The Triumph of Strategery

Gary Kamiya has a review in Salon of the new book by the NYT's invaluable Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Here's the rub:

Of course, Rich is hardly the first to anatomize the decline of America's news culture. Far more compelling -- and originally argued -- is his insight into the real reason Bush went to war in Iraq. His answer to this endlessly debated question, and his related excursus on the personality of Bush himself, may be the single most lucid and convincing one I've ever read. Although it is almost painfully obvious, and wins the Occam's Razor test of being the simplest, it is put forward considerably less often than more ideological theories -- whether about controlling oil, supporting Israel, establishing American hegemony, or one-upping his father.

Perhaps this is because Americans, in their innocence, cannot accept that any president would deliberately launch a major war simply to win the midterm elections. Yet Rich makes a powerful argument that that is the case.

Playing the key role, not surprisingly, is Karl Rove. "To track down Rove's role, it's necessary to flash back to January 2002," Rich writes. The Afghanistan war had been a success. "In a triumphalist speech to the Republican National Committee, Rove for the first time openly advanced the idea that the war on terror was the path to victory for that November's midterm elections." Rove decided Bush needed to be a "war president." The problem, however, was that Afghanistan was fading from American minds, Osama bin Laden had escaped, and the secret, unglamorous -- and actually effective -- approach America was taking to fighting terror wasn't a political winner. "How do you run as a vainglorious 'war president' if the war looks as if it's winding down and the number one evildoer has escaped?"

The answer: Wag the dog. Attack Iraq.

Thank you. Someone finally said it. Aside from me, of course. I've been saying this for three years, right down to making Karl Rove the pivot-point in the story. Frankly, chalking the Iraq War up to a midterm election strategy is the only way to make sense of the war's timing. Why did Bush have to force out the inspectors before they were finished? Why did he have to shortcircuit diplomacy at the UN or with NATO? Why did he purposely frame the debate in such a way as to deliberately alienate Democratic support? Electoral politics. Plain and simple. There was no crisis on the ground in Iraq. The sanctions were holding, and the no-fly zones had Saddam hemmed in militarily so that he could no longer threaten either his neighbors or his dissident regions, Kurds in the north and Shi'a in the south.

From the start, the most conspicuous feature of this war was its manufactured urgency. Columnists like David Broder, wallowing in their weathered naivete, can't begin to understand the deep and abiding anger the Bush administration has provoked, even among traditional moderates. It's all so unseemly! But if you understand this war for what it is, it is truly unprecedented. Has America ever fought a war solely for the purpose of creating a long-term electoral realignment? And for what? High end tax cuts? Even if we had won this war in the "cakewalk" the Bushies imagined, it would have been a moral disaster. Frank Rich begins to set the public record straight.