Friday, November 07, 2003

If the historian Barbara Tuchman were alive, she would be compelled by our misadventure in Iraq to update "The March of Folly: Troy to Vietnam," her searing account of national blunders and missed opportunities through history.

In her 1984 book, Tuchman carefully outlined four historic miscalculations and the consequences of failing to explore alternatives to military and ideological conflict.

As the two-time Pulitzer-winning historian made clear, it was arrogance that led to the siege of semi-mythical Troy, a nation-state with uncomfortable parallels in our own imperial moment. The Renaissance popes also knew a thing or two about folly. Their corruption and taste for political intrigue led to the Protestant secession and the full flowering of the Reformation.

Tuchman's analysis of George III's bungled war for the hearts and minds of the colonists is worth the price of the book alone. Fortunately, the monarch's stupidity and vanity paved the way for American independence, dashing Britain's schemes for imperial expansion in the New World.

But the wages of arrogance were never clearer than in the moral and military disaster that was our incursion into Vietnam. Tuchman used the American debacle in Indochina to illustrate her central thesis that even "democratic" governments willfully pursue policies contrary to their national interests.

It doesn't seem to matter that less costly alternatives are available if the nation's ruling elite have decided on a particular course of war and retribution. Wanton stupidity is, apparently, an intrinsic part of the decision-making process in Washington these days.

One wonders what Tuchman would've made of a story reported in yesterday's New York Times that a month before the war, Saddam Hussein used back channels to try to cut a last-minute deal with the United States to avert a cataclysm he knew would lay waste to his regime and much of Iraq.

According to the Times, representatives of the Iraqi regime offered to allow an unrestricted search of the country by American troops for WMDs it insisted didn't exist. They added that "2,000 FBI agents" could scour the country to their hearts' content if necessary.

Iraq also offered to hand over a man accused of participating in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The suspect was cooling his heels in a Baghdad prison, but the regime promised to hand him over to Washington as a goodwill gesture. The regime was also willing to hold elections and become a dependable ally of the United States in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Because it suspected America was primarily interested in its oil wealth, Iraq offered generous oil concessions. The only thing the Iraqi regime insisted was nonnegotiable was Saddam's immediate exit.

Richard Perle, a high-ranking Pentagon adviser and an architect of the administration's hawkish policy toward Iraq, was initially interested in examining the Iraqi regime's overtures for signs of sincerity. He was told by the CIA that the agency had opened its own back channels. Perle backed off. He was skeptical of the promised concessions anyway. Because the war was weeks away, there was precious little patience for talk of peace.

Was the CIA's rebuff of the Iraqi regime's clandestine offers an astute analysis of a wily foe's trickery? Or was it yet another example of a monumental intelligence failure that seem to be part of the background static of this war?

There are at least 376 dead American soldiers who wouldn't mind turning back the hands of time if they could. Exploring Saddam's sincerity doesn't seem too high a price to pay to avoid so many funerals.

There are thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis who wish an alternative to war had been pursued. Now an occupied and humiliated population must live with jittery American soldiers who can't differentiate friend from foe as a guerrilla war by Saddam loyalists and migrating terrorist cells heats up.

Thousands of lives will be lost as Iraq continues its downward spiral into anarchy. There is no precedent for peaceful reconstruction of an occupied nation under these circumstances. To believe so is a folly worthy of George III.

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