Why did liberals push for the Iraq war? Politics Weekly America podcast
2023-03-17 00:39:44
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Monday marks 20 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq in what was originally called Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live in an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now.
In the lead up to that moment, President Bush had told the world that one of the main aims was to rid Saddam Hussein's regime of weapons of mass destruction. Weapons that posed a clear and present danger to the world. As it turned out, once the troops went in, no such weapons were anywhere to be found. In 2011, the U.S. withdrew its forces, leaving space for ISIS, or the so-called Islamic State, to form, and eventually, American troops went back into Iraq. Brown University's Costs of War project calculated that the Iraq war led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Of those, some 5,000 were U.S. military personnel, but the overwhelming majority were Iraqi civilians.
All this is history now, but for me, it's also memory. I lived through the debate that led to Bush's announcement. Indeed, as a columnist for The Guardian, I was involved in it. Like many on the paper, I wrote that the case for war pushed by both Bush in Washington and Tony Blair in London was badly flawed.
I came under some pressure from the Blair team to change my position, they wanted me to follow the lead set by my counterparts in the US.
Who mainly backed the invasion? Two decades later, I speak to one of those writers who has come to regret his backing of the war. I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
I was probably already having some conflicted feelings about the war, which I had supported.
Of the fact that Iraqis, most of them, hated Saddam Hussein and were happy to be rid of him. But it also struck me as perhaps a reminder that America was engaged in this in ways that were not going to be necessarily very easy or simple.
Peter Beinart is author of The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter on substack, and professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
He's also the author of The New Republic magazine at the time of the invasion. Peter, Welcome to the podcast. Good to have you with us. So let's go back to January of 2001, when we had a new administration taking over the Bush administration. They had arrived at the presidency by the skin of their teeth, following a ruling from the Supreme Court.
It had been a deadlocked election in November 2000.
The Bush people arrived. And even then, very early on, there were some people talking on the edges of the administration. But about Iraq, and about regime change in Iraq. Where were you on that question right then? And I'm deliberately saying, early in 2001, before the events of September the 11th, 2001..
I think my view, which was shared by a lot of both Democrats and Republicans, was that it would be a good thing if Saddam Hussein were toppled. In fact, it was the Clinton administration which had signed, I think, in 1998, something called, I think it was called the Iraq Liberation Act, where it basically made it U.S policy that the U.S wanted Saddam out of there. It was still fairly inconceivable at that point that the U.S.
Would actually do so through an actual war. That maybe the most was their suggestions. Well, maybe the U.S could somehow do more to support the Kurds, for instance, or perhaps even support some of the Shia in the South who were hostile to Saddam. So I think my view would have been that, yes, it would be great if Iraqis overthrew Saddam and were able to create a better kind of government. But it really would have been inconceivable to me at that point that the U.S.
Would have launched a full-scale war.
And you would have at that point. would you have opposed it if they had at that point?
I think, so, yes. I mean, it was almost in a way not really a topic of conversation that I think was being raised. But I suppose, yes. I don't think that at that point, I would have thought it was fairly inconceivable.
Yeah, no, I think it was only talked about on the edges. That then changed after 9-11, and the drumbeat began pretty soon. I went traveled to the United States soon after 9-11 and wrote a column having talked to people in Washington, the headline of which was turning towards Iraq. In November of 2001, it was pretty clear that that's what people were thinking.
At that point, once 9-11 had happened and the talk moved from the fringes to the center of debate, how were you seeing it then?
I think it was pretty clear that the U.
S was going to go into Afghanistan, but I was, and the magazine I edited. The New Republic was generally sympathetic after 9-11 to the idea that the U.S should force some kind of confrontation with Saddam Hussein, with the goal of toppling him. In retrospect, that was a really catastrophic kind of error in judgment of mine that I spent a lot of time and actually kind of wrote a book trying to wrestle with.
