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[book post] To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before:
There’s this one very Charismatic Guy. He has a lot of credibility in his industry, and in the companies he’s worked for: because he’s had some past successes, or because he knows people, or he got lucky. But people listen to Charismatic Guy.
Charismatic Guy has this weird pet project. He has a ~vision~. He knows This One Weird Trick for transforming his whole field, and he just needs like a ton of headcount and money and time, but seriously guys, listen to me, it’s gonna be so awesome.
The C-suite, they listen and smile indulgently, and maybe even give him a little R&D project, as a treat. But they’re not gonna buy in to this dude’s vision. Everyone knows it’s a bit tenuous, a bit silly, a bit out there.
But then something happens. Something big. Something that shakes the company’s confidence to its core. Maybe a competitor put out a product that is way better than anything the company can do, and the company thinks its days are numbered. Maybe the company’s terrified they’re about to miss out on the next big market sector. The company is like, oh shit, we’ve got to do something. We cannot lose here.
And Charismatic Guy, he’s had this agenda for a long time. And, in fairness, the entire company’s putatively had this agenda for a while. Like, Charismatic Guy’s project is tangentially related to some goals the company set five years ago.
Charismatic Guy says, I can do this. Charismatic Guy says, trust me.
People who actually know Charismatic Guy think, well, this dude’s obviously full of shit. This dude’s pet project has nothing to do with the crisis at hand; this dude’s pet project is exactly the wrong way to handle this crisis.
But the C-suite doesn’t ask the right questions. They listen too much to Charismatic guy. They don’t know what else to do and this option is right here. Or maybe they’re just criminally incurious. They buy into Charismatic Guy’s mission, shut down all dissent, and it’s Full Steam Ahead on this quixotic quest for the next n years.
Okay. I’ve just told the story of how Google+ happened. I’ve also told the story of, like, a billionty similar scenarios that happen in bigtech and academia all the time. If you’ve worked in any large-ish company, you have probably seen this scenario play out, personally.
What happened when your company did it? A fucking waste of time and resources, probably. Maybe the project eventually got shitcanned, maybe it limped along for years and years until the resources quietly dried up, something like that.
What happens when the US government does it? Well. Read this book and find out.
It’s more complicated than just Charismatic Guy, of course; this is not the lazy-yet-memetic narrative of “Cheney started a war for oil” that lefties love to quote for a quick dunk. The failures of the system are myriad, and you appreciate how complicated it is to run an apparatus as large as the federal government—but this isn’t apologia, either. Those failures were not insurmountable, and multiple times I bashed my head against the book because Bush was just so, so willfully incurious, and just so willing to believe whatever information fit his preexisting biases.
Let’s get into specifics:
* Paul Wolfowitz isn’t the only dude who Had It Coming for Iraq, but he’s one of the earliest and most earnest. It’s borne out of some real feeling—he was in Bush Senior’s administration, and he had hoped after the Gulf War, rebels within Iraq would overthrow Saddam. When they were instead brutally gunned down, he tortured himself with “could the US have saved them? could we have offered more support?” musings.
Initially it looks like he’ll be facing an uphill battle for his “overthrow Saddam” plan. When he asks at a Camp David retreat, a few days after 9/11, “could Saddam be involved?”, apparently most people gave him a “wtf?” look—someone mentioned that it was like asking “could Belgium be involved?”, just as absurd.
Bush tables that discussion—but comes to Wolfowitz later, asking what he thinks, what he knows.
Still, most people know Iraq’s not involved, most people think this is dumb. But Wolfowitz and some of his clique are noisy and determined. The Iraq skeptics eventually convene a weekly committee to discuss “possible solutions” in Iraq—apparently thinking, look, this committee will get Wolfowitz off our backs, it’ll never go anywhere, we’ll just isolate them in this little corner where they can play pretend.
But uh, once a committee exists, it tends to gather a momentum all its own, as anyone who’s seen this play out in a big company knows. Uhoh uhoh uhoh—
That’s not the only reason sentiment shifts and then spirals, but it’s one of the more memorable ones.
