I’ve been floating a few counter-factuals about this war in my head. In particular, I’m thinking about what the Josh Marshalls and Joe Conasons (although Josh is in a different league of seriousness than Conason, of course) would have had the administration say just before the war. What if Cheney had gone on television and said: “Look, this is going to take months. Saddam’s hardcore is highly trained, ruthless and will fight to the death.” Wouldn’t that have largely removed the chance – even if it were an outside one – of psyching out the Ba’ath leadership and possibly cracking the Saddamite machine at the outset? Part of what the administration was trying to achieve, it seems to me, was a psychological coup against the Baghdad leadership. If they could out-psyche the Ba’athists, convince them they were doomed, we’d have had much higher chances of winning this quickly and well. The problem, of course, was that the message designed for Saddam was also one heard by the domestic audience, and so was a set-up for disappointment. The further problem was that if the leadership survived, they might also feel more confidence for making it through the first couple of weeks. But, again, that’s only a problem if the British and American publics aren’t grown-ups and can’t deal with the uncertainties of war, and if we don’t have the firepower to win anyway. But the publics are grown up – certainly more so than many of my colleagues in the media – and we do have the firepower to carry on. The other obvious advantage of the rolling approach to the war is what Jim Hoagland points out this morning:
They were determined to avoid giving Hussein time to launch missiles with chemical warheads against Israel and its Arab neighbors, torch Iraq’s oil fields or launch new massacres that would send waves of Iraqi refugees fleeing into Turkey and elsewhere. They have been largely successful in these objectives so far.
Those are big successes, but because they are negative ones, they don’t please the critics. From the broadest perspective, I’d say that the negative verdict on the war plan is still unproven.
AND HOW: Here’s general Peter Pace on the flexibility of the Rumsfeld-Franks plan, making a similar point to Hoagland’s. He persuades me:
I think it’s a very, very good plan, and I have given my opinions many, many times to the civilian leadership. I support this plan. It’s a brilliant plan in both its simplicity and its flexibility. And Gen. Franks had a plan that would allow us, if there was early capitulation on the part of the Iraqis, would have allowed us to not have to destroy a large portion of that country. It is flexible enough to handle everything up to the most devastating attacks that we may have to conduct.
But the scope of the operations is all within the original plan, and the flexibility has been demonstrated right from the beginning. When Gen. Franks saw that the oil fields down South might be destroyed as the oil fields were in Kuwait, he quickly sent the ground forces in there and was able to secure over 1,000 oil wells, maybe 80 percent of the Iraqi people’s wealth that’s in the ground he was able to secure for them for their future. And there’s many, many other examples of the plan being set in motion and then circumstances on the ground providing opportunities, like the night that we got the great intelligence on where we thought Saddam was and the very, very specific precise attack.
Of course, Pace has a vested interest in saying this. But he also makes sense. And the critics have a vested interest as well. Why else would jilted former Bush adviser, Brent Scowcroft, the man who helped get us into this mess in the first place, be carping on background to the Washington Post?
The Dish 