But it was the product of a number of things. First of all, there was the sense that Saddam was a problem that the United States did not know how to solve. Not just because of his terrible human rights abuses, but because the U.S had had this containment policy since the end of the Gulf War. On the assumption that he had to be under some kind of sanction. Because if he were allowed to get all the oil revenue, he would go and rebuild. A nuclear program in particular, and other weapons of mass destruction, which he had had before the Gulf War. The other, much broader subject that we could discuss more was, I think that by 2002 2003, there was a culture of hubris in Washington that had really been building since the late 1980s. Which vastly overestimated what the American military could do, overestimated how easy it was to create democratic regimes. And it was just afflicted with a kind of self-righteous lack of understanding about the dangers of American imperialism, and I think was afflicted with that hubris.
I'm very struck by the fact that you're talking about Washington rather than one party or other. And I suppose relevant there is what had just happened at the end of the previous administration. The Clinton administration had more than one encounter in the Balkans. But in 1999, the war for Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, which had worked out pretty successfully and had led to Bill Clinton. But also Tony Blair being hailed as kind of liberators by the Kosovo people. And my memory is that that led to a feeling that, yeah, maybe there's no limit to what we can do. And on the British end of the debate, particularly because we had a Labour government, then was this idea there's no limit to what we can do for good. So-called liberal interventionism.
And it was in 1999, long before George W. Bush was around, that Tony Blair gave the famous Chicago speech, where he unveiled this doctrine of liberal interventionism. Which is this notion that if horrible things are going on, human rights abuses are going on. And a regime was punishing its own people, hurting its own people, then other countries have the right to go in there and protect those people. Finally realised standing aside was simply not an option. I would argue to you that today, the impulse towards interdependence between countries.
Is immeasurably greater.
Is that part of the mix of this thing that you're talking about? About hubris, or do you separate in your mind interventions like the Kosovo one from that hubristic mindset that you're describing?
No, you are exactly right. And it actually starts building even a decade before Kosovo, Ronald Reagan, although he's considered this enormously hawkish president, was very, very reluctant to send U.S. troops into battle overseas. Because the legacy of the Vietnam war was still too strong. In the end of Reagan's presidency, he was pushed by some advisors to invade Panama, which he refused to do.
But the story I would really start from when George H.
W Bush The Father invades Panama, which many said would be another Vietnam, and actually didn't. It turned out to be a fairly successful operation. Then you had the Gulf War, which most liberal elites in the United States.
Ted, Kennedy said, would be another Vietnam and then the Gulf War, although I don't want to whitewash it. There were huge numbers of innocent Iraqis killed. Was a military success for the U.S. Then Clinton dithered, but ultimately intervened in Bosnia in 1995. Again, people said it would be Vietnam, and it looked, and in retrospect, that he had ended an ethnic cleansing. And then you were right.
By 1999, this was getting momentum in both parties. In some ways, it's the Republican Party, and you're right. Flair was a critical ideological figure in making the case for this among liberal interventionists. The U.S. and UK went to war in Kosovo without U.N. approval because the Russians and the Chinese wouldn't allow it.
So we went outside the U.N. system, outside of international law, did it with NATO support. And again, the Kosovar Albanians seemed very, very grateful. People were patting themselves on the back and all of this. It's a little bit like Las Vegas, you go to Las Vegas, you put down a small bet and you win.
And then you put down a bigger bet and a bigger bet and a bigger bet until you lose. And I think the story from Panama through Iraq.
Is a little bit like that? The Vegas image is quite right. It was building and building. Because this was the period in which the United States was sort of shaking off what had been called Vietnam syndrome. Which was this fearfulness, timidity about using force. And you mentioned Ronald Reagan is in some ways, a part of that. This was the period in which it began to feel it's sort of cojones a bit and think after the first Gulf War of 1991, yeah, we can do these things.
And so perhaps this was the moment, the Iraq war, when that mentality went.
Too far. Two other elements that were really crucial, one of which was that the economic boom in the United States of the 1990s erased the budget deficit. Which meant that it seemed like the U.S had money to spend. And historically, if you look at American foreign policy, it's often when the U.S feels flush with money that it's less inhibited about these military campaigns.
And then the last point was this massive third wave of democratization, which rolled through Eastern Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa. That made people believe that once you got rid of Saddam, it would be like Eastern Europe, you would have, you know, democratization kind of flourish in Iraq, and people looked at the Kurdish areas, which were kind of under U.s protection, which did have a somewhat functioning democratic system.
