by Conrad Black
In the new circumstances, Bush courted the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, another in the long line of military rulers who periodically disembark inept and corrupt civilian leadership in that very difficult nation. It was well known that, in its obsessive hatred of India, Pakistan cultivated various Muslim extremist groups to assist it in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and to ensure limitations on Indian influence in Afghanistan. In fact, about one-third of the Taliban, the Haqqani faction, was largely financed by the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI. Bush wandered into the tenebrous thickets of Muslim politics without much of a road map. The Saudis responded somewhat seriously to the incentives given them to sever links with al-Qaeda. The Pakistanis gamed the circumstances and delivered much less than they were paid and had promised to do.
As is the custom in U.S. public policy, Bush declared a “War on Terror,” as Johnson had his War on Poverty, and Nixon and Reagan the War on Drugs; both the last two wars have been lost, though inconclusively. Throughout 2002, the United States did discomfit al-Qaeda’s operations in many places. Almost no government really appreciated domestic terrorists and America helped strengthen counterterrorist measures throughout the world. There were incidents here and there, some of them quite serious, especially at a bar in Bali on October 12, 2002, which killed 202 people (including 88 Australians) and injured 240; in the Madrid commuter train system on November 3, 2004, that killed 191 and injured 1,800 people; and a series of bombs on London Underground trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, that killed 52 and injured 700. But the United States relentlessly bore down on al-Qaeda and destroyed most of its organization and leadership, including bin Laden, who was killed in his own bedroom in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near the Pakistan army’s headquarters on May 2, 2011.
It was clear by mid-2002 that the Bush administration had focused on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and was threatening him in the most dire terms. It was believed that Saddam had developed, or was close to having, nuclear and chemical weapons, Weapons of Mass Destruction—WMD, as they were known. Certainly, Saddam did nothing to reduce the apparent probability that he did, as he darkly hinted in the Arab world that he was preparing a nuclear revenge for having been evicted from Kuwait, and he had completely refused to cooperate with United Nations inspectors, or even admit them until under intense and explicit military pressure from the United States.
Bush had a clear international law case for invading Iraq, as Saddam had been in violation of the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War on several important counts, and had ignored 17 consecutive UN Security Council resolutions demanding compliance with various agreed obligations. (In response to a rather porous regime of sanctions, he had worked out a corrupt system of exporting oil in exchange for assistance to children and the medically needful; huge amounts of graft flowed both ways and to unseemly places in the United Nations organization, on this scheme.)
Though Colin Powell made an extremely eloquent presentation at the United Nations, much of the world, though not much admiring Saddam, was skeptical about another Iraq War. Bush himself spoke to the General Assembly and made excellent points about assuring that the United Nations did not become an impotent talking shop as the League of Nations had been. But the UN WMD inspectors were now claiming to be receiving adequate cooperation in Iraq and finding nothing, and there was no casus belli remotely comparable to the invasion of Kuwait. Germany, France, and Russia were all holding hands in opposition to the American threats to Iraq. Britain and some other traditional allies such as Australia and Egypt were on side, but even Canada declined to join on this occasion. It is not clear why George W. Bush was in such a desperate hurry to attack Saddam, nor why Saddam did not do the necessary to make it clear that he had no WMD and end noncompliance with the Gulf War cease-fire. Subsequent examination of Iraqi official papers indicated that Saddam was mad, which was not altogether surprising. But the impetuosity of the American government remains a mystery.
The United States and Great Britain attacked Iraq overland and with amphibious and paratroop strikes on March 20, 2003, and moved quickly on Baghdad. The Iraqi resistance was triflingly more determined than 12 years before, but was overpowered at every stage where it attempted to take a stance. The allies again only suffered a few hundred casualties while shattering the Iraqi army and occupying the entire country except the friendly Kurdish north, which was already in revolt against Saddam. The Kurds mounted an offensive in the north, with heavy air assistance from the allies, and the main unit part of the war ended after about 10 days as the Iraqi state disintegrated, while Saddam went underground. (He was captured, hiding in a foxhole near a rural farmhouse, on December 13, 2003, handed over to the new Iraqi government, and tried and executed, by hanging, which he faced with dignity, filmed on a mobile phone, on December 30, 2006.)
It was on seizing Baghdad that the United States committed one of the greatest military blunders of its history, almost on a scale with the failure to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Chapter 14) and the failure of military intelligence to detect the infiltration of 140,000 or more Chinese guerrillas into Korea in 1950 (Chapter 11). The entire armed forces and police forces of Iraq, 400,000 men, were discharged, declared to be unemployed and without income, but not discouraged from taking their weapons and ordnance with them. It should have been obvious to the U.S. commander, General Tommy Franks; to the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld; to the head of the new occupation authority, Paul Bremer; and to the president himself that this would turn Iraq into a civil war zone for years to come. Most of the disemployed soldiers and policemen, however limited their capacity to do battle with the premier units of the U.S. Army and Marines and their allies, were capable of lending themselves out quite capably to the factions that now emerged throughout the country apart from Kurdistan, and escalating and maintaining a state of extreme violence for years. This is exactly what happened.
