Novak's antiwar activism

For whatever reason, Robert Novak has doubted the advisability of both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his September 20, 2004 article Getting out of Iraq Novak simply states that the Bush administration has already decided to bug out of Iraq as soon as the election is over.

If I didn’t know Novak’s work better—or if I trusted him to accurately describe the Bush administration’s intentions—then I might panic. After all, abandoning the battlefield and leaving your enemy in control of it is just a means for deliberately losing. You don’t own the battlespace and your enemies do; just like in Vietnam.

Fortunately, in my experience—at least with respect to the military aspects of the war on terrorists—Novak has shown himself to be unreliable. This is not a new phenomenon; David Frum has previously noted that Novak espoused defeatism when writing about the U.S. war effort:

Robert Novak … on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: "The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan."

The article that Frum is referring to, Novak’s September 17, 2001 article Frustrated war fever ,deserves to be read at in its entirety. In this article Novak got a number of things wrong.

Novak asserted that the U.S. intended on “carpet bombing” Afghanistan. This weird assertion—which Novak attributed to a Pentagon source—seems designed to discredit the Bush administration as having a transparently dysfunctional strategy. Further, our military has avoided indiscriminant bombing during Gulf War I and the Vietnam War. If we didn’t neither Baghdad nor Hanoi would have survived. What gave Novak the idea that were going to be more barbaric and why now?

In any case, Novak was completely wrong. The Afghanistan campaign was most noteworthy for a relatively bloodless campaign that mostly relied on elite Special Forces and precision guided weapons; the reverse of indiscriminant “carpet bombing”.

pessimistic regarding Bush’s efforts to transform Pakistan into an ally.

… but so far emphasis on courting Pakistan suggests an attempted anti-Taliban front. The results have been less than satisfying. Pakistan, spurned by Washington in recent years, has been friendly but not willing to grant fly-over rights to U.S. warplanes

Of course Bush has shown himself to be very successful at bring Pakistan around to our side. Novak was wrong about that too.

Novak sneered at the Bush administration’s purported shallow thinking

Will bombing empty terrorist camps in Afghanistan and leveling its battle-scarred capital really inhibit religious fanatics eager to embark on suicide missions? That is the question pondered by worried officials who understand the complexity of this crisis for America.

Here Novak is wrong on several levels.

Regarding Will bombing empty terrorist camps in Afghanistan : Who exactly did Novak think was running the White House, Clinton? And exactly who—outside the Clinton administration—ever proposed that bombing empty terrorist camps would accomplish anything?

Regarding leveling [Afghanistan's] battle-scarred capital : our precision-guided munitions avoided unnecessary damage in Kabul and elsewhere.

Regarding whether bombing [would] really inhibit religious fanatics eager to embark on suicide missions : well I doubt that anyone in the Bush administration every said that bombing would “inhibit” jihadists. They did say, however, that removing the Taliban also removes the regime that gave al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan; which also remove this sanctuary as one of the means for conduction terror operations against the U.S.

OK, I think that this is sufficient to show that

• Novak is viscerally opposed to the military aspects Bush’s anti-terrorism policy. He doesn’t want us in either Iraq or Afghanistan.


• That Novak sometimes doesn’t have a clue as to what the Bush administration will do militarily


• Novak is just plain loopy when he speaks to this subject.

Now back to Novak’s September 20th article that suggests that the Bush administration is preparing for the mother of all bug outs. In summary, I don’t think that the Bush administration is thinking this way. I think that his article is just Novak’s means for offering his own wishful thinking as purported administration thinking.

Why would Novak do this? Well, I will have to speculate in order to answer this one. My take is that this article is sort of freelance trial balloon that Novak’s floating with the intent of building a pro-bugout consensus. Anyone who is inclined—or is becoming inclined—to advocate bugging out will feel slightly bolder about speaking their mind if they read that the White House is planning on bugging out anyway.

Of course any folks that become vocal pro-bugout activists will be joining Novak’s side of the argument. All that Novak ever intended to do was smoke-out the pro-bugout bloc and—he hoped—to demonstrate that the pro-bugout bloc is larger than conventional wisdom suspected. And if Novak hits the jackpot and reveals that this bloc is a majority then this will hasten the erosion of the war’s political support.

However, on the other hand, if there is no more support for bugging out than was apparent before then this article is nothing more than another quickly forgotten trial balloon. Novak will feel no pain either way.

Update: Andrew Sullivan has different THOUGHTS ON NOVAK

The question lingers: why would anyone in the administration want to leak to Robert Novak that Bush is contemplating a quickish exit from Iraq? An obvious thought is that the leak comes from someone diametrically opposed to such a stance. An admission of any plan of that kind would demoralize the president's supporters (and war supporters) and probably prompt a question in the debates or upcoming news conferences. The president might then be forced to dismiss such an idea, boxing himself into the neoconservative position before the election. Tada! You scotch the withdrawal idea by raising it. The beauty of this is that it uses that anti-war curmudgeon, Novak, to bolster the president's resolve.

Iraqi blogger Ali nearly came unglued when he saw Novak's article. Hit tip Glen.