Every War Is a Choice
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY
June 12, 2008; Page A15

Claims that the Iraq War was a reckless "war of choice" – rather than a prudent war of "necessity" – are a standard element of the anti-Bush narrative. The latest critic to make this claim is former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

But a close look at American history shows that this distinction makes little sense. All wars are wars of choice, because it is almost always possible not to fight. The real question is whether the price of peace outweighs the costs of war.

Although the U.S. has resorted to armed force hundreds of times, it had engaged in only 10 major conflicts before 9/11, including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. In each instance, American leaders chose to go to war because they believed national interests were at stake. However, in only three of these conflicts was the nation's existence even arguably threatened. And, even in each of these instances, options other than war were available.

The Revolutionary War was necessary, but only if the goal was American independence. Otherwise, colonial grievances could have been compromised. In 1776, Admiral Lord Richard Howe arrived in New York Harbor with a British Army and offers of pardon for most patriot leaders. As George Washington reported to Congress, Admiral Howe had "great powers" to negotiate a settlement. Indeed, as late as 1778, the British government offered to meet all colonial demands short of independence. America's leaders, however, chose to fight on instead. By then, independence was the very point.

Likewise, the Civil War was a war of choice. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln chose to confront secession with force. The seceding states had not invaded the north, and the abolition of slavery was not – at this point – a war aim. Lincoln chose to fight because he genuinely believed in the Union's constitutional indivisibility, and that the future of democracy rested on its survival, especially on vindicating the proposition that constitutional government was impossible if part of the country could simply opt-out after losing an election. However, there would still have been a United States if the South had gone, and many serious people thought the South would prevail. Britain's William Gladstone spoke for many when he said, early in the war, that "We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States." Lincoln bet differently.

At the beginning of World War II, when Japan actually attacked Pearl Harbor, the country could nevertheless have chosen not to fight. It was perhaps politically unthinkable, but America would not have ceased to exist if it had abandoned its position as a great power in the Far East. The principal U.S. territory there – the Philippine Islands – was a colonial conquest from Spain; its other interests were economic and, of course, ideological. Was containment possible? Fortunately, Franklin Roosevelt did not explore that possibility.

Similarly, American engagement against Nazi Germany was also a matter of choice. Hitler declared war on the U.S. but had not invaded any U.S. territory. Should Roosevelt have explored a peaceful settlement and then, again, sought to contain an Axis Europe? Was his later demand for "unconditional surrender" necessary, or did it prolong the war? Some Americans – in ways eerily reminiscent of today's efforts to decouple the Iraq war from the war in Afghanistan – argued at the time that the European campaign against Hitler was a distraction from the Pacific war against Japan.

Of course, it would have been morally unacceptable, and not in the national interest, to pursue any of these opportunities for peace – but they did exist. The question then, and now, is not whether war was unavoidable, but whether force is legally and morally justified in light of the circumstances.

In 2003, President Bush chose to confront Saddam Hussein – who indisputably was hostile to the U.S., who had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, and who had given aid to terrorist groups (though not directly to Osama bin Laden). The president may well have acted on faulty intelligence – as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence now claims – but he did not ignore or suppress intelligence proving that Saddam wasn't a threat after all. Rather, he acted on available intelligence and in light of Iraq's past record.

Going to war may have been a choice others wouldn't have made. But it was no more a war of choice than any of our other wars.

-- Messrs. Rivkin and Casey, Washington attorneys, served in the Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Labels: democrats, Iraq, mcclellan, Petraeus

Great commentary by Bill McGurn.

In the media week that has been Scott McClellan, my former colleague has had his motives questioned, his character impugned, and his own book dismissed as something he could not possibly have written himself.

Yet in the midst of the storm, the press has largely skipped over what is at once Scott's central claim, and his silliest argument: that the president's big mistake was to embrace the "permanent campaign" and that this led to a strategy that meant "never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned."

The decisions on Iraq that followed Scott's departure tell a much different story. Whether you agree with the surge or not, that decision was one of the defining acts of his presidency. And what Scott apparently still has not recognized is that his own heave-ho was the prelude to exactly the kind of reconsideration he says was impossible in the Bush White House.

Exhibit A is the sacking of Don Rumsfeld immediately after the 2006 elections that gave the Democrats control of Congress. The "after" is critical, because the president was blasted for his timing by many in his own party. Arlen Specter complained that he would still be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee if the president had made the move before the elections. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that the president's timing probably cost Republicans control of the Senate and 10 to 15 seats in the House.

These men had a point. But the timing also said something about George W. Bush: A president who makes a decision knowing that it could cost his party control of Congress can be accused of many things, but subsuming all his decisions to the "permanent campaign" cannot seriously be one of them.

The president's decision to replace his Defense secretary was followed by an even more thorough rethink of his war policy. Anyone who has spent time in government knows that changing a major policy midstream is like trying to make a U-turn with an aircraft carrier. And anyone who was in the White House in late 2006 knows that the dramatic shift in Iraq that we now almost take for granted was the result of one man: George W. Bush.

Scott and the other critics accuse the president of stubbornness. In my experience, when the pundits accuse you of being stubborn, often all it means is that you don't accept the conventional wisdom of the Beltway establishment – and that you are unwilling to run up the white flag and bow to their superiority.

The president I served had concerns that were far removed from this audience. Constantly he would remind his speechwriting team to keep in mind how his words would be heard by others. By an enemy who believed Iraq was theirs for the taking. By Iraqi families being asked to stand up and have faith in the United States. And by some second lieutenant in some godforsaken town in Iraq about to lead other Americans into battle.

