Every essential element and premise of American hegemonic leadership of the free world was invested in the Iraq mission.

Killing it in popular and political perception is a crippling blow to the exercise of American global leadership by making the essential elements and premises taboo. Stigmatized. This is why opponents of the particular foreign policy type – from the Left and Right – are dedicated to upholding the false narrative on the Iraq mission and enforcing the mission’s failure.

The US intervention in WW2 and Korea spawned a US foreign policy course for the next era. The Iraq mission could have done that, too. It was meant to do that in Bush’s strategic vision as well as solve the proximate Saddam problem.

The enemy with our own isolationists learn from our history, too, and they were going to stop a revitalized second era of American hegemonic leadership from taking root in Iraq.

They made 2+2=5. The Saddam problem was headline, frontpage news for over a decade. Clinton officials defined Saddam a “clear and present danger” that required regime change to solve. Yet overnight, it was like Bush invented the Saddam problem from whole cloth as a ‘neocon’ plot with those same, now ex-Clinton officials leading the ‘fraud’ charge.

http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/EOP/NSC/html/nsc-11.html

December 19, 1998 President Clinton speaks to the role of American and British troops fighting to generate Iraqi compliance with UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. The President announces that U.S. policy toward Iraq would seek the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.

December 16, 1998 President Clinton orders air-strikes against Iraq in response to Iraq’s lack of compliance with UN inspectors, as outlined in UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler’s report to the UN Secretary General. President Clinton describes Iraqi actions as a failure in their “last chance” to prove willingness to comply.

http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/html/19981216-3611.html

The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world. The best way to end that threat once and for all is with the new Iraqi government, a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people.
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Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0307/22/lkl.00.html

I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don’t cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions. I mean, we’re all more sensitive to any possible stocks of chemical and biological weapons. … it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/19/clinton.iraq/

Noting that Bush had to be “reeling” in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton said Bush’s first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining “chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material.”

“That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for,” Clinton said in reference to Iraq and the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.

“So I thought the president had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, ‘Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.’ You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks,” Clinton said.

If they could spin the Iraq mission, they can spin anything. The activist game is the only social-political game there is.

I didn’t believe it would just happen. I thought we would actually occupy Iraq, for a longer time, and with more control. Otherwise it didn’t make sense. You’re either in or out.

The thing I underestimated was the success of the relentless propaganda drive of the left and the MSM and the Democrats to put a negative spin on the “occupation” part of the war. I knew they would try, but I didn’t think their propaganda would work as well as it did.

If they hadn’t been so relentless and extreme in their negativity and distortions, I do not think the American people would have turned. Most people just read headlines, etc. (if that), and are fairly susceptible to propaganda.

2001-2008: Our friends trusted us and our enemies feared us.

2009-2016: Our friends neither trust us nor believe us. Our enemies(and potential enemies)are laughing, testing, pushing and time & again proving to themselves that we’ve become Far Weaker and irresolute.

Neville Chamberlain is high-fiving you, Barack. Winston Churchill and so many others are shaking their heads in sadness and disbelief. Stalin is saying,”Where was this fool when we needed him, Comrades?”

I didn’t posit it that way, because I had a soldier’s view and an activist’s insight as well.

Choice is an element, but the superseding would be through contest.

The Soviet system falling apart isn’t the norm. Normally, the activist game is the only social-political game there is, and it’s a competition where violence is a difference of degree, not kind.

I agree that commitment is a required element in activism. You only need to look at the cultish fanaticism of leftists.

However, I disagree that a “majority of Americans were never willing to make such a commitment”.

In the activist game, consent of the people is manufactured. Same as for the Founders as for now. We’re not talking about a majority of aggregated individual opinion. We’re talking about consent as the majority view of the general will.

Remember, most Americans have been untouched directly by the Iraq mission or even the War on Terror in general.

It’s engaged as a social phenomenon, and activism is sociology weaponized.

Reifying that social commitment is also a function of the activist method.

We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States. Once they were overthrown, what else were we going to do? No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren’t about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.

If we take a step back to the original problem of Saddam and agree that, one, the containment was broken (see the Duelfer Report), two, freeing a noncompliant, unreconstructed Saddam was out of the question, three, Saddam has just failed his last-chance compliance test despite the credible threat of regime change, and four, in addition to the establish threat of Saddam as a “clear and present danger” (Clinton) before 9/11, the intel indicates he’s reconstituting (which the Duelfer Report corroborated he was, just not in the same way indicated by the pre-war intel) . . .

. . . Saddam just failed to prove compliance with UNMOVIC. Now what?

We can’t return to a toxic ‘containment’ that’s already broken.

For 12 years, we’ve deemed that a re/armed Saddam was intolerable. More so after 9/11, we can’t free a noncompliant, unreconstructed Saddam who, if anything, has grown worse since 1991. (Or can we? How?)

It’s Spring 2003 and Saddam just our called our bluff. A basic problem needs to be solved.

Now what?

prior to the invasion of Iraq, Bush, the neocons and myself included, posited that the individual’s ‘universal aspiration for self-determination’ would supersede any cultural imperative.

We were wrong.

reify: verb, to make (something abstract) more concrete or real.

The activist method’s ability to make democracy and minority rights more concrete or real does not confer dominance. Certainly over generations of commitment, such activity can lead to conversions to the cause but the majority of Americans were never willing to make such a commitment and Bush, the neocons and myself never gave that reality proper consideration.

What could have been, if only… is disconnection from the reality of what is…