Page 5 of 10 THE WAR
OF THE IMAGINATION, Part 1 How a war
of fantasies happened By Mark
Danner
Thus the war of imagination draped
all the complications and contradictions of the
history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized
society in an ideologically driven vision of a
perfect future. Small wonder that its creators,
faced with grim reality, have been so loath to
part with it. Since the first thrilling night of
shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm
by the American television networks, the Iraq war
has had at least two histories, that of the
war
itself and that of the American perception of it.
As the months passed and the number of
attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two
histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for
most Americans, the war of imagination - built of
nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris
and administration pronouncements about "spreading
democracy" and "greetings with sweets and
flowers", and then about "dead-enders" and
"turning points" and finally about "staying the
course" and refusing "to cut and run" - began,
under the pressure of nearly 3,000 American dead
and perhaps a 100,000 or more dead Iraqis, to give
way to grim reality.
The election of
November 7 marks the moment when the war of
imagination decisively gave way to the war on the
ground and when officials throughout the American
government, not least the president himself, were
forced to recognize and acknowledge a reality that
much of the American public had discerned months
or years before. The ideological canopy now has
lifted. The study groups are at their work.
Americans have come to know what they do not know.
If confronted with that simple question the
smiling President Mahmud Ahmadinejad of Iran put
to Mike Wallace last August - "I ask you, sir,
what is the American Army doing inside Iraq?" -
how many Americans could offer a clear and
convincing answer?
As the war drags on and
alternatives fall away and American and Iraqi
deaths mount, we seem to know less and less,
certainly about "where we are going to end". Thus
we arrive at our present therapeutic moment - the
moment of "solutions", brought on by the
recognition, three-and-a-half years on, that we
have no idea how to "end" phase two. This is now a
matter for James A Baker's Iraq Study Group and
the military's "strategic review team" and the new
Democratic committee chairmen who will offer, to a
chastened president who admits he thought "we
would do all right" in the elections, the "new
ideas" he now professes to welcome. However
quickly the discussion now moves to the
geopolitical hydraulics, to weighing partition
against partial withdrawal against regional
conferences and contact groups and all the rest,
the truth is that none of these proposals, alone
or in combination, will end the war any time soon.
It bears noticing that Kennan himself,
having predicted that we will never know where we
are going to end in Iraq, lived to see disproved,
before his death at the age of 101 last March,
what even he, no innocent, had taken as a given:
that "you know where you begin". For as the war's
presumed ending - constructed from carefully
crafted images of triumph, of dictators' statues
cast down and presidents striding forcefully
across aircraft carrier decks - has flickered and
vanished, receding into the just-out-of-grasp
future ("a decision for the next president", the
pre-election Bush had said), the war's beginning
has likewise melted away, the original rationale
obscured in a darkening welter of shifting
intelligence, ideological controversy and
conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all
sides by the mounting dead.
Out of this
maelstrom, how does one fix now on "how we began"
in Iraq? One might do worse than the National
Security Presidential Directive entitled "Iraq:
Goals, Objectives and Strategy", the top-secret
statement of American purpose intended to guide
all the departments and agencies of the
government, signed by Bush on August 29, 2002:
US goal: Free Iraq in order to
eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,
their means of delivery and associated programs,
to prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment
and becoming a more dangerous threat to the
region and beyond.
End Iraqi threats to
its neighbors, to stop the Iraqi government's
tyrannizing of its own population, to cut Iraqi
links to and sponsorship of international
terrorism, to maintain Iraq's unity and
territorial integrity. And liberate the Iraqi
people from tyranny, and assist them in creating
a society based on moderation, pluralism and
democracy ....
Objectives: To conduct
policy in a fashion that minimizes the chance of
a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack
against the United States, US field forces, our
allies and friends. To minimize the danger of
regional instabilities. To deter Iran and Syria
from helping Iraq. And to minimize disruption in
international oil markets."
This
secret document, disclosed by Woodward, is
presumably the plainest, least ideological
statement of what American officials thought the
country they led would be trying to achieve in the
coming war. The words have now a sad and antique
air, as if scrawled on yellowed parchment and
decipherable only by a