* Even if you’re sympathetic to the president feeling like he needs to do Something (an understandably big “if”)—even if you feel like The President Must Do Something, it rankles to see how many other, less destructive opportunities for Something come up and are ignored, because they don’t feel flashy or big or taking-down-Saddam-and-spreading-liberty enough. In particular, in mid-2002, the CIA tracks down a pretty major terrorist cell’s base of operations in northern Iraq, and the CIA’s like “hey, if you in fact want to do War On Terror, we could send in some special forces to take these dudes out, they definitely suck and definitely want to hurt Americans.” The response is something like... “well more terrorist will just pop up, but if we invade Iraq then we eliminate terrorism in the area for good.” Me: headdesk.
* (It’s even more infuriating given Saddam’s own sensibilities. Apparently Saddam ran an aggressively secular government and hated Islamists; there’s good evidence that he actually wanted to pal up with the US and take out radical Islamic terrorist cells in the region.)
* One of Bush’s biggest failings is a strange preference for consensus. If there was a disagreement in a department, or a disagreement between departments, he didn’t want to watch them argue in front of him for a few hours. He wanted to come to the meeting with their disagreements already resolved.
As a result, he gets a bunch of mealy-mouthed “well there’s some evidence of WMD but we’re not sure” reports, rather than the more accurate descriptor of “this one working group in a weird corner of the DoD thinks there’s WMD he’s ready to use, but literally the entire CIA is extremely skeptical, and even if he had WMD why tf would he use it” report he could’ve gotten. The former gives you a vague impression of an ominous threat! The latter tells you probably one agency is right and the other is wrong! This is a big difference! Let your people talk to you ffs.
* “did they teach him his management techniques at that fancy Harvard Business School” snark snark, insert my obligatory mean-spirited potshots at The MBA-Industrial Complex here
* I oscillated between pitying and loathing Powell throughout this. He thought the war was a dumb idea but was too chickenshit to say so, basically. He wasn’t in the best position to catch Bush’s ear—Bush obviously liked Cheney and Rumsfeld more, and in meetings where Powell voiced skepticism he got (often brutally) shut down. But there were a few key moments where Bush asked his advice, when Powell had a chance to really push back—and in one such key moment, instead of saying “don’t go to war,” Powell’s advice was, “go to the UN first.” (Cue me tearing all my hair out.)
* The CIA director is also pretty chickenshit, and damn willing to throw his own dudes under the bus. Again, the director was in a difficult position—the administration reacted poorly to reports that went against their preferred narrative, and responded with adulation for reports that did fit the narrative—but, god, dude could’ve stuck to his guns, instead of just letting the CIA slowly drift into Team “Provide Misleading Evidence Without Context To Construct A Case Of War, Like Fuck It Just Do Anything, Please Don’t Ignore Me Like The Clintons Did.”
* Donald Rumsfeld sounds like such a micromanaging power-tripping asshole of a boss god fuck that guy so hard
* In the book’s final chapter, which covers “what happened when the war actually started,” I screamed aloud at Rumsfeld’s staggeringly dumbass plan of “we’re disbanding the entire Iraq army effective immediately, no alternative employment offered, gg good luck y’all.” Cool cool cool, hundreds of thousands of twentysomething dudes with military training just became unemployed in a shitcanned-due-to-war economy. The fuck did these assholes in the DoD think was going to happen? You want to get ISIS? Well, uh. That is. That is how you get ISIS.
...and god, there’s so much more that I don’t have the room to cover here, haha. (Ahmed Chalabi is the most infuriating conman of the century; the Swedish head of the UN weapons inspection team is such a hard-nosed stick-to-your-guns dude and I love him, too bad no one paid attention to him; the magnitude of Bush’s incuriosity really cannot be overstated; there’s a chapter on how basically everyone in Congress just rolled over instead of asking real questions; there’s a chapter on like half the press core just rolled over instead of asking real questions, and those journalists that did ask real questions tended not to work for the big-name newspapers, because big-name newsrooms tended to stifle internal dissent, so as to retain their special press access to the bigwigs.... Everyone Here Sucks, basically.)
I picked up this book mostly on impulse—as someone who was alive during all this, but deep in rural red-state America, and also tweenaged, and thus pretty fuckin’ clueless as to what was going on, I’ve been lowkey interested in a narrative that actually lays it all out in an accessible way. Hearing a brief interview with the author sold me on it. I didn’t actually expect to read the whole thing, and didn’t expect it to be as engrossing as it was—save for some repetitious bits near the middle, it often read like a page-turner.
I’m not super well-read on the subject and thus can’t compare it to other narratives of “why the fuck did the US invade Iraq” again, but this seemed like a mighty good one.
