Bush came to office a man who knew little of the world, who had hardly traveled outside the country, who knew nothing of the practice of foreign policy and diplomacy. Two years later, after the attacks of September 11 and his emergence as a self-described "war president," he has come to know only that this lack of knowledge is not a handicap but perhaps even a strength: that he doesn't need to know things in order to believe that he's right and to be at peace with himself. He has redefined his weakness—his lack of knowledge and experience—as his singular strength. He believes he's right. ...Mark Danner
Early this morning, the BBC broadcast a piece about how kevlar vests have improved in their protection of US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also how they do not protect completely. Of course not: the arms and legs of the soldier are still fully exposed as well as, more notably, the head. Soldiers without these vests would have been killed outright in earlier wars; now they often walk away from the IED or other massive explosion, or at worst are carried away still alive but with leg or other injuries. The biggest hitch is that they walk away and go on to fight for more weeks and months having suffered traumatic brain injuries which won't even surface until much later, when they get home. From the point of view of America society, their families, and the normal life they hope to return to, they are dealing with time bombs.
Bush's vanity war in Iraq was brutishly conceived. It will have brutal results for years. Iraq will affect us domestically in ways we don't even know how to anticipate. Already we have a culture in which random violence is more and more common. Now we will add to that utterly blameless, ill-used veterans whose brain injuries have turned them into uncertain quantities whose adjustment problems could be enormous. Societies absorb problems like this as the cost of necessary wars, but what happens in the wake of an illicit war, a war in which lives and normality were wasted deliberately for no good reason? That changes things for the victims and their families. We used to call it the "Vietnam syndrome."
Mark Danner describes the determination with which Bush went to war, trampling on carefully constructed international alliances -- lying, and blackmailing his way into Iraq. Bush is meeting, at Crawford, with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a month or so before invading Iraq. He's putting the screws to Aznar who doesn't want to join in the war effort unless there's a UN resolution sanctioning it: Aznar faces enormous opposition at home where 90% of voters are against the invasion.
Bush responds to his plea for diplomacy with a rather remarkable litany of threats directed at the current temporary members of the Security Council. "Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, and Cameroon have to know," he declares, "that what's at stake is the United States' security and acting with a sense of friendship toward us." In case Aznar doesn't get the point, he describes to the Spaniard what each nation will suffer if it doesn't recognize "what's at stake":
[Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos has to know that the Free Trade Agreement with Chile is pending Senate confirmation, and that a negative attitude on this issue could jeopardize that ratification. Angola is receiving funds from the Millennium Account that could also be compromised if they don't show a positive attitude. And Putin must know that his attitude is jeopardizing the relations of Russia and the United States.
What is striking about this passage is not only how crude and clumsy it is, with the President of the United States spouting threats like a movie gangster—he presumably wants the Spaniard to convey them directly to the various leaders—but how ineffective the bluster turned out to be. None of these countries changed their position on a second resolution, which, in the event, was never brought before the Security Council to what would have been certain defeat. Bush, in making the threats, did the one thing an effective leader is supposed always to avoid: he issued an order that was not obeyed, thus demonstrating the limits of his power. (The Iraq war itself, meant as it was to "shock and awe" the world and particularly US adversaries, did much the same thing.)
The US came to be seen not only as a bully but a failed bully. And in the face of that, Danner writes, along with Bush's bluster "comes stern self-righteousness." Incalculable, long-term damage was done to US relations with the rest of the world.
A little less than a year after Aznar's meeting with the president in Crawford -- a year in which quick and easy invasion had given way to a long sectarian war -- Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and researchers added up the price of the Iraq war. Quite apart from any other costs of invasion will be the costs which continue well into the future. In a detailed and shocking study, his group tracked all of those costs, including the costs of those who have survived thanks to kevlar but who will be suffering from brain injuries -- those already detected and those yet to be detected. Each brain injured soldier represents just short of $3m in medical costs over their lifetime. How many will suffered brain injuries which have not yet manifested? 10,000? 30,000? Half or more of those deployed in Iraq? We don't know yet. We won't know until the effects of the injuries surface.
These costs are bad enough in both social and economic terms. Every time Congress continues funding the war, every time we factor in the reasons for those costs, we feel sick and angry. Very angry -- because it was not only an unnecessary war, a war of political and personal vanity, it was a fabricated war, created by piling lie upon lie.
Aznar: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.
Bush: I am an optimist, because I believe that I'm right. I'm at peace with myself...
