Peter Feaver sets out to debunk five “myths” about the Iraq war, but he gets off to a very bad start:
For my part, the myths that get thrown at me most often have to do with why the war happened in the first place. Here are five of the most pervasive myths:
1. The Bush administration went to war against Iraq because it thought (or claimed to think) Iraq had been behind the 9/11 attacks.
It would be interesting to know who has been “throwing” this claim at Feaver, since war opponents don’t make this argument. The Bush administration did promote false claims of Iraqi cooperation with Al Qaeda. These bogus claims ranged from the non-existent Prague meeting with Muhammad Atta to the extremely strained argument that Hussein must somehow be providing protection to Ansar al-Islam while it was based in Kurdish territory outside his control. Let’s not forget the story of old one-legged Zarqawi, who miraculously gained a new limb later on. Feaver even links to the interview in which Cheney refers to the Prague meeting that never happened, but he doesn’t address it directly. In the interview, Cheney said:
I’m not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can’t say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al-Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We’ve seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center [bold mine-DL]. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn’t he there, again, it’s the intelligence business.
Of course, this was nonsense. The administration did everything it could to create the false impression that there was a meaningful connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and then let the audience’s imagination do the rest. All the while, it avoided specifically making a direct link between Iraq and 9/11 because the administration knew perfectly well that there wasn’t one. Unfortunately, the people that do believe that Iraq was in some way responsible for 9/11 were and still are supporters of the war, and I suspect this false claim is a major part of the reason why they have supported it. During the pre-war debate, a large part of the public certainly got the wrong idea that Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In September 2002, a CBS/NYT poll found 51% agreeing that Hussein was “personally involved” in the 9/11 attacks. As late as April 2004, that figure was still 39%. Who do you suppose might have been responsible for encouraging that misunderstanding? What Feaver has done in this case, as he does in most of the rest of his post, is to state an absurd argument that no war opponent makes as if it were common claim made about the Iraq war. He then knocks down the strawman, and claims that this somehow contributes to a “more nuanced, less simplistic” understanding of the war.
Daniel Larison 
Fran Macadam 
James Canning 
HyperIon 
Myron Hudson 
Rob in CT 
Northern Observer 
gcochran 
Ken Hoop 
Johnny 
Rojo 
Mightypeon 
Ronan Fitzgerald 
The blogger does harm to his own credibility when anyone can click on the link, read Feaver’s essay, and discover a series of arguments which, “absurd” or not, are in fact commonly recited, and recited and recited and recited: esp. all of nos. 3 through 5: conspiracy and other odd theories; neoconservative capture of policy; “Bush lied, people died.”
Feaver’s No. 1, the only one the blogger specifically addresses, on Saddam-AQ “links,” seems almost impossible to discuss rationally or strategically, and any attempt to do so here will be complicated by Feaver’s odd phraseology. However, Feaver does go on to offer a clearer explication of the Bush Administration case such as it was and such as it attempted to present it, a partly speculative, partly strategic “linkage” different from but not exclusive of possible “operational linkages.” That the public polled in the mass does not administer the nuances with high precision and consistency seems an eternal characteristic of mass public opinion, so it is difficult to attribute particular artifacts of polling – i.e., widespread belief in the supposedly thoroughly debunked or disavowed “linkage” – strictly to Bush Admin PR.
Feaver’s second “myth” is in an odd way the most interesting one. The claim that “missionary democracy” really was the Bush or perhaps guiding neoconservative impulse all along was something more often heard from defenders of the war and especially of the occupation policy through the mid-2000s. The idea would be invoked against conspiracy-mongers and other war opponents who refused to grant any conceivable positive intentions to Bush et al. As an expressive of the positive ambition of the war, a goal supposedly worth fighting and sacrificing for, the democracy argument was reinforced during the Surge debates, as Petraeus COIN strategy was depicted as a basis for a just and durable post-conflict order in which liberal-democratic values would be adapted to the local terrain. I have lately heard the same arguments from pro-Islamist or anti-imperialists or anti-interventionists who opposed the Surge and the invasion on the same grounds – that is, because they oppose any attempted forcible democratization of the Islamic world. Mr. Larison often provides examples, generally as attacks on neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, and (vulgar) exceptionalism, of the arguments that Feaver seems to be isolating here, if in a slightly different language.