There’s this one very Charismatic Guy. He has a lot of credibility in his industry, and in the companies he’s worked for: because he’s had some past successes, or because he knows people, or he got lucky. But people listen to Charismatic Guy.
Charismatic Guy has this weird pet project. He has a ~vision~. He knows This One Weird Trick for transforming his whole field, and he just needs like a ton of headcount and money and time, but seriously guys, listen to me, it’s gonna be so awesome.
The C-suite, they listen and smile indulgently, and maybe even give him a little R&D project, as a treat. But they’re not gonna buy in to this dude’s vision. Everyone knows it’s a bit tenuous, a bit silly, a bit out there.
But then something happens. Something big. Something that shakes the company’s confidence to its core. Maybe a competitor put out a product that is way better than anything the company can do, and the company thinks its days are numbered. Maybe the company’s terrified they’re about to miss out on the next big market sector. The company is like, oh shit, we’ve got to do something. We cannot lose here.
And Charismatic Guy, he’s had this agenda for a long time. And, in fairness, the entire company’s putatively had this agenda for a while. Like, Charismatic Guy’s project is tangentially related to some goals the company set five years ago.
Charismatic Guy says, I can do this. Charismatic Guy says, trust me.
People who actually know Charismatic Guy think, well, this dude’s obviously full of shit. This dude’s pet project has nothing to do with the crisis at hand; this dude’s pet project is exactly the wrong way to handle this crisis.
But the C-suite doesn’t ask the right questions. They listen too much to Charismatic guy. They don’t know what else to do and this option is right here. Or maybe they’re just criminally incurious. They buy into Charismatic Guy’s mission, shut down all dissent, and it’s Full Steam Ahead on this quixotic quest for the next n years.
Okay. I’ve just told the story of how Google+ happened. I’ve also told the story of, like, a billionty similar scenarios that happen in bigtech and academia all the time. If you’ve worked in any large-ish company, you have probably seen this scenario play out, personally.
What happened when your company did it? A fucking waste of time and resources, probably. Maybe the project eventually got shitcanned, maybe it limped along for years and years until the resources quietly dried up, something like that.
What happens when the US government does it? Well. Read this book and find out.
It’s more complicated than just Charismatic Guy, of course; this is not the lazy-yet-memetic narrative of “Cheney started a war for oil” that lefties love to quote for a quick dunk. The failures of the system are myriad, and you appreciate how complicated it is to run an apparatus as large as the federal government—but this isn’t apologia, either. Those failures were not insurmountable, and multiple times I bashed my head against the book because Bush was just so, so willfully incurious, and just so willing to believe whatever information fit his preexisting biases.
Let’s get into specifics:
* Paul Wolfowitz isn’t the only dude who Had It Coming for Iraq, but he’s one of the earliest and most earnest. It’s borne out of some real feeling—he was in Bush Senior’s administration, and he had hoped after the Gulf War, rebels within Iraq would overthrow Saddam. When they were instead brutally gunned down, he tortured himself with “could the US have saved them? could we have offered more support?” musings.
Initially it looks like he’ll be facing an uphill battle for his “overthrow Saddam” plan. When he asks at a Camp David retreat, a few days after 9/11, “could Saddam be involved?”, apparently most people gave him a “wtf?” look—someone mentioned that it was like asking “could Belgium be involved?”, just as absurd.
Bush tables that discussion—but comes to Wolfowitz later, asking what he thinks, what he knows.
Still, most people know Iraq’s not involved, most people think this is dumb. But Wolfowitz and some of his clique are noisy and determined. The Iraq skeptics eventually convene a weekly committee to discuss “possible solutions” in Iraq—apparently thinking, look, this committee will get Wolfowitz off our backs, it’ll never go anywhere, we’ll just isolate them in this little corner where they can play pretend.
But uh, once a committee exists, it tends to gather a momentum all its own, as anyone who’s seen this play out in a big company knows. Uhoh uhoh uhoh—
That’s not the only reason sentiment shifts and then spirals, but it’s one of the more memorable ones.