And said, Why can't all of Iraq be this way? Yeah, and all of it put together just led to this sort of hyper confidence. This was the period where people were talking about America now as the sole superpower, even a hyper power, yes.
And there was nothing that America couldn't do. Here's a sort of, perhaps unexpected question. I wonder if part of your problem, in a way, was that you were insufficiently tribal and partisan. And I say that because when I examine my own reactions at the time, I wonder if partly why I was against this was that I was just so deeply skeptical of Republicans. That this was George W. Bush and the crowd I had seen behave, as far as I was concerned, appallingly. During the Florida deadlock, when they essentially canceled a recounting of the vote, partly by storming a mini riot, the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, where men in Chinos were college Republicans, stopped a count of the vote.
I thought these are people who are sort of appalling, and therefore I didn't believe a word that came out of their mouth for simple, quite tribal, partisan reasons. And I've asked myself if it had been a sort of hypothetical third term Bill Clinton, who had said. For the same humanitarian reasons we moved in Kosovo, we're now going to do that here in Iraq. I just wonder if I'd have reacted differently. Instead, I was immediately skeptical of all the messages that were coming out of Washington in terms of weapons of mass destruction and all the rest of it.
How come you? And quite, I don't mean to single you out. Because there were so many. Otherwise liberal commentators who would normally support Democrats and been hostile to the Bush administration suddenly sort of dropped their usual partisan filter. If you like, and were ready to trust that Bush, Cheney, his vice president, were all operating in good faith.
It's a great question, I think. Look for some of the Democrats politicians. It was clearly they were politically scared because Bush was enormously popular after 9-11 and he was weaponizing this kind of nationalism. No one wanted to be called soft on terrorism. So you had people like many Democratic senators who would oppose the Gulf War in 1990, which was a much more modest effort. Like John Kerry, who then supported the Iraq war. Because the lesson for Democratic politicians of the Gulf War was, it will end your political career if you vote against a war. That turns out well.
Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, who became the Democratic nominees in 2000. The small number of Senate Democrats who had actually supported that war, that was among the politicians. But I think you're making a fascinating point. One of the points is that Washington was actually not quite as partisan back then as it is now. And American foreign policy is always more bipartisan than American domestic policy. I mean, even if you look at Biden's China policy, which I'm not a fan of, it's actually continued many of Donald Trump's policies.
So there's that element, but I think there were also then people who had more liberal credentials, who vouched for it. So you mentioned Tony Blair, so Tony Blair was someone who Democrats and liberals in the United States identified with. And then there were a group of liberal interventionist intellectuals.
I was one, I was kind of one of the junior members, but there were a lot of people who were older than me, who I looked up to, who also took that view. And I think that you're right. I should have said much more, even if I think this might have some merit objectively, or which I in retrospect, it didn't.
But then do I really trust these people? First of all, they had never shown any interest in nation building, right? Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were hardly the kind of people who one necessarily believed cared that much about democracy. But I think there was the feeling, well, they're the people in power at this moment. And there was another element that actually had a influence with me and others like me, which was the influence of a certain number of Iraqi exile.
I'm not talking about Midshalabi, this slightly kind of sleazy guy who was wheeling and dealing with the Neocons. But the figure of Kanan Makia, who was a very impressive Iraqi dissident who had written about the horrors of Saddam, and who talked about this as a kind of national liberation. I think that spoke to me and others like me and overrode what should have been the kind of sensibility that you had? Which is, this is not a gang to be trusted, even if you believe that it.
Was a virtuous effort. I take your point about partisanship on foreign policy. I think also what was easy for me to put to one side, perhaps, was just the sheer degree of emotional unity in the United States. After 9-11, me as a Brit sitting in London, it didn't work like that quite the same way. But there was this closing of ranks among Americans after 9-11, which maybe accounted partly for why that previous sort of more partisan impulse didn't kick in. But it was interesting your point about Blair and the impact that would have on you sitting in the United States. Because there was an attempt to make the traffic work two ways.
