I recently discovered this writing of mine from November of 2006, which was a summation of my “final” thoughts on the Iraq War (because that was basically when the war ended for me). This was written when I had already been out of the military for six months and about to move permanently to Austin to focus on stand-up. I also feel there is a definite tonal shift in the way I sound here as compared to what I wrote in 2004. Although I think that the writing from 2004 was sort of what started this tonal shift, so the stuff I wrote before that feels vastly different to me than both of these (and I don’t enjoy reading those). Again, I used my footnotes here to add to (or reflect on) my memories.
Keep in mind that back in 2004, a surprising number of Americans still thought things could turn out well in the Iraq War (including myself), but by 2006 no one was any longer under any such delusions (including myself). However, there would be a ray of hope that would come in the following year with the success of the Surge. Unfortunately, that hope would be short-lived for what I consider to be a multitude of reasons. Obama officially “ended” the war in late 2011, but of course that too would be short-lived when the Syrian Civil War created a vacuum that Islamic radicals were happy to fill, which allowed AQIM to morph into ISIS, and then ISIS invaded Iraq in 2014. That ushered in the start of a whole new (and equally brutal) chapter of the Iraq War.
NOVEMBER 9, 2006
I get genuinely disheartened at the polarization of the American political spectrum. Because I think it's good to maintain the balance, but it's simply become obsessive now. All liberals talk about is conservatives, and all conservatives talk about is liberals. Even when they pause to discuss issues, they only talk about what the other side is saying about the issue and how wrong it must be.
Two days ago I finished reading Bob Woodward's State of Denial. The irony of the book's cover being red with a gold star prompted my father and uncle to label it: “Woodward’s Communist Manifesto.” In case you couldn't tell, they are conservatives. Which means they are probably crying in their beers right now after the midterm elections.1
I sympathize with my conservative comrades, I really do. I do not have much faith in the Democrats either, but at the same time I think it's good to give the president the kick in the gut he needs. Bush has always made it known that he considered 2004 validation for his decision to invade Iraq. So I think he needed this wake-up call. And even though Donald Rumsfeld resigning is probably a case of “too little, too late,” I am still glad to see him go. Some things about Rumsfeld I like, specifically a lot of his plans for Pentagon overhaul before 9/11, but I don't trust anyone who is so blindly dismissive of others and yet so sure of themselves.2
The first thing that struck me about State of Denial was the notable change in tone by its author [as compared to Woodward’s first two books on the Bush administration]. Woodward is definitely more openly critical this time, and willing to put his two cents in. Which seems to be a popular theme these days, because I am noticing an increasing frustration with the Bush administration from those that were once more sympathetic (like myself). Not that I ever hid the fact that I did not like Bush as a president, but it never went beyond disagreeing with his job performance. I had no disdain for the man.3 His choice to attack Iraq despite everybody else in the world wanting to keep putting the burden of Saddam on the backs of the Iraqi people was the only decision he made I truly respected. Just wish I had known how little they had prepared for the repercussions.4
These days I hear more and more conservatives expressing their distaste for the Bush administration and how they've put a dark cloud over the Republican Party. And I can almost condone Woodward’s editorializing, even though I believe journalists should always force themselves to avoid making judgments as much as humanly possible. But even I find myself feeling betrayed that I spent such a long time defending these people. Giving them the benefit of the doubt because I felt Iraq was more important than politics. Now I come to find that the administration itself (despite its rhetoric) never seemed to feel the same way I do. After all, Bush and his people clearly fucked up in 2003 with their intelligence and rhetoric on Iraq. Yet in 2004, Bush was given a second chance from the American people to make amends for it, and he blew it even worse than the first time. In 2006, it would appear voters wanted Bush to realize that they have no interest in giving him a third chance.
Although whenever my frustrations get the better of me, I always try to remind myself that at no time have I doubted that Bush is a man who's heart is in the right place. There was a telling story in Woodward's book that speaks of Bush breaking down in tears after a woman who suffered from Saddam's torture chambers calls him a “liberator” in Arabic. His emotions on the subject of Iraq appear to me to be true and valid. I firmly believe he wants nothing more than to do something noble for Iraqis, for Americans, and for the world. The problem is that what he is trying to do is so insanely intricate and complex that he seemed to fail to realize it would take more than faith to accomplish it. Faith is necessary, especially in a venture such as this, but cheerleading alone does not win the game.
