FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD - The Revenge of Geography - page 13

The really remarkable thing about Clinton's refusal to include the removal of this
villain [Slobodan Milosevic] among his war aims is that he himself inherited the
consequences of his predecessor's refusal to include the removal of another vil-
lain among his war aims. In 1991, half a million American soldiers were a few
hundred kilometers away from Saddam Hussein, and George Bush did not order
them to Baghdad. His generals feared casualties, and they had just concluded a
zero-defects war of their own. They, too, adverted to the “territorial integrity” of
Iraq, as if the misery that would result from the collapse of the state would be
commensurate with the misery that had already resulted, to the Kurds in the north
and to the Shia in the south, from the survival of the state. 20
It was as if the imaginary borders of Central Europe were limitless, extending unto
Mesopotamia. Things would turn out differently, of course. But in 2006, during the worst
of Iraq's sectarian carnage, following the collapse of the state, which may have rivaled the
violence that Saddam had inflicted on the country, Wieseltier had the grace to confess an
“anxiety about arrogance.” He admitted to having nothing useful to say despite his sup-
port of the war. He would not be among those supporters of the invasion who were toiling
strenuously in print to vindicate themselves. 21
I, too, supported the Iraq War, in print and as part of a group that urged the Bush admin-
istration to invade. 22 I had been impressed by the power of the American military in the
Balkans, and given that Saddam had murdered directly or indirectly more people than had
Milosevic, and was a strategic menace believed to possess weapons of mass destruction, it
seemed to me at the time that intervention was warranted. I was also a journalist who had
gotten too close to my story: reporting from Iraq in the 1980s, observing how much more
oppressive Saddam's Iraq was than Hafez al-Assad's Syria, I became intent on Saddam's
removal. It would later be alleged that a concern for Israel and a championing of its territ-
orial aggrandizement had motivated many of those in support of the war. 23 But my exper-
ience in dealing with neoconservatives and some liberals, too, during this time period was
that Bosnia and Kosovo mattered more than Israel did in their thinking. 24 The Balkan inter-
ventions, because they paid strategic dividends, appeared to justify the idealistic approach
to foreign policy. The 1995 intervention in Bosnia changed the debate from “Should NATO
Exist?” to “Should NATO Expand?” The 1999 war in Kosovo, as much as 9/11, allowed
for the eventual expansion of NATO to the Black Sea.
For quite a few idealists, Iraq was a continuation of the passions of the 1990s. It repres-
ented, however subconsciously, either the defeat of geography or the utter disregard of it,
dazzled as so many were with the power of the American military. The 1990s was a time
when West African countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, despite their violence, and
despite being institutionally far less developed than Iraq, were considered credible candid-