Supporting the Iraq War and the Decision President Bush Did Not Make | Big Think

Supporting the Iraq War and the Decision President Bush Did Not Make

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Frum explains why he supported the war and what George W. Bush did wrong.

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David Frum:

David Frum is the author of five books, including two New York Times bestsellers: THE RIGHT MAN: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (2003), and co-author with Richard Perle of AN END TO EVIL: What's Next in the War on Terror (2004).

Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writes a daily column for National Review Online. He contributes frequently to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Great Britain's Daily Telegraph and Canada's National Post. He appears regularly on CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. In 2001-2002, David Frum served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.

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TRANSCRIPT:

David Frum: I wasn't in support of the way it was done the first time around. I was on the losing side of a lot of bureaucratic battles. I'm not important enough to be on any side, but my point of view was on the losing side of important bureaucratic battles in 2002 and 2003.

I think a big part of what went wrong in Iraq was the original conception was that the United States would race into Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein, install a provisional government made up of Iraqis and get out as rapidly as possible. We then had a terrible internal argument inside the United States government where the people who were envisioned as that provisional government were vetoed. Now maybe that was a good decision; maybe it was a bad decision. But it meant that we raced into Iraq with no idea, with no plan for what was to come next; and because there never was an alternative to a provisional government idea.

Let me start this all over again because it's too complicated.

During the debate over the Iraq war, to simplify a little, there were two competing ideas in the United States government about how to do Iraq. One idea, broadly, says Donald Rumsfeld, was, "This is not a war, it's a raid. What we're going to do, is we've got 70,000 troops, race them up the Tigris and the Euphrates, capture or kill Saddam Hussein, install a provisional government and then get out, and wish them well."

The other view, which coalesced around Colin Powell, was that first view is completely irresponsible: "It can never work that way. What we need to do is we need to accept that if we go into Iraq, the provisional people are no good, they are tainted in all kinds of way. We are going to have to do a long slow process of developing Iraqi institutions. That will take five years, maybe 10. And that means we're going to need a massive occupying army, which means 70,000 won't do it, we need 350,000; we need to stay a decade."

Now, these were two starkly different visions of how to proceed. And who knows which one was the right one. We ended up melding them together in an especially disastrous way, which is we did Donald Rumsfeld's war and Colin Powell's peace, because we were sending 70,000 people racing up-- I think in the end it was 130,000-- racing up the Tigris and the Euphrates and then we are not installing a provisional government, then we are going to do an occupation that is going to last five or 10 years while we try to build all sorts of Iraqi institutions.

Now, obviously that was a formula for failure and it was a formula for failure because we put together two parts of absolutely predictability that would not work. And when I look back on the way the decision making was done, the great tragedy was that there should have been a moment, and there are institutions in the government to force this, if somebody had said, "Mr. President [George W. Bush], the war plan and the peace plan do not add up together, they won't work. You have to either have a peace plan that follows your war plan, or a war plan that is consistent with your peace plan, or you have to forget the whole thing."

So here's what we end up doing, we send 130,000 troops racing up river. We do seize Baghdad and then we stop and we ask each other what happens now. And there's a week of uncertainty and at the end of the week the president calls Paul Bremmer and says, "I'd like you to be my pro-counsel in Baghdad."

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