But good intentions aside, I cannot help but have moments where I want to punch some these people in the dick and/or vagina. There was another telling excerpt from State of Denial that simply shocked me (as well as Woodward apparently). It was an excerpt from an interview he had with Donald Rumsfeld:
At the end of the second interview I quoted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, “Any military commander who is honest with you will say he’s made mistakes that have cost lives.”
“Um hmm,” Rumsfeld said.
“Is that correct?”
“I don't know. I suppose that a military commander…”
“Which you are,” I interrupted.
“No, I'm not,” the secretary of defense said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“No, no. Well…”
“Yes. Yes,” I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the hierarchy. “It's the commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander.”
“I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living and dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case.”
How anyone with any sense of duty and honor could make such a statement is beyond me. And the fact that he makes it on the record is especially disturbing. As if he sees nothing wrong with it. I know a lot of the crap that comes out of Rumsfeld's mouth probably has more to do with his dismissive attitude to what he considers an unfair and biased media [in other words, I understood that he – and probably Bush too – was responding to them specifically when they say these kinds of things], but how can you justify that comment when serving in the most influential position in the entire military aside from the president himself? Especially when said secretary of defense has overwhelmingly exerted his control over every aspect of the defense department?5
I fully empathized with the reasons for this war, even if many I know did not. And I have not always agreed with it, but I supported it for the sake of the outcome. But every single death in Iraq is something that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should have on their conscience. That's their fucking duty. Yet as Bush himself said, the decision was ultimately his and he “sleeps well at night.” A part of me honestly believes these men may have lost their minds.
Colin Powell and Richard Armitage engaged in a private, running commentary about Bush, Cheney, the White House and what was really going on. Both wanted Bush to succeed, and they believed the Iraq War had to be won for the stability of the Middle East. A precipitous U.S. withdrawal would be followed by chaos. But what about adjusting the policy? Shouldn't we all be more realistic?
“Don't they have moments of self-doubt?” Armitage asked Powell one day. Didn't Bush within his soul wonder if all this was right?
Powell said he had the same question. They always had self-doubt. They lived on it, mainlined it. If you didn't, Powell said... you're not worth much.
“Not worth a shit,” Armitage said.
Doubt never seeped into the president's public rhetoric. And as far as Powell's and Armitage's experience went, he was the same in private.
I have personally tried to epitomize this belief in self-doubt for years [though I’m now willing to admit I failed miserably at that during the early part of the war]. That if you ever reach a point where you are certain you are in the right, then you are definitely in the wrong. There is never any way to know for sure what the answer is, and you have to fight your fights with that always in the back of your mind, or you will make mistakes. But it is an incredibly difficult thing to ask of people. It means living your life in a fog. Always uncertain. But is it worth having a clear head if it means making mistakes that will get people killed?
Other than showing strong and steady optimism, it is hard to remember a single thing that Bush has actually had a hand in this war.6 The only thing I can give him strong credit for is the January 2005 Iraqi elections. Everyone was telling him to push the date back so as not to alienate the boycotting Sunnis, but Bush stubbornly stood firm.7 I remember back then, even I was vehemently opposed to maintaining the firm date. But everyone was wrong, and Bush was right. And it was his call.
Those elections were the last time I remember feeling really good about Iraq, and really excited about the prospect of going back there [this would be when I was trying to volunteer for convoy duty]. Especially after Lebanon ejected Syria the following month after Rafik Hariri's assassination. I would catch myself daydreaming that maybe all the critics would set their hatred of Bush and America aside, and call for other nations to get involved and save Iraq. It would be a beautiful thing. To see it actually come together. To see their suffering end. To see their home returned to them. Why didn't anyone else want that as badly as I did?
By that same token, I have often heard conservatives and Bush alike justify this war in terms of an unseen, ultimate result. They say, “Trust me, in fifty years Iraq will be a free and peaceful nation just like Japan and Germany, and that would never have happened without U.S. intervention.” And they are right that without American military action in Iraq these people would never have had a chance. No one else ever showed any interest in lifting a finger to help them, not even their fellow Arabs. And conservatives may very well turn out to be right about their fifty-years prediction. But what if it could have been done in ten years instead of fifty? What if it could have cost 50,000 lives instead of 500,000? What if there are going to be hundreds of thousands more people who will not get to live to see that free Iraq because we fucked up? Those are numbers that should matter to them as well, and it just seems to me that they do not.