And I remember Tony Blair's organised a dinner for the reluctant liberal commentators and colonists who were not yet on board with the war. And I was at that dinner, and the speaker was Robert Kagan, who, you might remember, famously wrote that essay Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. And he was another liberal advocate of the war at the time. The arguments that the administration were making and the Blair administration were making there was always. This quite interesting because from the Bush people you would hear a lot about regime change in effect, and liberating Iraqis from tyranny.
We will bring freedom to the Iraqi people out of London. It was much more about weapons of mass destruction, that they are pointed this way, that they are dangerous. It's a clear and present danger. We have to do this to disarm Saddam Hussein. Of those two twinned arguments for invasion, which was the one that really pressed in on you?
They both did in a kind of a complimentary way. I think weapons of mass destruction is a very problematic phrase in the sense that chemical and biological weapons are nowhere not in the same ballgame as nuclear weapons. I think for me, at that time, the thinking was so. We know that Saddam had been working very hard on a nuclear, trying to build a nuclear weapon. Up until the Gulf war, he seemed, was closer than the U.S. had fought.
Then there had been an inspection, the inspections.
Didn't really have the eyes and ears on the ground. It was only logical that he would be rebuilding his nuclear program. We had no idea how far away he would be. Given his appetite for risk, there were others who were focused on the idea that he could give these weapons to terrorists. I don't think that was something that had as much of an impact on me.
I think it was the feeling that you had to do something. Because you had no mechanism to stop Saddam Hussein from getting a nuclear weapon that would be intolerable, there was no other way of stopping that, the other mechanisms that we had, the containment regime was kind of unraveling. I think that was the very flawed logic, but it was the kind of logic that was most compelling to me at the time.
I think what might be shocking for people who don't remember any of this is how much everything you're talking about was just the vocabulary of the time. It was front and center where it was.
I remember you just referred to those U.N. inspections and the U.N. Arms inspector. Hans Blix. His name was on the news. On every bulletin. People would talk about today's a Blix Day because Hans Blix was giving an update to the UN. It would be on every channel live, even in Britain, all over the world, people would watch it.
The world was kind of holding its breath, waiting for a judgment, a signal. If, for example, Hans Blix said there are weapons that would be a cue for war if, he said, Look, I've looked. And there's nothing that maybe would derail the momentum towards war. It's just striking to think back now how?
All-consuming in our kind of media conversation, in public conversation, this was, I remember it, being at social gatherings, around family dinner tables, people would fall out about this stuff. Was there much more unity in the America of the time, or were people really going at each other and at this argument back then? In the United States as well?
It's very important to say that there were people who, to their great credit, who, despite this environment, opposed the war. Even though the New Republic, which I edited, was very strong pro-war. John Judas, one of my colleagues, was a dissenter. There were people in Congress like Senator Robert Byrd or Governor Howard Dean, There were people who were opposing this, but they didn't have a kind of critical mass in Washington. I think that it's interesting.
There were even conservatives, who I think probably were privately somewhat skeptical. Because, after all, if you're a conservative, you don't really believe the government can do anything right. It's kind of absurd to believe the government can go halfway across the world and topple a government and build a new one. But those conservatives, some of whom were in the first Bush administration, kept quiet. I think the other point is, and you were getting at this earlier. There was an environment post 9-11 in the United States that made people prone to apocalyptic thinking. It was 9-11. But remember, after 9-11, then there were these anthrax attacks, which kind of freaked people out even more.
It's like, what's going on, what's going on here?
This is where envelopes of white powder arrived on addresses on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, and people thought we are really under attack. A deadly form of anthrax.
Rare inhaled form of anthrax to be killed in a deliberate anthrax attack. Yes, and people just assumed, I mean, wrongly, in retrospect, but assumed that there would be more terrorist attacks. And so maybe this had something to do with the fact that Americans were separated by two oceans.
We have these benign neighbors. So, perhaps for a country that had an expectation of unusually elevated expectation of what security would be like from foreign enemies. The fact that it was pierced produced more of an apocalyptic response, perhaps, than in other places. Also, again, because America had this overwhelming power, there was the sense of, well, you could do something about it. But I think it was the discussion, particularly of Saddam's nuclear program, against the backdrop of that kind of apocalyptic environment. And it's funny people at the time didn't think they were being hysterical.
