Bush-haters’ criticisms of the liberation of Iraq tend to follow scripts. One common complaint was first voiced by Wesley Clark at the beginning of his ill-fated but highly amusing run for the nomination, to the effect that Iraq was a “distraction” from the war on terror that actually emboldened the terrorists at the same time that it pissed them off. We should never irritate the terrorists though express action, because if we ignore them they’ll go away.
Another script is making the rounds of the more extreme (explicitly) anti-capitalist wing: that Saddam wasn’t really such a bad ruler, because the sanctions regime was the real villain in pre-liberation Iraq. This script is put out by the same people – Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore – who say that invasion was unnecessary because “containment was working.”
Excuse me, but “containment” and “sanctions” are two names for the same thing. So how can this thing be bad when the Bush-haters need to answer the human rights dimension of the liberation, but good when they need to slam the death and destruction coincident to the liberation?
In Chomsky’s fantasy, lifting the sanctions would have ensured that the Iraqis themselves could have otherthrown Saddam, which means that he at least sees the contradiction and tries to address it, while Moore doesn’t see it at all (at least according to his appearance on the lame Air America “O’Franken Factor” today).
If elimination of the sanctions was the key to the overthrow of Saddam by Iraqis, why didn’t they get around to it before the sanctions were put in place?
I don’t ever remember ever Clarke or Kerry or anyone else saying “We should never irritate the terrorists though express action, because if we ignore them they’ll go away.”…or even implying it. Please correct me if I didn’t see that.
In other news, the Iraqi public isn’t very happy at all with the US, and that doesn’t just mean insurgents upset with US military:
http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_091172113.html
I, for one, am glad Saddam is gone, because now he can’t bomb us. He was *so* close to bombing us, and so we acted quickly, and now he can’t. So getting rid of Saddam meant protecting the US. If we didn’t get rid of him, then we would have been vulnerable to his attack, which really, if you think about it, could have been at ANY moment.
You make a great point, Steven – surely the Iraqi People would be much happier if the blood-for-oil imperialist swine would put Saddam back in power and leave forthwith. I’ll write the President and suggest that right away.
There were several reasons to be against the invasion, but the best was that Saddam wasn’t a threat to the US. If the explicit reason for invading was to stomp Saddam before he attacked us, then he explicitly had to be a threat. We know this was the explicit reason because the neocons rewrote national policy to include the pre-emption doctrine, which holds as a basic premise the (admittedly lowered) criterion of “immanent threat.”
And I’m not retrofitting this argument with the knowledge that we now know there were no WMD. I opposed the war on strategic grounds prior to the invasion, and I firmly believed he had WMD. The reasons it was a boneheaded strategy are four:
1. In 30 years of rule, Saddam had never sponsored terror beyond his borders. He was an old-school despot, and he oppressed Iraqis to stay in his old-school dictatorship.
2. The fanatical fundamentalists who perpetrate terror despised Saddam. He may have managed to get invaded by the US, but Osama knew he fought us with our own weapons. Saddam was essentially a secularist, and was despised by Osama. That there was somehow a link between them was a farce on the face of it.
3. Sanctions were working. When I made this argument before the war, I was evicerated as a rube. The argument seems a hell of a lot stronger now, however, when we see that the regime was collapsing financially and had no means to produce WMD.
4. We are under assault by actual terrorists. Bogging ourselves down in a half-trillion dollar boondoggle in Iraq was about as stupid a move as we could have made. Anyone with even the most passing familiarity with Iraq’s history would have known it was going to be a hellish, violent debacle that sucked enormous resources. Guess what? It’s a hellish, violent debacle that’s sucking enormous resources.
You can call me commie scum–it’s accurate. But you’ll have a harder time calling the many generals who argued these same points themselves. To say that this was somehow a broadly-agreed-upon war is to engage in revisionist history.
Jeff, you’re revising history to suit your argument:
1) Saddam did sponsor terrorism outside his borders, primarily the Hamas suicide bombers whose families he paid as a reward for killing Jews.
