The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.
TODAY, if you read even respectable journals, it appears that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq. That's not the way I recall it. I recall support being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives. We all had the same information, and we got it from the same sources. I certainly never based my judgment on American intelligence, faulty or otherwise, much less the intelligence produced by the Bush administration before the war. I don't think anyone else did, either. I had formed my impressions during the 1990s and entirely on the basis of what I regarded as two fairly reliable sources: the U.N. weapons inspectors, led first by Rolf Ekeus and then by Richard Butler; and senior Clinton administration officials, especially President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Al Gore.
I recall being particularly affected by the book Butler published in 2000 called The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security, in which the chief U.N. inspector, after years of chasing around Iraq, wrote with utter certainty that Saddam had weapons and was engaged in a massive effort to conceal them from the world. "This is Saddam Hussein's regime," Butler wrote, "cruel, lying, intimidating, and determined to retain weapons of mass destruction."
The big turning point for me, I suppose, was the confrontation between Saddam and the Clinton administration that began in 1997 and ended in the bombing of Iraq at the end of 1998. The crisis began when Saddam blocked U.N. inspectors' access to various suspect sites, and the Clinton administration launched a campaign to prepare the nation for war. I remember listening to Madeleine Albright compare Saddam to Adolf Hitler and warn that if not stopped, "he could in fact somehow use his weapons of mass destruction" or "could kind of become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction." I remember William Cohen appearing on television with a five-pound bag of sugar and explaining that that amount of Anthrax "would destroy at least half the population" of Washington, D.C. Even as late as September 2002, I remember Al Gore saying, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, that Saddam "has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
President Clinton and his top advisers had declared Saddam's continued rule intolerable, and I recall joining several others in a letter to the president in January 1998 insisting that "the only acceptable strategy" was one that eliminated "the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction." That meant "a willingness to undertake military action," and it meant eventually "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." The signatories included Francis Fukuyama and Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, among others. About a year later, the Senate passed a resolution, cosponsored by Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, providing $100 million for the forcible overthrow of Saddam. It passed with 98 votes. On September 20, 2001, I joined many others in another letter to President Bush, in which we endorsed then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement that Saddam was "one of the leading terrorists on the face of the earth." We argued that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." That letter, too, was signed by Francis Fukuyama, Eliot Cohen, Stephen Solarz, Martin Peretz, and many others. I recall broad bipartisan support for removing Saddam right up to the eve of the war. In March 2003, I signed a bipartisan letter in support of the war with a number of former Clinton officials, including Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg, Ambassador Peter Galbraith, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Ivo Daalder, Ronald Asmus, and Robert Gelbard.
We were asked what issues we've changed our minds about. My father recalled for me a line from Thucydides, which Pericles delivered to the Athenians in the difficult second year of the three-decade-long war with Sparta. "I am the same man and do not alter, it is you who change, since in fact you took my advice while unhurt, and waited for misfortune to repent of it."
Robert Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.