When Did They Know?

I have had numerous discussions with friends about the origins of the war in Iraq where they argued that the Bush administration knew, without doubt, that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. A loose reading of Paul Pillar's article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs can lend some credence to this, though he does say that "there was indeed a broad consensus [in the intelligence community] that such programs existed."

(Parenthetically, Pillar's article gives an instructive description of the subtle ways that the analysis of data by the CIA was skewed by predelictions for policy of those at the top of the U.S. Government.)

My answer to my friends has included reference to Hans Blix's memoir, Disarming Iraq. Blix indicates that as late as early February 2003 he believed that his inspectors would find Iraq's WMD, despite their failure to turn up anything after months of trying.

Now, it appears that even Saddam's generals believed that they had them. The New York Times citing a classified Pentagon report, writes that:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

That was in December 2002.

In addition, an article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, based on what appears to be the same report, includes this footnote:

For many months after the fall of Baghdad, a number of senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe it possible that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability hidden away somewhere (although they adamantly insisted that they had no direct knowledge of WMD programs). Coalition interviewers discovered that this belief was based on the fact that Iraq had possessed and used WMD in the past and might need them again; on the plausibility of secret, compartmentalized WMD programs existing given how the Iraqi regime worked; and on the fact that so many Western governments believed such programs existed.

If senior Iraqi officials believed these weapons existed, it cannot be surprising that American officials, and American intelligence, believed the same. Was this a casus belli? That is a different question. In my view it was not.

As often happens when policy goes wrong, critics can be divided into those who believe those responsible were knaves, who did wrong purposefully, and those who believe they were fools, who did wrong out of ignorance or stupidity. The last word may be too strong--President Bush and his advisors are not stupid. But they were fools, not knaves.

Freedom is Not Enough

President Bush has often said that that freedom is a universal value, desired by everyone, made possible by democracy. He reiterated this recently, in January, when speaking to students and others at Kansas State University:

History has shown that democracies yield the peace. Europe is free, whole, and at peace because the nations are democratic. That wasn't always the case, obviously, in the 1900s. Two major wars were fought where a lot of Americans died, and yet systems and forms of government changed. And now Europe is completely different, in terms of security and peace. The Far East -- I just mentioned the Japanese example. And that's what the enemy understands, and that's why they're so brutal and relentless. They understand the march of peace will be contagious. Part of my decision-making process is my firm belief in the natural rights of men and women; my belief that deep in everybody's soul is the desire to live free. I believe there's an Almighty, and I believe the Almighty's great gift to each man and woman in this world is the desire to be free. This isn't America's gift to the world, it is a universal gift to the world, and people want to be free. (Applause.)

And if you believe that, and if you believe freedom yields the peace, it's important for the United States of America, with friends, to lead the cause of liberty.

This is a marvelous vision, one that many people share, and not just in the United States. Why, then, do people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere reject democracy, or at least do not embrace it? The answer to this question is a key to understanding what is happening in Iraq. It seems that when we "broke" Iraq we believed in the universality of this vision, that no sane person could fight against it.

There have been many ideological and religious arguments against democracy. Lenin and Hitler made theirs, which amounted to the need for a small group or leader, armed with a true understanding of the world, to take charge and foster change in the polity. The masses could not be trusted to act unguided. Before these 20th Century monsters, royalists made their own form of the argument. Long before that, Plato did much the same thing. Bin Laden and the jihadis, calling on the true followers of Muhammed, are the most recent bears of this tradition.

But the essence of the weakness of democracy in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Weimer Germany stems from something more basic than the somewhat abstract and convoluted thinking of Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Jihadis. People crave security. They want to exile fear. Where democracy is weak, fear runs rampant.

Democracy requires trust. As a citizen, you have to trust that the people you live and work with will adhere to democratic processes, that they will accept the limitations that democracy imposes. These limits have to do with the power of the state, which, following Weber, holds a monopoly on the use of force--it controls the army, the police, and other institutions that are licensed to use force.

But in Iraq and Afghanistan, that trust is absent. So is the monopoly on the use of force. People must rely on the means available to them and their neighbors to defend themselves.