2) Saddam and Osama shared an interest in the Sudanese aspirin factory that Clinton blew up.
3) Sanctions were brutally killing thousands, and making Saddam’s grip on the people stronger every day – over 25% of Iraqis depended on him for their daily bread.
4) Generally speaking, and allowing for events like those in Fallujah this week, the reconstruction and nation-building exercise in Iraq is going well, and the military phase was actually a cakewalk.
We understand that generals would rather push papers in the Pentagon until they qualify for retirement, which is why we don’t allow them to make strategic decisions about war and peace.
Now see if you can put an argument together against the liberation of Iraq that relies on fact.
some comments:
1. I don’t think anyone suggests that Saddam *didn’t* fund terrorists, but he is small-time compared to other countries’ contributions, financially. Hint: one of them starts with an S, and ends with “Arabia”. Iraq is peanuts. Kuwait, Bahrain, Lebanon, and the UAE…they showed Al Qaeda the money. And don’t take just my word for it, these smart folks figured this out on their own:
http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=5080
and the people who put that report together ? Yep, smarter than you, even: http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=5088.xml)
2. So what about the aspirin factory ? Are you implying that Saddam was bitter about the factory bombing and had the means to harm the US ? Doesn’t seem to me that Iraq had any means of harming the US under the sanctions and scrutiny of the CIA. But you apparently disagree.
3. Nation building wasn’t the reason why a lot of people voted for Bush. In fact, more people voted for Bush because he was *against* nation building. Saddam was bad to his people ? No argument there…but you want to see *real* evil dictators being bad and killing people ? Try Luanda, Angola. Try China and Nepal. Try Sierra Leone. Since the Gulf War, more atrocities have happened in those places than in Iraq.
More than 10,000 Iraqi civilians are thought to have been killed since 20 March 2003 as a direct result of the military intervention in Iraq, either during the war or in violent incidents during the subsequent occupation.
Even if the war *was* sold as a liberation, and not about WMDs, I’m not so sure the liberation is going so well for either Iraqis or the US.
Either way, I feel no safer now that Saddam is gone. On April 5th, 2002, CBS poll:
“If another nation is planning to use weapons against the U.S., 67% of the public say actual evidence of such a plan is needed in order to justify military action against that country. One in five, however, say that only a suspicion ?- and not actual evidence — is needed to justify a military attack. Only 8% say military action is not justified.
WHEN SHOULD THE U.S. TAKE MILITARY ACTION?
When it has evidence 67%
When it is suspicious 19
Military action not justified 8”
There has been no evidence.
Richard,
On sponsoring terrorism, you’re right about Hamas–though this isn’t exactly the same thing as participating in it. Saddam just offered bounties; there’s no evidence he was involved in planning. In fact, I’d argue that the way in which he sponsored Hamas shows how out of the loop he was–and how “old school” he was. Let’s say I grant you the argument–are you contending we invaded Iraq to stop Hamas? Because, beyond Hamas, there’s no evidence of connection to terrorists threatening us.
Your other points are quite a bit weaker. “Sharing an interest” isn’t exactly strong evidence of threat. Sanctions did kill thousands, but of course that’s not what I was referring to. We didn’t invade Iraq on a humanitarian mission. We invaded to stop a threat that was already checked by the sanctions. That the rebuilding is going well is flatly contracted by all fact we have available. Care to support that claim?
Mostly, though, you’ve avoided the larger thrust of my argument: where was the threat that justified pre-emptive invasion?
(Incidentally, I appreciate your responses. It’s not often I can debate this issue reasonably with someone. Thanks.)
I agree with you, Jeff, that Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat to the US at the time of the invasion. It was probably a “grave and gathering threat”, as the President said in the 2003 State of the Union address, but we had to way of knowing what Saddam’s actual timeline was. But I think the invasion was justified on humanitarian grounds even if it wasn’t on military ones, and the truth of that is independent of anyone’s political spin.
Today I saw a list of questions from Christopher Hitchens that you might find intriguing.
Reading that now…