So for several intense weeks, my colleague Chris Michel and I isolated ourselves in a tiny room in the West Wing, trying to capture the new policy in a coherent draft. Early one Saturday, Dan Bartlett came by to check on our progress.

Dan is a straight shooter. He knew that the new policy risked losing the support of the few remaining hawks, because they wanted many more troops than the five brigades the president would be proposing. He also knew that most everyone else in America wanted to hear that our men and women in Iraq were coming home. Dan did not kid himself – or us – about how it would go down, at least in the short term. "No one wants to hear what this speech is going to tell them," he told us.

The president understood this too. But he also understood that the moral and strategic purposes of the U.S. demanded a president willing to stand up and do the unpopular thing – no matter what the polls or pundits were saying.

So on the evening of Jan. 10, 2007, Mr. Bush looked into the television cameras and gave the speech nobody wanted to hear. He told the American people that the central policy of his administration was not working, he took all responsibility for the mistakes, and he offered a fix that he knew many would regard with skepticism. It is hard to imagine any presidential act more removed from "the permanent campaign."

Of course, only a mind that was not completely closed to "rethinking" or "reconsidering" or "reflecting" on Iraq (or George W. Bush) could appreciate the magnitude of what the president did that January night. And as Scott more than proves, in today's Washington that kind of mind is all too rare.

Labels: Iraq, mcclellan, Petraeus, revisionist history

The following retort of Scott McClellan's book-bash of Bush is from Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to the president, who knew and worked along side Scott McClellan.

He [Scott McClellan] would have us believe that the Bush administration was, at bottom, massively and deeply deceitful and corrupt — but this has only dawned on Scott since he started writing his book, years after the fact. Let's just say that for these revelations to spring forth as if truth were like a time-released capsule, in which things magically get clearer with the passage of time (and the signing of book contracts), is, well, suspicious. And my former colleagues are absolutely right to point out that Scott not only never raised any objections contemporaneously, in meetings or with his superiors; in fact, he said almost nothing at all, at any time, about anything of consequence. ... Scott seems to be that rare bird who kept those concerns suppressed, if he had them at all. And now, years later, he finally feels liberated to make arguments he didn't appear to believe at the time.

Scott's broader claim that "in some small way" his hope is to "move us beyond the destructive partisan warfare of the past 15 years" and that he wants to "contribute to [a] national conversation" about making our politics higher and better is not terribly persuasive. The same can be said about his complaints about his disdain for "the Washington game." In fact, one of the oldest games in Washington is to turn against those in power who cared for you and gave you the greatest opportunity in your life to serve this nation — and to do so in a book, for which you received a hefty advance.
It's also been pointed out that one of McClellan's suppossed turning points was upon learning that he had been lied to by Karl Rove, who claimed he had nothing to do with the leak of Valerie Plame's name. Just one problem with that -- the man who admitted to leaking Plame's name was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove. How can one be betrayed by someone who didn't betray?

Labels: mcclellan, media bias, PlameGate, revisionist history

I'll say this for Scott McClellan, at last he learned how to communicate. He was, to my mind, one of the worst press secretaries in presidential history — at least in modern times, continually cowed by the press, never able to show any confidence, and making us all wince whenever he held a briefing.

His book, titled What Happened, seems to go after Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, the president and others. The main releases we read about are how the president bollixed the response to Katrina and how the White House made a political campaign of the Iraq war, using, as Scott puts it, "a propaganda campaign."

The first thing to ask about these kinds of books is "does it help history, does it shed light, does it add to the sum total of knowledge about a topic history or contemporary analysis can use to shed light on an administration?" OR, rather, "is this a self-aggrandizing after-the-fact justification to bolster one's own reputation and credibility?" especially after having done such a poor job in the first place.

I think we'll probably find this book is mostly of the latter category. The evidence I've seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn't do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

As far as Katrina, I think we all know and can admit it was both a public policy and public relations disaster. We had a bad FEMA director, the president should not have flown over the disaster, or said Michael Brown was doing a good job. But it wasn't just the administration that didn't do so hot. I seem to recall state and local officials, those who had more access to the facts on the ground, those tasked with evacuation plans, those responsible for the city and state, were pretty unprepared as well. Heck, the mayor's family fled the state. Not the city, the state.

Finally, we'll learn more as those written about in his book speak out. I note Fran Townsend is already on record saying she recalls no meeting where Scott McClellan ever objected to what was being said or made his dissenting views known. And I'll just leave you with this — having not read the book and having no plans to do so: don't you think that when someone has an objection to what is being done, they owe it to the public and as a mark of duty to do something about it or say something about it at the time, rather than wait two years and save it for a book? Does that in and of itself not cut down some of the credibility.

The job of press secretary is not easy, but it can be done well, as Tony Snow and Dana Perino have shown. You want a Democratic example, I always thought Mike McCurry did a good job — and with good cheer in a tough time. But I'll say one other thing, too. I think this genre of book is losing its cachet, and people are getting a little tired of the game which goes something like this: Get a high-level job, make your name and reputation, do an average job at it, then write a book after you leave that helps nobody but bolsters your own reputation at the expense of those without book contracts. It's one of the uglier things in Washington, and as I say, I think its days will soon be over. People are tired of it.

-- Seth Leibsohn

Labels: mcclellan, media bias, revisionist history