Jack Reed's I-Told-Ya-So, Part 1

This was Senator Jack Reed’s conclusion to his Stephen Ogden Memorial Lecture on International Affairs at Brown University, delivered this past Friday…

We are engaged in a Long War that transcends the boundaries of any one country. It is a generational struggle that calls upon all of our national power, not just our military strength. It is a clash of ideas as well as armed forces. It demands a strategy grounded in a realistic assessment of threats, not ideological presumptions…

For someone criticizing policies for having too much ideology and not enough realism, in other parts of his speech, Senator Reed plays awfully fast-and-loose with the facts. Here are two examples from two consecutive sentences from the opening section…

In the fall of 2002, Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the United States or to the region. After a disastrous and inconclusive war with Iran, after a decisive defeat in Desert Storm and ejection from Kuwait, and after a decade of sanctions, Iraq was a bankrupt nation with little military capability…

1. American policy was not based on the imminence of an Iraqi threat. Here is the President's most high-profile statement on the imminence of an Iraqi threat from the January 2003 State of the Union address…

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

The old Spinsanity website had a good round-up on the entire imminent threat debate.

2. Calling pre-March 2003 Iraq "bankrupt" is a dubious characterization at best. Iraq’s leaders, at least, we doing quite well through oil-for-food corruption, and Iraq was developing robust commercial ties with the countries of Europe. Resources may not have been getting to the Iraqi people, but that didn't mean that the Iraqi government wasn't getting what it needed to fund its schemes.

The most serious problem in Senator Reed’s speech, however, comes in his view of the policy options that are available to the United States of America...