People at the time thought they were making, and myself it was kind of sober. Rational assessment of dangers. But the truth is that that was in the background. And I think, and kind of within the conversation. In a way that I don't think I didn't have the distance from it to recognize at the time.
And we should say something here about the media, because there was a bit of an internal sort of inquest, particularly on the New York Times and others about whether the media had been too credulous about some of the administration's claims. Particularly about WMD weapons of mass destruction, which, of course, after the invasion, there were no sign of, they just nobody ever found any WMD. And I know that, as I say, papers like The New York Times did wonder, how had they got this wrong? What's your view of that? Because the Guardian newspaper was skeptical about the case for war.
It was against it. And partly that was informed by news reporting, which said there were questions about the so-called intelligence, which said that there was WMD. Other papers in this country were all for it. But what's your view, now, 20 years on, of how the U.S. media handled this?
EPISODE Well, I mean, I think there are different failures. One of them, I think you're right, is that there was not enough pressure put on these claims about weapons of mass destruction. There were honorable exceptions. Knight Ritter, for instance, which is a fairly small media service, actually was raising these questions.
Part of the issue was that there was just an assumption that was shared by the U.S. and, I think, to be fair, most other intelligence agencies. And also by the Democrats and the people who've been in the Clinton administration. You know, someone like Ken Pollack, for instance, who wrote a very influential book supporting the war, had been in the Clinton administration. And there was this assumption that, well, given everything we know about Saddam, of course, he's trying to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. That's the kind of guy he is. And I think because that assumption was so strong, the dissenting voices. There was one U.S. intelligence agency from the State Department, which was somewhat more skeptical about these claims.
And the media didn't flesh that out because I think a lot of journalists.
And they were reliant on their sources, and again, they didn't have Democrats raising these questions. And so it produced a kind of toxic groupthink that led that. Even if people started to realize that some of the individual claims of evidence were not that strong, some way, they thought, Well, okay, maybe this particular piece of evidence isn't a slam dunk. But it just simply was taken for granted that this was the thing that Saddam would be likely to do.
Yeah, and I think it's a classic case of sort of confirmation bias. Because when Colin Powell famously appeared at the United Nations Security Council, presenting this evidence, those people who were skeptical at the end of it thought, well, there wasn't much there was there. Whereas those people who were persuaded in advance said, Well, that was an absolutely comprehensive, unarguable presentation, and it just depended where you were starting.
The facts in Iraqis behavior Iraq's behavior demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort, no effort to disarm as required by the international community. If I remember correctly, I think Saddam may have wanted people to think he did have a WDMD program. I think the line that was used by Blix or one of the other inspectors was You can have a beware of dog sign outside without having a dog. So I think there were even actually people quite close to the Iraqi regime who might have thought there was something there that doesn't.
But you're right, given the magnitude of what's happening, the press and the members of and Democrats and many others really fail to put enough pressure on these claims.
Yeah, and at the time, it did seem unimaginable that this guy who was facing the might of the United States and its allies did not just say, Look, guys, I don't have these weapons. Which would have been the easy way out for him. Instead, he maintained the fear and he kept that people assumed he had a dog. Let's just talk about events after the point where his 20th anniversary we are now marking. So the invasion has already happened.
At what point did you start?
Questioning your initial support for this, I think two things happened fairly early on. The first was that, you know, the U.S didn't find weapons of mass destruction right on the ground. And and and there were people who kept on saying, No, we're going to find them, we're going to find them, we're making excuses.
And that was a very big, big problem. That was one of the things that just made me. Made it clear that, you know, the rationale for for the war was was collapsing. The central rationale. The other was that as the insurgency began to break out again, it didn't take very long for this to happen. You know, people were, some people were saying, Well, you know, we made some mistakes. The Bush administration didn't handle this correctly in the aftermath of the war.
