December 9, 2002: Wilson: US on Brink of Launching an ‘Imperial War’

Former ambassador Joseph Wilson joins former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, retired foreign service officer and terrorism expert L. Paul Bremer, and neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer at a symposium at the Nixon Center to discuss the impending Iraq invasion. Wilson is dismayed to hear the others “wax… eloquent about how we would reshape the Middle East with our invasion of Iraq.”
Krauthammer: Iraq Will Provide Evidence for Further Efforts to Democratize Middle East - In Wilson’s description, Krauthammer is particularly voluble, telling the other participants that the US must invade and conquer Iraq for three reasons: weapons of mass destruction, American credibility, and the democratization of the Arab world. US credibility is at stake, Krauthammer says, because if the US does not invade after the months of increasingly belligerent rhetoric from the White House and its allies, “I think there will be a tremendous collapse of everything we had achieved by the war in Afghanistan. That would be a great strategic setback. And it would have negative effects on the region, especially on the war on terrorism.” As for the enforced democratization of the Arab states, Krauthammer likens it to “what [America] did in Germany and Japan” after World War II. “It’s about reforming the Arab world,” he says. “I think we don’t know the answer to the question of whether the Arab-Islamic world is inherently allergic to democracy. The assumption is that it is—but I don’t know if anyone can answer that question today. We haven’t attempted it so far. The attempt will begin with Iraq. Afterwards, we are going to have empirical evidence; history will tell us whether that assumption was correct or not.” Wilson will describe himself as “stunned by the unabashed ambition of this imperial project, by the willingness to countenance a major military engagement and lengthy occupation in order to ‘attempt’ to reform the Arab world, to remake it to our liking. What hubris, to put American lives and treasure at stake in order to gain empirical evidence to test an assumption.” Krauthammer concludes by giving what Wilson will call a “chilling comment that we needed to go to war soon, before the antiwar movement coalesced—in other words, before Americans woke up to the fact that this war was not at all about combating the publicly proclaimed grave and gathering danger posed by Saddam [Hussein].”
A US 'Imperial War' - Wilson retorts that Krauthammer’s neoconservatives remind him of Napoleon’s generals “as they sat around the table and listened to his plans on the eve of the march on Moscow”—the ill-fated assault that led to the French emperor’s ultimate failure. After some back-and-forth, Krauthammer says that he is reminded, not of French imperialist ambitions, but of the US on the eve of World War II’s D-Day invasion of Normandy, which led to the downfall of the Nazi empire and the liberation of France. Wilson will later reflect: “If the advocates of [Krauthammer’s] vision in the symposium had their way, we really were going to try to bring Jeffersonian democracy to the Arab world on the coattails of an American military conquest. We were going to be waging an imperial war, pure and simple.” [Wilson, 2004, pp. 309-312]