Other historical events that I have researched got more interesting the more I looked at them. This was not like that. It got less interesting. As far as I can see, there was not any plot by Roosevelt to bring the US into the war, or anything like that. The Americans were simply incompetent and racist.
(By racism, he meant that they did not think the Japanese navy could carry out a successful surprise attack.)
What about the attacks of 2001 September 11 on the United States:
How to decide?
Speaking for myself, I can tell you that I was surprised by the attacks. I was surprised even though I had seen a book cover that depicted a highjacked airliner flying into a skyscraper. Moreover, I knew that suicide attacks are common in some cultures.
However, I did not receive any briefings about this from professionals who should have been more military and less culture-biased than I.
President Bush and other senior people in his Administration did receive such briefings.
Either
To me, the third option is most likely.
However, it has been argued that the Bush Administration was dependent on an intelligence organization still under the influence of its predecessor, and therefore could not give its briefings much credence.
Thus, to judge whether the Bush Administration is incompetent, we must look at other administrative actions.
Please bear in mind that only one of two outcomes helps us decide. If more recent actions are competent, that does not tell us whether the Bush Administration acted with due diligence before the attacks of September 11. The result only tells us that the Administration either was acting well at that time or that it learned from past mistakes. From a US patriotic point of view, either is a better outcome than the alternative. On the other hand, if more recent actions are incompetent, the evidence suggests either that the Administration continues its past failure or that it became worse than it was. From a US patriotic point of view, neither is a good outcome.
There is no doubt to me that President Bush and his colleagues are politically shrewd. That is not the question here. The question is whether they are running a competent Administration?
It goes without saying that everyone makes mistakes. However, good measures of an administration are whether it makes fewer than an alternative administration and whether it learns from the mistakes it does make, and makes corrections.
Now, for evaluations of more recent actions:
Consider Afghanistan: after the then government refused to extradite Osama bin Laden, the US invaded the country and changed the government. This part was successful.
However, more than two years on, has the followup been as successful? That is to say, have potential sanctuaries for US enemies in Afghanistan and neighboring countries been removed? Are young men finding it better to get jobs on foreign and locally funded development projects than joining the armies of local warlords or farming opium?
It looks to me that so far, the followup has failed. Indeed, in 2004 the US engaged in another `Spring offensive'. This tells us that the US had not previously defeated its enemies in Afghanistan and neighboring countries.
Consider the justifications for the invasion of Iraq: the Bush Administration publicly argued for the invasion of Iraq on three grounds:
The justification for supporting the UN is that international laws and resolutions are a liberal, democratic, and contemporary European ideal; they provide a mechanism for restraining the actions of a super power.
[I read various Blix inspection reports, which told me that the Iraqi was not abiding by the mandatory Chapter 7 resolution at issue.]
Salman Rushdie made this argument. Eventually, the US government also made this argument, but not before 2003 Feb 17, when I wrote that
No government that I know of has said that this is a prime reason to go to war, although all claim it would be a nice side effect.
( Rushdie also said
I think the real problem is that I haven't heard anything that suggests that the Administration in America has worked out what to do after Saddam. You can't start a war if you don't know those answers.
(He said this before the US attacked Iraq.)
Without a doubt, this was the major public justification for the invasion.
The Bush Administration convinced its political supporters and some others that not only was the Iraqi government funding development projects but that it possessed some weapons in contradiction to mandatory UN resolutions.
The publicly known reasons for believing that Iraq had chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons are three fold:
In my opinion, the US government was persuaded to invade Iraq by a fourth, unstated, reason, namely,
The question at hand is how competent has the US administration shown itself for each of these reasons?
Is the US now more willing than before to abide by mandatory UN resolutions, as well as asking others to abide by them? Or is the UN less a check on a super power?
It seems to me that initially at least the US administration failed. The diplomatic actions of the US in January, February, and March of 2003 did not lead either the people of the US or others to think better of the UN, to be more likely to abide by mandatory UN resolutions, or to provide an international check on unilateral power.
Nor did the US administration suggest a detailed new form for an international organization that would restrain member states' power.
(For example, the US administration did not suggest a three chamber organization, one chamber based on population, like the US House of Representatives, one chamber based on history, like the current UN or the US Senate (although perhaps with some agglomeration of very small countries), and one chamber based on taxes paid (this is an indicator of GDP, but one that reflects power only if paid). I mention a three chamber organization because that is the only way I can see simultaneously to overcome rich countries worry about poor populous countries, like India, give populous countries power, and gain support from the very small.)
However, it is notable that the President Bush has recently called upon the Secretary of the UN to take more of a role in Iraq. UN Secretary Annan, speaking with French President Chirac at his side, accepted the task. Also, the US recently accepted a proposal by Libya that the UN inspect the country as part of a disarmament agreement.
So it may well be that the Bush Administration, over time, increasingly favors the UN. This is not an outcome I expected from this Administration.