And that was all true, but I think that over the course of 2003, and again, I bitterly, deeply regret not having had these thoughts. Earlier. It just became clear that although it was true that many, many Iraqis, most Iraqis, perhaps, bitterly hated Saddam Hussein, it was also like. It also was obvious that many of them bitterly hated an American occupation, which, smacked for them, looked to them like a return to the Western imperialism of old, and that also became harder and harder to ignore. Oh, it's a tiny number of people who are doing this.
It just became more and more clear that even Iraqis who passionately detested Saddam Hussein did not want the United States there.
Once you began to shift in your view as as events unfolded, at what point did you feel it was now important to? As it were? Sort of come out and say, you know what, I've got this wrong.
Well, after a certain period of time, I really felt like I had no choice for a number of reasons. First of all, on a personal level. My sister-in-law, who's a doctor in the army, still is a doctor in the army. Was deployed to Iraq, had to leave her small daughter, and then was later deployed to Afghanistan, by which point she had to leave her two small children. And I felt a tremendous amount of guilt for that. You know, here I was living in Washington, I wasn't fighting.
I wasn't suffering as a result of the war. My editor, my former boss, Michael Kelly, who was editor of the New Republic and then was editor of the Atlantic, died covering. And it wasn't long until one started to see Iraq war veterans on the streets of New York and other cities as homeless. So at a very personal level, I started to feel what I can only sense is a sense of shame about my role in this.
Intellectually, I felt like I had a massive problem because it wasn't just that I had been wrong about Iraq. Iraq was part of a whole worldview I had. I mean, I was a liberal interventionist. I was very much like Tony Blair in my views. And I didn't know how to continue to write about American foreign policy, given that I had been so wrong.
It wasn't a small mistake. It shook that all of the assumptions that I had about American foreign policy were thrown up into question. I thought, Well, unless I'm going to go do something else for a living, it's not just a question of apologizing. I have to rethink things from the ground up. And so I left the New Republic and went and wrote a book called The Icarus Syndrome, which was about America's interventions in World War I in Vietnam and Iraq. Which was basically an effort to try to understand the hubris that I had been complicit in and trying to come out the other side.
It was only after writing that book and reading, and spending a lot of time thinking about figures like Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Littman and Hans Morgenthau and others, that I began to see. Perhaps an alternative way of thinking about America's role? And yet I wonder if you maybe.
But certainly, many in the United States, broadly on the liberal or left of the spectrum, overlearned the lessons of that war. And I'm thinking particularly about Barack Obama, not.
In the Syrian case, and I would argue that the Syrian case, in some ways, was more egregious, more demanding of military action. Because the people of that country did face an immediate threat to their lives. And we saw the death toll running to the many hundreds of thousands. And yet there was no appetite, certainly among Liberals or Democrats, to say, let's go in and do what has to be done. Is it possible that after flying too close to the sun, per your Icarus syndrome argument? That actually there's been a withdrawing of the United States? That in some ways, maybe I don't know whether it was equally unwise. But has its own problems that we've seen played out in the decades since the mistake, tragic mistake of the Iraq war.
There were many who did make exactly that point, and Obama was very bitterly criticized, including from liberal Hawks who didn't disappear in Washington. On the Syria case, I don't see it that way. I think that, first of all, the United States would never have sent its own ground troops into Syria because Syria was not a threat.
No one was making the case that Syria was a direct threat to the United States. It would have been more like Libya, where maybe we were actually sending some weapons through the CIA to the Syrian rebels. But I think you also have to remember the legacy not only of Iraq, but the legacy of the Libya War, which was more of a classic humanitarian war that happened after Iraq. The Obama administration was still willing to go along with the idea. That because Omar Gaddafi was so terrible and people who were were rising up against him, that the U..s.
With NATO should go in and basically give them the air support so they could topple Libya. And many liberal internet interventionists were very much pushing this. But the very bitter, bitter lesson of Libya, I would say, was a similar one to Iraq. Which is that, as hideous as Gaddafi was, as hideous as Saddam was. A failed state can be worse. What's happened to Libya since Gaddafi has probably been worse, a failed state. No function in government awash in weapons.