And I simply cannot understand it. I can't understand any of it anymore.
And now, your moment of zen…
Two years after Bush broke every Democratic heart by winning reelection in 2004 (I had initially gone into the year determined to vote against Bush but ultimately chose not to vote at all), the Democrats cleaned house in the 2006 midterms, making Nancy Pelosi the first female Speaker of the House. Much of this was a referendum on just how much Iraq had deteriorated into a state of pure hell. Dems gained 6 Senate seats for a very narrow majority, but they also won a hefty 31 seats in the House. The Democrats would gain an even stronger “supermajority” in Congress (and the presidency) in the 2008 elections.
The irony is that a lot of what Rumsfeld had wanted to do in defense policy (pre-9/11) would have really gone a long way in eliminating the bloated “military-industrial complex” that he is now so closely associated with because of the war in Iraq. He wanted to streamline our military; eliminate the excess bureaucracy in the Pentagon; lessen the focus on large-scale, conventional wars and focus instead on intelligence gathering and rapid-response forces – as opposed to building more and more giant, useless military hardware like we did during the Cold War arms race. Unfortunately, this “streamlined” posture of Rumsfeld’s is also why we initially invaded Iraq with far too few forces that were solely focused on a “blitzkrieg” to Baghdad, without thinking about how to hold and secure the country (which could have helped prevent a lot of the looting and chaos that plagued us in the immediate aftermath).
I will never deny that the palpable hatred many still have for George W. Bush is totally understandable and even warranted. Still, I never bought into the idea that Bush was a bad person, anymore than I bought into the notion that he was just a “puppet.” But I also don’t think that his “revival” in the wake of Trump can wipe the slate clean on what happened during his presidency. And I will not allow myself to be put into a position where I’m actually defending Bush. He doesn’t need anyone to defend him. He was born rich, and he will die rich. That should be defense enough for any of the slander he has had to endure.
Bush can never escape the fact that his presidency was an unmitigated disaster. I remember walking through his presidential library and looking at the placards for No Child Left Behind, the NSA wiretapping scandal, Iraq and the Global War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the Financial Crisis of 2008 – and I’m thinking, “Jesus, even in his own library this guy’s presidency is a real fucking bummer.” In fact, the only undeniable success story of the Bush-43 presidency was his remarkable fight against AIDS in Africa (PEPFAR), which almost no American has even heard about.
There were generally two categories of interventionists during the Iraq War (and you could also be a bit of both): The “national interest” interventionists (focused on American interests and national security) and the “humanitarian” interventionists (focused on human rights and/or democracy-spreading). I was 100% in the latter camp, and my focus was very much on the human rights stuff. I could not have cared less about America’s interests, my only concern was for helping the Iraqis. I was not concerned if we found WMD or not, I was not concerned if invading Iraq made America safer — whatever it took to get someone (anyone) to end the nightmare that the Iraqi people had been living under for 25 years was fine by me.
I remember in the beginning of the war, some of my anti-war friends would say to me, “Y’know, Eric, we may have to be there for 10 years!” And I would immediately reply, “Yeah, at least 10 years. Honestly, my guess would be 20 to 25 years minimum, and I am absolutely okay with that.” Because I understood that a task of this size required a very long commitment, and you cannot pull the trigger on something like this if you are not prepared to go all the way with it. And I was absolutely ready for us to go all the way with it. And I was convinced that the Bush administration was ready too (I was clearly wrong on that last part). I was certainly not convinced that the Bush administration had developed a rock-solid plan for the aftermath and occupation, but I at least thought they had a plan…
As opposed to people like me, the “national interest” interventionists were only interested in deposing Saddam to shore up any potential threats to America’s national security in the wake of 9/11. These included the Bush administration “hawks” (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton). These guys did not give a shit at all about rebuilding Iraq or “spreading democracy.” They were basically an early breed of “America First” that was vigorously proactive in their foreign policy rather than isolationist (like the populist-right version of “America First” is today). They were there to eliminate the threat (Saddam) and go home. If Iraq burned after that, that was Iraq’s problem.
