military error, the

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　Why did George W. Bush invade Iraq? What were the realmotives, the overarching policy decisions that drove events fromSeptember 11 until the war began?To a large extent, we still don’tknow. But by now we do know in some detail, as Thomas Powerscarefully explains in the essays collected here, how theadministration made its case for war, using faulty intelligence toargue that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction andposed a mounting threat to the Middle East. Once Iraq was occupiedand the weapons turned out not to exist, the case for war seemed todisappear as well. Bit by bit the evidence–the documents suggestingthat Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, thealuminum tubes that the United States claimed were meant foruranium enrichment, the Iraqi defector code-named Curveball whoclaimed Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs–has been exposedas unreliable, misinterpreted, “cherry-picked,” exaggerated, orjust fake.But as faulty as the intelligence was, it was always onlya pretext, a way of persuading Congress, America, and the world tosupport a war that President Bush had already decided to wage. Thereal question remains: Why did Bush insist on a war of choice,refusing to accept any solution short of an American occupation ofIraq? The answers Powers proposes to that question, which assessthe Iraq invasion as an insistence on responding to political andcultural conflicts with military action, suggest an overarchingfailure of American policy in the region that, as long as itremains insufficiently understood and publicly debated, will makeit difficult for any president to change course.No one is betterprepared than Powers to evaluate the way the Bush administrationused intelligence to make its case for war, used the CIA forpolitical ends, and used arguments of secrecy to advance both itsgeopolitical agenda and its claims for executive power. But beyondthe now-familiar stories of nonexistent WMDs, The Military Errorproposes a new, deeper analysis of the error of using militaryforce, which has succeeded primarily in generating opposition andincreasing resistance to American aims. America went into Iraq fullof bright hopes and confident ideas, but Powers argues that thoseideas, based on the ability of force to solve problems, defeatopponents, and make friends, were largely illusions. Suchillusions, as we learned at great cost in Vietnam, die hard, but wecan make decisions about our future role in Iraq only byunderstanding the errors that got us embroiled there in the firstplace.

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