Iraq, Iran and how the Neocons failed (Part I)

Glenn Kessler has a superb story at the Washington Post on conversations between U.S. interrogators and Saddam Hussein before his death in which the former Iraqi director conveyed — persuasively — his reasons for pretending he had big guns: He feared Iran.

It’s a tale that explains a lot about why the neoconservatives who morbidly attached themselves to Bush’s prosecution launching of the Iraq war are now losing the Iran argument.

Glenn’s story is sharp not because of his otherwise proven investigative skills — the conversations were declassified by the independent National Security Archive (some of my favorite people, and an endless source for  good stories). What Glenn pulls off here is to make the bleeding obvious compelling.

Here’s his lede:

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as "a zealot" and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

For anyone who has lived in the Middle East or followed it for more than five minutes, these are givens: Saddam, after a blistering eight-year war, wanted to contain Iran. And terrorists he could not control 24-7 were terrorists he did not want around.

The reason Glenn has to make this "duh" revelation compelling is because for eight years we in Washington lived in a bizarro world where the most obvious conclusions were not just ignored, but mocked, actively suppressed and made akin to treason. "The sun rose today" becomes news after years of folks screaming in your ear that it’s dark, dark, dark.

The Bush administration and its neoconservatve apostles, apologists and acolytes needed David Kay, a weapons inspector who pulled off the neat trick of fawning toward Bush’s Middle East ambitions while debunking their premises to finally discard the idea that Saddam had posed — in his final years in power — anything other than a threat to himself.

Saddam was on his way out, thanks principally to the carefully calibrated Clinton-Blair policies of  sanctions and strategic bombing raids of the 1990s. He was taking his painful old — and at times bloody — time, but by now he would have been gone, absent thousands of dead young Americans, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and an empowered and apparently crazed Iran. Kay’s revelations were clear in 2002 to Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspections chief and, in 2003, to journalists such as Dafna Linzer and Charlie Hanley at the AP and Barton Gellman at the Washington Post. Not to mention, the Germans, the French, and just about anyone who bothered to read beyond an executive summary (otherwise known during that administration as "This is what we believe, and damn the facts past page 5!").

The Bush administration had not merely an aversion but a psychotic fear of saying "We wuz wrong." It needed Kay to tell the truth because he was the type who was happy to skedaddle right on over to Larry King right after his press conference and say with a straight face that, of course Bush was fooled, we were all fooled, right? Well, no.

One of the most jawdropping sidebars to this goof-show was this Charles Krauthammer column around the time of the Kay report:

Kay has now offered the most novel and convincing explanation for why U.S. intelligence — and, for that matter, U.N. inspectors and the intelligence agencies of every country that mattered — had misjudged what Iraq possessed.

It was a combination of Iraqi bluff, deceit, and corruption far more bizarre than heretofore suspected. Kay discovered that an increasingly erratic Saddam had taken over personal direction of WMD programs. But because there was no real oversight, the scientists would go to Saddam for money, exaggerate or invent their activities, then pocket the funds.

Scientists were bluffing Saddam. Saddam was bluffing the world. The Iraqis were all bluffing each other. Special Republican Guard commanders had no WMDs, but they told investigators that they were sure that other guard units did. It was this internal disinformation that the whole outside world missed.

Whoa! Dictators are control freaks! And they bluff! So do their petrified advisers! Whodathunkit? Why — it’s novel!

Yes. As novel as a Scooby-Doo denouement. "My bluff woulda worked if it hadn’t been for those darn neocon kids!"

I raise this because how this happened is important and explains why — I think — neoconservatives are losing, and in a major way, the post-Iran election argument, even though they got it less wrong than the liberals.

It is their failure, or their abject inability, to say "I was wrong."

First of all, everyone was wrong about the Iran election.

The neoconservatives and the Netanyahu government and AIPAC were wrong, we now know, to call the election a joke, a proforma exercise precisely because it turned out to be exactly that. (I mention all three elements — Israel, the neocons and AIPAC — because they are aligned on this issue, but not necessarily on others.) An AIPAC e-mail blast just before election day used "election" in quotes.

But now we see that Iranians were invested in the election, even in its constrained, Mullah-driven version. We see that Mir-Hossein Moussavi is not a tool of the establishment and is putting himself at considerable risk.

