I never wanted Gary Hart to be right. Heck, the former U.S. senator surely would have preferred to be wrong when he said that American troops could remain in Iraq for decades. “People roll their eyes when I say that, but look, we’ve been in Korea 50 years,” he told me in March 2003.
He made the statement days after U.S. bombers began pummeling Iraq. Hart was traveling in New Hampshire in his quixotic campaign for president at a time when polls showed an overwhelming majority of Americans were giddy with enthusiasm for the war. I called to ask his views of the situation.
“A nightmare,” he said.
Fast forward to last week, when I heard White House spokesman Tony Snow trying to explain the Bush administration’s vision for the future in Iraq. American troops might have “an over-the-horizon support role … as we have in South Korea,” he said.
My jaw dropped.
I called Hart.
“Tony Snow gave the first official indication of what the strategy was all along,” Hart said. Americans were led to believe that the troops would overthrow a brutal dictator, remove weapons of mass destruction and then leave.
“The people who planned it all along had in mind that this would be our military and political base in the region,” Hart said. “The fact that anyone in the administration still clings to that hope is delusional.”
In every way but the time factor, the comparison with South Korea is ridiculous. In Iraq, there’s no border, no truce and no opposition government with which to negotiate. “It’s totally different,” Hart said.
“What I meant was that by kicking open that hornet’s nest, we’d have no choice but to stay and try to fix it, and that could take half a century.”
That’s not to say that Hart, who is chairman of the American Security Project and the Council for a Livable World, supports an open-ended commitment of U.S. troops.
He doesn’t.
“Everybody knows the exit strategy: Regional powers have to be brought in, U.S. visibility has to be reduced and we have to forgo our territorial and imperial ambitions.” It’s what the Iraq Study Group concluded, and “the formula has been the same since Day 1.”
What’s particularly exasperating for Hart is that it has taken four years for Americans to wake up to the fact that they’ve been deceived.
“The American people can’t simply distrust their leaders,” he said. “The answer is to question leadership more intensely before making major decisions. That was not done.”
The reality is that with rare exceptions, war is obsolete.
The true shock and awe of Iraq has been that the most sophisticated military power on earth has been utterly flummoxed by a bunch of guys assembling cheap explosive devices in their garages and detonating them with cellphones.
More than 30,000 Americans have died or been injured in combat to date – with May the third-deadliest month in the war so far – and the tragedy is that our national security is more precarious than ever.
The war has made it worse.
“Under most circumstances, being the predominant military power in the world and in human history will not solve 21st-century problems” such as the rise of stateless nations, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, mass south-north migrations, globalization and the threat of pandemics, Hart said.
It takes diplomacy, strategic economic policy and cooperation to solve critical problems that have no respect for national boundaries.
Hart, who predicted a terrorist attack with mass casualties long before 9/11 and who argued strenuously against the invasion of Iraq, remains actively engaged in the debate about how to build a secure future for Americans.
He’s working on a proposal for a 21st-century national security policy for whoever becomes the next president. He’s helping to develop a climate action project with dozens of scientists from around the country, and he’s working with the Aspen Institute to prepare international initiatives to slow global warming.
He’s not running for anything, not campaigning for anybody, but he’s still around, writing, talking to world leaders and thinking – always thinking.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