Bush and his administration now proclaimed the desirability of democracy everywhere, as democracies did not make war aggressively. It was almost as simple-minded a concept as Jimmy Carter’s indiscriminate championship of human rights, no matter how much more repressive and hostile to the United States might be the successor regime to the one whose rights record had been found wanting. The Bush administration called for democratic elections in the Palestinian territories, and the more extreme Hamas defeated the admittedly distasteful Fatah (though it necessarily became less insufferable in November 2004 when Yasser Arafat, aged 75, died of natural causes after being effectively confined to his compound in Ramallah by the Israeli army for two years). The administration’s promotion of democracy in Lebanon helped deliver that country to the extremists of Hezbollah, and their demands for democracy in Egypt contributed, at least marginally, to the fall of the Mubarak government, albeit in 2011.
The lionization of democracy as a system is unexceptionable and appropriate for the United States, but it was very late for an American administration to be claiming democracy as both a panacea and an original thought. Embarking on the reconstruction of Iraq as a democracy was the most ambitious and daunting task of nation-building the United States had ever undertaken. Instead of officially decapitating the Saddam regime and elevating some nontoxic middle-level military and civilian personnel of some apparent talent, and maintaining the military and police under new orders and commanders, as the occupation forces of Eisenhower in Germany and MacArthur in Japan had done, Bremer set about remaking the entire state.
Tribal, sectarian, ideological, and nationalist crosscurrents, each tendency armed to the teeth with the remnants of Saddam’s security forces, tore the country to pieces and there was little progress in restoration of order, services, water supply, electricity or oil production, or other indices for several years, and the United States eventually sustained over 5,000 dead and 32,000 wounded in Iraq. It had also largely decamped from Afghanistan to Iraq, leaving its loyal NATO and United Nations allies to deal with what was essentially an American war there, though it was in a humanitarian
cause, with insufficient forces. The allies and inadequate American forces conducted a holding action in Afghanistan for over five years, while pretending that the government of the country was reliable and somewhat democratic. (Led by a scoundrel, Hamid Karzai, it was a sinkhole of corruption that was so licentious that the hated Taliban made a serious comeback.)
What the United States should have done in Iraq, apart from allowing junior ministers and officers, under supervision, to bring their country forward in civic and governance terms, was offer to rebuild it in exchange for preagreed quantities of oil at a prefixed, mutually defensible price per barrel. They were castigated in the world for seeking oil, and did not gain a drop of it. In strategic terms, though there was perfectly adequate justification for disposing of Saddam, it was a disaster. It cost over $1 trillion, perhaps 40,000 American casualties, mired almost the entire U.S. conventional ground forces military capability in a morass for seven years, strained the Western Alliance, achieved little in the War on Terror, and inflated the price of oil without increasing supply.
Fortunately for Bush, the American public were still enjoying the aftermath of the crisp execution of the military operation when reelection time came around in 2004. Bush and Cheney were renominated without opposition, and the Democrats, after another lackluster campaign for the nomination, lapsing back into the general mediocrity of post-1968, pre-Clinton Democratic internecine politics, chose Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts for president and Governor John Edwards of North Carolina for vice president. They both had a lot of overgroomed hair on their topknots, but had little allure as candidates; Kerry was sanctimonious and humorless, Edwards glib and specious. Bush was not very charismatic, but he was comparatively solid, and Cheney, though afflicted by grimness, was clearly a very capable and experienced man, with impressive legislative, administrative, and private sector credentials. (He had been the head of the large international engineering firm Halliburton, which profited handsomely from the reconstruction of Iraq.)
Kerry ran into difficulty early when he tried to span the schism in his party over the Iraq War by explaining that he had supported the invasion but had then voted to withhold funds for the mission. It had come to this. Bush was no spellbinder and had spent most of the credit he had earned for responding quite well to the 9/11 attacks, pursuing the War on Terror vigorously, and adopting a serious program of tax cuts to ward off a postattack recession. Only his awkwardness and growing concerns about an Iraq exit strategy prevented him from running away with it, but at least he won the first clear majority since his father in 1992, and became the first president since Madison to be a second consecutive two-term elected president. He won by 62 million votes (50.7 percent) and 286 electoral votes from 31 states to 59 million votes (48.3 percent) and a strong 251 electoral votes from 19 states and the District of Columbia for Kerry. The Republicans retained control of both houses of the Congress comfortably enough, and George W. Bush became the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two consecutive terms and bring his party in with him both times in control of both the Senate and the House. Colin Powell retired, not a spectacular secretary of state but a very respected man and public official. He was replaced by the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, a talented, articulate, and ingenuous former provost of Stanford, and concert pianist. She was an African American Russia specialist, now an out-outmoded discipline, and had served as national security advisor in the first George W. Bush term.