Under these new circumstances, the creeping, and creepy conviction among the pro-Israel-Netanyahu-neocon crowd that an Ahmadinjead victory would be clarifying is appalling. Here’s Elliott Abrams in an election day op-ed in the New York Times:

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s defeat would probably be welcomed abroad as a sign that Iran is moving away from his policies, but Iran’s policies aren’t his — they are dictated by Ayatollah Khamenei and his supporters in the Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitary. In fact, a victory by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, is more likely to change Western policy toward Iran than to change Iran’s own conduct. If the delusion that a new president would surely mean new opportunities to negotiate away Iran’s nuclear program strikes Western leaders, solidarity might give way to pre-emptive concessions.

This is perverse. It proposes that we alienate the reformists who are likely one day to assume power — for whom? A Holocaust denier. At least, when the West (and Israel) backed the Shah against clear signs he was on his way out, it got some compensation  — intelligence sharing, oil, strategic leverage in the region. Three decades later, now we’re making the argument for a man who might be guilty of genocide incitement — against us.  This is manna for conspiracy theorists.

And worse, three weeks later, the neconservatives are arguing … pretty much the same. Iran has turned upside down, no one has any real sense of how this will turn out, but Johh Bolton thinks we should bomb the place anyway.

Those who oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons are left in the near term with only the option of targeted military force against its weapons facilities. Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people.

This is a  public diplomacy campaign I’d like to see. I’m thinking the likes of Slim Pickens riding in on the misslles screaming "Pardon my bombs!"

With Iran as close as it is to a nuclear device, and with support for such a capability widespread, the most realistic likelihood of neutralizing the threat would seem to be a friendly — or at least a not-hostile — regime. I’m not sure how bombing helps.

What makes these missteps extraordinary is that the liberals, the accomodationists, had Iran wronger than the neoconservatives — and yet have emerged, I think, with the more sympathetic posture after the election.

They had it wronger because they insisted, prior to the election, on wrapping the regime in with its people. Roger Cohen at the New York Times was the poster boy for this approach. His thesis: the Iranian leadership’s recalcitrance, its vicious Israel baiting was a tactic, not a strategy:

One way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace — and engagement with Tehran — will have to take account of these points.

Here he is a few weeks later, after President Obama’s outreach to Iran, explicitly conflating Iranians with their regime:

With his bold message to Iran’s leaders, President Obama achieved four things essential to any rapprochement.

He abandoned regime change as an American goal. He shelved the so-called military option. He buried a carrot-and-sticks approach viewed with contempt by Iranians as fit only for donkeys. And he placed Iran’s nuclear program within “the full range of issues before us.”

We now know how remote the regime was from its people. Ignoring this divide — this willful assignment of legitimacy to the Ahmadinejad presidency and to its handlers — is, I would argue, a more profound failure than that of the neoconservatives. The neocons misread Iran’s regime; the liberals (and Cohen was emblematic) misread the whole nation.

And yet, three weeks into the regime, the liberals — Cohen among them — are actively plumping for Iran’s disenfranchised. Juan Cole and Andrew Sullivan, hyperinfluential bloggers who had advocated accommodation, are now running  ongoing coverage of the resistance, even as its importance has evaded an ADHD mainstream media swept away by the death of Michael Jackson and the eroto-monomania of the South Carolina governor.

Meantime, for the neoconservatives, Israel and the pro-Israel establishment, it’s Iran business as usual: punishment, through sanctions or through all out war. How long until they find a David Kay who will gently guide them out of the morass?

Liberals are winning the post-election argument because they are able to pronounce "I was wrong."

This is Cohen, after the election:

I’ve argued for engagement with Iran and I still believe in it, although, in the name of the millions defrauded, President Obama’s outreach must now await a decent interval.

I’ve also argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.

And a few days later:

I think President Obama, as I wrote from Tehran, erred on the side of caution early on. He misspoke in equating Moussavi with Ahmadinejad in terms of US strategic interests. He should have been more forthright in standing with the Green Wave. Meddling be damned. This was a pivotal and historic moment. Obama should have tossed the strategy papers in the garbage and spoken from the heart.

Liberals have been able to pivot. Neoconservatives have not. Instead, they are defaulting their defining advocacy of democratic interventionism to their political rivals because to embrace it after attaching themselves so morbidly to the inevitability of conflict would be to admit that they were wrong.

I’m not sure why this is; for liberals, it might be written into the DNA of an outlook that makes a cult of self-examination, or it might simply be eight years of being on the wrong end of a presidency that never brooked criticism.

Among neoconservatives, it is more baffling; it is after all a movement that grew out of self-criticism among liberals in the 1960s. I’ll look further into this in coming days, examining books on neoconservativism by Ben Wattenberg, Doug Feith, Martin Indyk and David Makovsky and Dennis Ross.