Before the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the Sunni-dominated insurgency was the major apparent source of fear. The link between the insecurity the insurgency has fostered and the success of our democratic project in Iraq has been recognized by the United States. From all appearances, significant progress has been made in at least parts of Iraq in reducing the fear felt by the population. The rising totals of people goaing to the polls through 2005 is an indication of that. (Whether the progress has been sufficient is a different question.)

But the destruction of the mosque has clarifed the threats to democracy in Iraq. It is now clear that Iraqis have reason to fear each other. The insurgents, particularly Zarqawi's group, are bringing their murderous antipathy to the Shiites to the fore. Shiites have replied in kind. All are adding to memories from Iraqi history of brutality that have left suspicions, fears, that will not dissipate. Each group has given the others reasons to distrust it: Sunni massacres of Shiites in 1991 and throughout Saddam's regime; Sunni memories of Shiite insurgents under British rule; Kurdish experiences as targets of Arabs and Turks over a century and more. They all can declare a right to vengeance and exercise it.

What has become most clear is that each group is turning to its own to defend itself against the others. The Sunnis have insurgents. The Kurds have had their own militias for decades. Now the Shiites have the Mahdi Army and the like. In short, the Iraqi democracy has no monopoly of force, particularly as the army and police are formed of ethnic-based units, many of which seem to have more loyalty to their own kind than to the Iraqi state.

This is much like a communalist riff on Weimar Germany. In the 1920s, all large German political parties--nationalist, socialist, or communist--had its own group of thugs. The most renowned of these, of course, was the SA, the brownshirts. When economic security disappeared as the Depression deepened, the strength of these groups grew. Each group assaulted its enemies, with little interference from the republic. The Nazis, promising security, triumphed. Democracy, illegitimate, ineffective, died.

Of course, Iraq is not Germany. The conflicts now differ widely from the conflicts then. The legitimacy of the Iraqi government has not yet been fatally compromised. And an external power retains some capacity to influence the outcome. But the challenge is a difficult one. Each of the three sides must, somehow, engender trust in the other two. Trust is not liking. It is simply the belief that the other will abide by the rules of democratic government, that it will accept those limits.

The results of the violence that followed the destruction of the mosque are as yet unclear. It may have scared the sides into compromise. But it may also lead Iraqis to seek security provided by their own kind. This is a turning point for Iraq and the American enterprise there. The only thing certain is that the promise of democracy alone will not suffice.

Invasion of Privacy

Bruce Schneier has a column on the threats to privacy that the advance of computer technology is generating. The march of technology, he argues, "has resulted in the almost constant surveillance of everyone, with profound implications for our society and our freedoms." Therefore, he continues, we need laws to protect our privacy as strong as those of the Europeans. Can he be right? European law, particularly as issued by Brussels, has tended to produce economic stagnation (examine the economic growth rates of European countries compared to those of the United States). And few of us feel an immediate threat of persecution by our government or private enterprise. Yet threats exist, as Schneier points out, and we would be foolish not to consider them.

There are two drivers that are increasing the threats to our privacy. One, of course, represented by the spat over surveillance by the NSA, is security. The other is convenience. Most of us are willing to give up a part of our privacy if we can increase either one of these. The question is how much privacy are we willing we give up?

This problem is that this will change; we will give it up by degrees and find that the next bit is not so precious after all. One day, however, we'll find that we miss it. People are like this. You have only to look at what was shocking in popular entertainment just twenty years ago and what is perfectly acceptable now. Martin Niemöller found the same phenomenon in a different context:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Privacy seems destined to follow a similar path. Who would not allow our security agencies to listen in on people who seem to be allied to Al Qaeda? We value our own privacy, not theirs. And who does not give the information, hardly precious, that Amazon, Yahoo, Google, or a credit card company requests in exchange for easy access to the delights they dangle before us?

But once it's gone, how do we get it back? And when organizations or groups, governmental or private, use it to pursue interests contraposed to ours, will there be anyone left to speak for us?

Privacy is maintained through both custom and law. Would that custom alone would suffice. But it will not, or so it appears. We must, alas, rely on law instead to protect us. If we cannot, then we may find that a dystopia has become our own brave new world.