Are members of the former Iraqi secret police less of a danger now than before? Are the current secret operations of the various Shi'ite and Sunni groups less dangerous than before? Do people feel safe from robbery or intimidation?
It is not yet clear the degree to which Iraqis will enjoy a feeling of security, human rights, and political freedoms in the near future or over the next decades.
Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, the US failed to expend a huge effort searching for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. As many as 6 weeks later, the Pentagon said it still had over 700 `known' possible sites to investigate. (This list did not count unknown sites.)
The former head of the Bush Administration inspection team says that perhaps some weapons, if they existed, were stolen or hidden away at that time.
In any event, the Bush Administration inspection team has not found significant chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons in Iraq, either because the weapons were hidden, perhaps in Syria, or stolen, or because the programs were discontinued in the 1990s.
Certainly, the Bush administration should have used the Army to search `known' possible sites immediately after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. The searchers could have done little, except to tell all concerned that most sites are harmless. This latter action would have been extremely useful.
As it is, we still do not know whether some weapons were hidden or stolen during this time period, or whether they were never manufactured.
This is a major failure of the administration.
Since the public argument for the war depended so strongly on either finding weapons or on proving that the US government was wrong and that they did not exist, this failing is all the more striking.
As I said, the Bush Administration did not advance this as a reason for invading Iraq, although I personally think this was very important. In particular, this connects the invasion of Iraq with the concurrent US war against non-state terrorists.
To some extent the US has succeeded in intimidating others. In particular, the US and Britain have managed to persuade Libya accept UN disarmament inspections. This action both helps disarmament and helps the UN as an institution. However, the results appear delayed. Libya agreed to the US only recently.
On the other hand, the US gives the appearance of having made a deal with Iran in November of 2003 to accept Iran influence over the country's Shi'ite majority. This implies that the Iran succeeded in intimidating the US rather than vice-versa.
This deal results from a major failure by the US Administration, namely to fail to foresee that the Iraqi government would engage in an asymmetrical guerilla war after the fall of Baghdad. Currently, the US appears to winning the war in Iraq, but it has taken a long time, rather than just a couple of months.
The US military could have acted to police Iraq by the beginning of May, shortly after searching for banned weapons. The US would not have won a guerilla war as soon as it captured Baghdad. But if there had been no expectation that the US would win quickly, the US would have been more able to intimidate others in the July through November period of 2003, simply by showing that it was fighting successfully and dreadfully.
In these circumstances, it is likely that Libya would have agreed to accept UN inspections sooner, shortly after the US and Britain first started negotiating. Syria might well have decided to attempt to placate the US sooner. Instead, the Syrian government erroneously gambled that the US would get bogged down in an Iraqi asymmetrical war.
Moreover, the US would have been in a stronger position to intimidate the Iranian government and would have been less concerned that some of the Shi'ites in Iraq would wage an asymmetrical war against the US. The US would have been less subject to pressure to turn the Iraqi government over to Iraqis -- mostly likely to Shi'ites and Kurds seeking justified, but unpleasant revenge -- and more able to change the culture of bribery and corruption that exits in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.
Similarly, the US could have intimidated other governments sooner, and gained their aid, willy-nilly, against anti-US terrorists earlier on.
But none of this happened, because the US did not act early enough against the Iraqi guerilla war. This was the result of either a major intelligence failure or the result of not acting on intelligence.
Either way, this failure is the responsibility of the Bush Administration since, by early 2003, it had been in office more than a year.
Those are military related issues having to do with Administrative competence.
Two other issues are the tax cut and the weakening of the US currency.
In the short run the Bush and his colleagues were politically shrewd to propose and pass their tax cuts. Their supporters were pleased.
In the long run, however, the tax cuts weaken the US, by shifting money from private investment to government spending. (Some have said that the tax cuts are designed to impose spending cuts; but the Bush administration is increasing government spending, not cutting it; so this argument is invalid.)
While the long run is politically irrelevant, it is a duty of an Administration. The mark of a great administration is to handle both simultaneously: to act shrewdly in the short run, while also preparing a good long run for its successors.
In the short run the Bush and his colleagues were politically shrewd to weaken the US dollar. Hitherto, few jobs have come from the recovery from the post-bubble recession, although profits have risen. With the devaluation, US exports to Europe should rise and this extra manufacturing should lead to more jobs before the 2004 US election.
In the long run, however, a weakened dollar may lead people in the US and elsewhere, and the central banks of countries such as China and Japan, to invest more money in countries with strengthening currencies, even if the countries' economies are not intrinsically dynamic. (Currently a good portion of the US government deficit is funded by the Japanese central bank.) Such a shift away from the US dollar would hurt long term US economic growth.
Putting together both these military actions and these economic actions, I gain the impression that Bush and his colleagues are politically shrewd, at least in the short run, but that they are not very competent as an Administration, particularly when considering long term or followup actions.