And I think, given that, and remember that Bashir Assad was a monster. I don't think Obama could have confidently believed that overthrowing the Bashir regime would not have produced a failed state, a fragmentation. I personally do not think it was a case of Obama over learning the lessons. Because I think there was very. There was good reason to be really wary of what was happening in Syria. Even though what has happened in Syria without U.s military intervention has been hideous, the wariness is what I'm interested in.
You wrote a column back in 2007 where you said being a liberal as opposed to a neoconservative means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the U.S with unconstrained power, but we shouldn't have trusted ourselves. Do you ever see? We've talked before of how long it took for America to shake off the so-called Vietnam syndrome? There may now be an Iraq syndrome.
Do you ever see a time where you will believe that the U?
S can be trusted and could be trusted to help in a situation where people are under threat from their own brutal ruler, where democracy is absent. Are we ever going back to, in some ways, those youthful dreams you had 20-plus years ago, that?
Were dashed by the experience in Iraq. I hope not. I think that where I have landed is in the belief in international law I do. I am willing to support U.s military. That are in accordance with international law, because international law represents framework, but not a perfect, but a kind of framework. That does not require us trusting that we, unlike all the other human beings in the world, have some particular wisdom or righteousness, just because we happen to be Americans.
Within the context of international law, yes, I think America can play a really important role, and America should be working hard to strengthen international law, but not outside of the framework.
Doesn't that then mean that, unless Vladimir Putin is on board, he'll just wield Russia's veto at the U?
N.
And then it will be against international law, whatever action is proposed.
Well, perhaps, but remember, there are many, many other things the United States can do to help in the world and strengthen international law. Which don't have to be at the barrel of a gun, this is part of. The problem is that America has spent so much of its focus and so much of its money, and even its idealism, with the barrel of a gun. There's so much more that the U.S can do through cooperation and nonviolent efforts to try to help the world.
We should be channeling our idealistic streak in that direction. And you know, it's funny. People talk about the Iraq syndrome, but what I see in Washington today is not an Iraq syndrome. It's actually, it's a bipartisan, extremely hawkish consensus on China, in which there's very little conversation about the.
Catastrophic risks of u.
S war with China? Of the risks of another mcCarthyism, which I think has already started to break out in the United States. Here, vis-à-vis Asian Americans and other people who are associated with the Chinese regime. I actually, I don't think we overlearn the lessons of Iraq. Very few people who had influential positions in Iraq have lost their influential roles in the Washington media or have fundamentally rethought. I think that the problem is we still.
Don't know the lessons of Iraq? You yourself have given great thought to that, and you're unusually and admirably candid about that and willing to be self-critical. And for being so honest but also insightful with us, I'm really grateful. Peter BEInart, thanks so much for talking to us on Politics, Weekly America.
Thank you, and that is all from me. For this week, listen out for other Guardian podcasts covering 20 years since the start of the Iraq war. I spoke to my colleague John Harris for Thursday's episode of Politics Weekly UK. All about the British experience of that lead up to war, as well as the reverberations felt in the two decades since, today in focus.
On Monday, we'll explore the relationship between Haitha Abdul-Ahad and James Meek, both Guardian correspondents who met in the days after the fall of Baghdad. Haitha's audio-long read on what it felt like to be an Iraqi in those first few months after the U.S. invaded. Will also be out on Monday. So search for those wherever you get your podcasts, but for now, it's goodbye. The producers were Daniel Stephens and Hattie Moyer, and the executive producer, Maz Ebtehaj.
I'm Jonathan Friedland, thanks as always for listening.
This is The Guardian.
The wait is over and we are back. For series two of Pop Culture With Me Shante Joseph, we'll dive into the biggest pop culture stories of the week, again from Meghan and Harry.
And this is why sort of turning Harry and Meghan into polarising figures. Ticks a lot of boxes because it just drives clicks to Rihanna, Rihanna rocks off at about one. She just swans in like she's the most ordinary person in the world, swanning a couple of minutes late. And, of course, the chaos of my life.
I meet someone I show my friends, they're like, Yeah, it's okay. Four weeks later, I'm sliding down the floor, crying. One week later, I messaged my friends I met new guys. This is how I dated 11 people in one year.
Listen now, wherever you get your podcast.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os