The “neocons” were a different breed (Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle). People often equate guys like Cheney with the term “neoconservative” but Cheney was absolutely not a neoconservative. The “neocons” were a little of both interventionist camps. They thought liberating Iraq would start a “chain-reaction of democracies” in the Middle East, but they also thought this spread of democracy would be in our own “national interest.” So, in that way, they were even more naively idealistic than people like myself.
I guess a lot of people now consider the ‘90s to be the era that popularized human rights interventions, and the Iraq War is sort of seen as the culmination of this trend which put an abrupt end to that “misguided” era of the U.S. being the “police of the world.” Personally, my experience growing up in the ‘90s did not lead me to believe that human right interventions were popular at all. I mean, the U.S. refused to help the Iraqis when they rose up against Saddam in 1991; we quickly retreated from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident; we did very little to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia until the worst had already happened; we did nothing during the Rwandan genocide; we showed no interest in the concentration camps of North Korea; nor did we think it any of our business to give a shit about what the Taliban did to its own people (especially women) in Afghanistan. In fact, the only action during the Clinton years that you could probably consider a human rights intervention success was Kosovo, which most people now lambast as a classic example of American military adventurism gone too far (no one more so than Vladimir Putin). So to me, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a dramatic break from the status quo, not an example of it.
On this note, one recent item that really resonated with me was this 2021 interview clip with Noreen Malone of Slow Burn responding to a comment by Scott R. Anderson of Lawfare. Anderson noted that unlike the pro-war advocates on the right, most of the people who supported the war from the left were often younger in age. In fact, they were typically figures who fell into my generation’s timespan (younger Gen-Xers or older Millennials), and I think there is something to what Malone said about how “people don’t want to think so much about how much the time in which they were born influences their politics and their views on, y’know, morality – all kinds of things – but it really, really, really does.”
My generation was born after Vietnam, so we didn’t have to carry around that trauma with us (although we do now). We only had the Gulf War and the beginning of Afghanistan, both of which were resounding victories that were almost laughably easy. But we also had the memories of all the genocides around the world that our seemingly invincible war machine (and self-interested politicians) didn’t do a damn thing to stop. Some of the more active young people out there today may not realize that we were trying to do exactly what they are trying to do now — upset the status quo for the sake of finally promoting true equity and justice for all. The only real difference is we were thinking globally (the oppressed in other parts of the world) and they are thinking locally (the oppressed here at home), but that too is probably a product of the time in which we were born.
There was an excerpt from Robert Gates memoir Duty that discussed when Bush had an unexpectedly candid moment with Gates about his dismissal of Rumsfeld:
Then he shocked me as the breakfast ended by saying that he wished he’d made the change in secretary of defense “a couple of years earlier.” It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.
To be fair, the following year, Bush would be the one who pushed for the successful Surge strategy that really turned things around in Baghdad, despite a lot of opposition from all corners (the military, the Congress, the public, and even some of his own administration). The Surge was a wildly successful venture, although some still persuasively argue it was merely a temporary fix (although others also persuasively argue that it didn’t have to be).
I tended to feel a large problem was that it worked at fixing Baghdad’s situation alone, but couldn’t transfer over to more remote and rural areas (and in Afghanistan the Surge was applied solely to remote areas). That being said, even during the 2008 campaign, people in the media were honestly asking if we might be able to now consider Iraq a “victory.” When Barbara Walters put this question to then-candidate Barack Obama he said, “I would say Iraq has made enormous improvements in its security. People’s lives are better now than they were – certainly two years ago or three years ago.” Walters then said, “So no victory quite yet?” To which Obama replied, “Well… improvement. And I think improvement is important.”
Of course, Bush was equally stubborn about pushing through free and fair democratic elections in Palestine in 2006, despite serious concerns from the Israelis and some of his own people. I think it was noble for him to stand firm on this, but the outcome was a historic victory for Hamas. Which was not a good outcome (for anyone). It also subsequently led to a brutal civil war between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, which remains a leadership divide in the Palestinian territories to this day (and the reason why Gaza in particular is especially isolated from the international community).