The second Bush term was overshadowed by the Iraq involvement, as the project floundered with no visible progress through 2005 and 2006, and the country became impatient and handed both houses of the Congress back to the Democrats in November of 2006. A committee called the Iraq Study Group had been set up by the U.S. Institute for Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, essentially to give the president the most unembarrassing possible exit from what was assumed to be the hopeless imbroglio in Iraq. The membership was a formidable array of prominent people from each party, almost none of whom, except for Baker and to a point the co-chairman, former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, knew anything about the Middle East. It was a political Murderers’ Row, with Clinton insider and fixer Vernon Jordan, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, but it was largely a try by the president’s father’s friends to save some face for the current president, while reminding him of how unwise he was implicitly to go beyond the ambitions of Papa Bush in the Gulf War in 1991. The recommendations were a pusillanimous wish list about negotiations with Iran and Syria, pushing a Palestinian-Israel settlement, and starting an immediate pullout from Iraq, as if any useful negotiations with those antagonists could be conducted while the United States cut and ran from the area.
The report was just a thinly whitewashed confession that the whole enterprise was a failure, dressed up by Baker as a bipartisan effort, which it was in the sense that the Democrats wanted a defeat and the Republicans, being apologists for Bush Sr., were consolable that the current president had not shown them up. Given that neither Bush would have been president without the applied talents of James Baker, he was entitled to this foray and clearly relished it. Condoleezza Rice was basically a defeatist also, and Rumsfeld was discredited by the time the ISG’s report was known privately to the president.
Outwardly undismayed by the failure of his nation-building effort, George W. Bush vastly exceeded the humdrum confines of his normal limited grasp of grand strategy and its domestic political execution with the most brilliant foreign policy stroke of any president since Ronald Reagan came up with SDI as a means of fragmenting the self-confidence of the Soviet leadership. He sacked Rumsfeld right after the congressional midterm defeat and brought in one of the ISG members, former CIA chief Robert Gates, a chum of the president’s father, to carry out a policy that was a 180-degree reversal of the inter-leg-tail retreat the ISG was proposing. The ISG report was revealed on December 12, 2006, and on January 12, 2007, the president announced a “surge,” the reinforcement of the U.S. forces in Iraq with an additional 30,000 soldiers—as well as, though it was not publicly announced, a change in campaign tactics, based on greater cooperation with and reward for the tribal and regional chieftains of Iraq. By rejecting his father’s friends’ confession of failure and plucking one of its advocates to conduct a diametrically opposite policy, George W. Bush showed not only a Machiavellian sense of irony but the highest political courage and, since the policy actually worked, a blinding and unsuspected gift of statesmanship.
The surge was a success and control of the country increased quickly and the level of violence subsided equally quickly, and Bush was able to withdraw the additional forces by the time he left office in January 2009. The Democrats, who had overcommitted themselves to failure in Iraq, had to retrace their steps. George W. Bush was so inarticulate and had so strained public credulity and indulgence by this time that he gained little immediate credit for successfully reversing policy and changing the executants of it, but his action salvaged a respectable outcome of the mission from the stomach of ignominy, though it did not redeem all the bumptious hyperbole about the apotheosis of democracy. The question remained of whether Iraq would be a durable, secular, even slightly democratic confederation, or would fragment or degenerate into a corrupt despotism, even one subject to unsuitable Iranian influence.
4. THE GREAT RECESSION AND BARACK OBAMA
By this time, other grave problems had descended. The U.S. current-account deficit over the previous five years had ballooned to a cumulative total of over $3 trillion and was running at about $800 billion per year. Much more immediately sinister was that the Clinton embrace of the building trades and real estate speculators in the name of greater family home ownership, by ordering continued minimal interest rates and mandating residential mortgages unsecured by any equity and linked to irrationally inflated housing values, abruptly exploded wit
h a report heard and felt round the world.
In the autumn of 2008, almost the entire private-sector-lending banking system of the Western world, except for prudent Canada, was instantly insolvent; the depositors were guaranteed, but the shareholders were at the wall, waiting for the fusillade. One of the recently retired leaders of the world’s largest financial group, Citicorp, explained that “when the music’s playing, everyone has to dance.” Insurance giant AIG, already bedeviled by the New York attorney general, just elected governor, had to be rescued for issuing immense dollar quantities of insurance against default by these worthless “subprime mortgages.” The requirement for monthly asset revaluations by most financial companies assured the triumph of short-sellers, as companies that were stretched to the 30–1 ratio of debt-to-asset values were steadily issuing equity at crashing prices to maintain their ratios.
The president’s tocsin was “The sucker could go down,” referring not to the electorate that had twice (or at least the second time) placed him in the world’s greatest office of state, but to the $14-trillion U.S. economy. Though an inelegant formulation, hardly worthy of the proportions of the crisis, it was an accurate summation. Successive U.S. administrations had kept interest rates at negligible levels and encouraged consumption as well as residential home-buying (which in practice often meant individuals buying batches of homes with no equity commitment and low-interest mortgages, selling them when they went up in market value, and abandoning them and surrendering the keys when they went down). It was a political free lunch for Clinton (and even Bush), as they could speak of increasing home ownership at no apparent cost to the taxpayer. The American consumers had carried the luxury-goods industries of France and Italy and the engineered-products industries of Germany and Japan on their backs for decades, while American manufacturing and nearly 60 million jobs were outsourced to cheap-labor countries even as up to 20 million undocumented and poor migrants were tacitly allowed to enter the country to perform menial tasks.