* Even if you’re sympathetic to the president feeling like he needs to do Something (an understandably big “if”)—even if you feel like The President Must Do Something, it rankles to see how many other, less destructive opportunities for Something come up and are ignored, because they don’t feel flashy or big or taking-down-Saddam-and-spreading-liberty enough. In particular, in mid-2002, the CIA tracks down a pretty major terrorist cell’s base of operations in northern Iraq, and the CIA’s like “hey, if you in fact want to do War On Terror, we could send in some special forces to take these dudes out, they definitely suck and definitely want to hurt Americans.” The response is something like... “well more terrorist will just pop up, but if we invade Iraq then we eliminate terrorism in the area for good.” Me: headdesk.
* (It’s even more infuriating given Saddam’s own sensibilities. Apparently Saddam ran an aggressively secular government and hated Islamists; there’s good evidence that he actually wanted to pal up with the US and take out radical Islamic terrorist cells in the region.)
* One of Bush’s biggest failings is a strange preference for consensus. If there was a disagreement in a department, or a disagreement between departments, he didn’t want to watch them argue in front of him for a few hours. He wanted to come to the meeting with their disagreements already resolved.
As a result, he gets a bunch of mealy-mouthed “well there’s some evidence of WMD but we’re not sure” reports, rather than the more accurate descriptor of “this one working group in a weird corner of the DoD thinks there’s WMD he’s ready to use, but literally the entire CIA is extremely skeptical, and even if he had WMD why tf would he use it” report he could’ve gotten. The former gives you a vague impression of an ominous threat! The latter tells you probably one agency is right and the other is wrong! This is a big difference! Let your people talk to you ffs.
* “did they teach him his management techniques at that fancy Harvard Business School” snark snark, insert my obligatory mean-spirited potshots at The MBA-Industrial Complex here
* I oscillated between pitying and loathing Powell throughout this. He thought the war was a dumb idea but was too chickenshit to say so, basically. He wasn’t in the best position to catch Bush’s ear—Bush obviously liked Cheney and Rumsfeld more, and in meetings where Powell voiced skepticism he got (often brutally) shut down. But there were a few key moments where Bush asked his advice, when Powell had a chance to really push back—and in one such key moment, instead of saying “don’t go to war,” Powell’s advice was, “go to the UN first.” (Cue me tearing all my hair out.)
* The CIA director is also pretty chickenshit, and damn willing to throw his own dudes under the bus. Again, the director was in a difficult position—the administration reacted poorly to reports that went against their preferred narrative, and responded with adulation for reports that did fit the narrative—but, god, dude could’ve stuck to his guns, instead of just letting the CIA slowly drift into Team “Provide Misleading Evidence Without Context To Construct A Case Of War, Like Fuck It Just Do Anything, Please Don’t Ignore Me Like The Clintons Did.”
* Donald Rumsfeld sounds like such a micromanaging power-tripping asshole of a boss god fuck that guy so hard
* In the book’s final chapter, which covers “what happened when the war actually started,” I screamed aloud at Rumsfeld’s staggeringly dumbass plan of “we’re disbanding the entire Iraq army effective immediately, no alternative employment offered, gg good luck y’all.” Cool cool cool, hundreds of thousands of twentysomething dudes with military training just became unemployed in a shitcanned-due-to-war economy. The fuck did these assholes in the DoD think was going to happen? You want to get ISIS? Well, uh. That is. That is how you get ISIS.
...and god, there’s so much more that I don’t have the room to cover here, haha. (Ahmed Chalabi is the most infuriating conman of the century; the Swedish head of the UN weapons inspection team is such a hard-nosed stick-to-your-guns dude and I love him, too bad no one paid attention to him; the magnitude of Bush’s incuriosity really cannot be overstated; there’s a chapter on how basically everyone in Congress just rolled over instead of asking real questions; there’s a chapter on like half the press core just rolled over instead of asking real questions, and those journalists that did ask real questions tended not to work for the big-name newspapers, because big-name newsrooms tended to stifle internal dissent, so as to retain their special press access to the bigwigs.... Everyone Here Sucks, basically.)
I picked up this book mostly on impulse—as someone who was alive during all this, but deep in rural red-state America, and also tweenaged, and thus pretty fuckin’ clueless as to what was going on, I’ve been lowkey interested in a narrative that actually lays it all out in an accessible way. Hearing a brief interview with the author sold me on it. I didn’t actually expect to read the whole thing, and didn’t expect it to be as engrossing as it was—save for some repetitious bits near the middle, it often read like a page-turner.
I’m not super well-read on the subject and thus can’t compare it to other narratives of “why the fuck did the US invade Iraq” again, but this seemed like a mighty good one.