Defining Hubris Within the Case for War Against Iraq

The collaborated book entitled, Hubris, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, is a perfect modern example of fatal pride; the Neoconservative faction had conjected a case for war and regime change in Iraq almost a decade before consolidating an administration which would carry their manifesto through a proclaimed new age of terrorism.

If the intelligence gathered on an new adversary, which had successfully drawn blood on American soil for the first time since the Civil War, did not support an outdated ideology which anticipated nation-state warfare within the Middle East, particularly Iraq, then many prominent Neoconservative figures within the Bush Administration would engage in selective cognition in order to lead the United States to war against a secular, Pan-Arabic despot to avenge an attack carried out by Pan-Islamic extremists on September 11, 2001.

The tragic irony behind the foreign policy of the Bush administration began with a political analyst named Laurie Mylroie. Described in pages 68-69, Ms. Mylroie once advocated for American support of Saddam Hussein in the belief that he was the bastion of hope for the eventual Pro-American Democratization within the Middle East, even after the Reagan Administration condemned his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in his Anfal campaign in 1987. But Saddam's preemptive invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had drastically changed Ms. Mylroie's assessment of Mr. Hussein, from allied hero to the most sinister and dangerous, anti-American mastermind the world has ever seen.

Osama Bin Laden had directed his guerilla-style, Qutbist jihad against the United States, for reasons of establishing a military presence of non-believers in the holy lands of Saudia Arabia, by involving himself with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Evidence, described in page 70, had surfaced that Iraqi security forces had placed Abdul Rahman Yasin, a minor player in the bombing plot, under house arrest shortly after, and Ms. Mylroie proclaimed this as proof that Saddam Hussein was hell-bent on revenge.

Throughout Chapter 4, One Strange Theory, evidence gathered by non-partisan intelligence agencies suggested that every subsequent terrorist plot against the United States, successful or not, from 1993 to September 11, had been planned and financially backed by ragtag Islamic factions, like Al Qaeda, numbering in only a few thousand members, with no state-sponsorship.

However, Ms. Malroie, now hearkened to by Paul Wolfowitz, could not accept that such stratagems could be employed without strong governmental benefactors. Their conclusion: Saddam. Already, the assumption that intelligence reports garnered under the Clinton Administration were inaccurate had long been established before Bush administrative officials like Donald Rumsfeld held CIA operatives in contempt for drawing similar conclusions.

Within hours after the 9/11 attacks, both the FBI and the CIA gathered evidence to determine Al Qaeda's involvement under Osama Bin Laden's leadership, but Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney were not satisfied with their assessments. Since new evidence did not support older assumptions of terrorist politics theorized by Malroie, their apparent conclusion was that the current group of intelligence operatives were too incompetent to dig deep enough to unravel an Islamic coalition where Hussein served as an intermediary.

Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for George W. Bush (2001 - 2005), was hired to head a new intelligence unit to prove a connection between Saddam and Osama. Details within Chapter 6, The Secret Diggers, describes Mr. Feith's methodology that completely opposed orthodox researching: any bit of information, no matter how erroneous, that supports the original assumption will be deemed credible; likewise, all contrary data will be excluded and discarded.

Feith's justification for his outwardly biased pursuit, described in pages 106-107, was that since Osama and Saddam were in cahoots to wage war against the United States, both would have purposely covered their tracks to prevent such partnership from surfacing, thus no evidence. Their slogan: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Even before UN investigations into possible WMD storage and manufacturing in Iraq were to take place under Hans Blix's authority, President Bush had already intended for war; The dream of an American influence for democracy within the Middle East was too magnanimous of a goal to allow international "red tape" to stop it, and it was already two years ago when CIA Agent John Maguire had assessed that Iraq's infrastructure was barely holding. But what were the official plans for Iraq invasion and aftermath security?

Events described in Chapter 11, Best-Laid Plans, portrayed a conflict of opinion between the combat-experienced Army officials and civilian defense administrators in regards to the greatest military challenges facing American invasion forces in Iraq.

General Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff, had suggested a military campaign of “several hundred thousand” soldiers were necessary for postwar occupation. Lieutenant General Richard Cody, the Army deputy chief of staff for operations and plans, proposed a study under the efforts of the Strategic Studies Institute. Their conclusion was that Saddam's republican guard were the least of their worries in a nation toiled with infighting amongst religious and racial factions. Instability was so feared that postwar occupation was theorized to require vast quantities of resources and several years, if not more, to implement them. Even worse, the longer such an occupation force stays in the region, although quite necessary to rebuild, would harness further resentment from civilians towards its foreign occupiers.

Both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had undermined both Shinseki's speculation and Cody's report by suggesting that a majority of Iraq civilians, weary of Saddam's rule, would embrace any means to overthrow him. Thinking in terms of national boundaries which artificially united the Iraqi people rather than subcultural irreconciliations that strained them, Rumsfeld estimated a force of 75,000 troops would suffice and Wolfowitz theorized a timeline of six months at most. As for the war costs, revenues from Iraqi oil will pay for this, according to Wolfowitz. It never quite donned on him that an inadequate infrastructure would prevent a properly functioning pipeline.

To understand the underlining hubris behind the Bush Administration's case for war against Saddam in reprisal to attacks by Bin Laden, one must understand that the majority of officials within the Bush Administration were also chartered members of the Project for a New American Century. Within their Statement of Principles, members urged for a return to “Reaganite policy of military strength” for reasons of “preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

An American Empire built on military dominance was the goal of Reaganite policy against an equally empirical adversary, the Soviet Union. However, with the Soviet collapse came a power vacuum and a majority of American citizens less interested in global presence during the Clinton years. The world was changing from a conflict between two Cold War superpowers to a cluster of small cultural insurgent organizations, with no national ties, targeting those in favor of secular, economic globalization policies. There is no effective arms race to be found here.

What made America a superpower was the conquering of two fascist nation states, Germany and Japan, during WWII, as well as a half century of stalemating with the Soviet Union. I theorize that the neoconservative's myopic obsession with Hussein was some unconscious desperation to acquire their next great boogyman in order to continue their legendary, and vastly profitable, military build-up.