What Do I Think About the Iraq War? Part I

First, allow me to say that Americans have a genius for learning the wrong lesson from their experiences. We see this, for example, in the progressive movement's scapegoating of Ralph Nader. (If Al Gore couldn't afford to lose even a few votes to Nader, surely the real problem wasn't Nader's presence on the ballot but Gore's own inadequacy. Bush Jr. might well have won the 2000 election even without the Nader campaign, and Gore might well have succeeded even with it.) Another example is the people who look at the present-day mess in Iraq and say that it proves Bush Sr. was right not to remove Saddam Hussein back in 1991.

Although I was far from enthusiastic about the 1991 war, I always thought it was wrong to stop short of removing Saddam from power. IMHO Saddam's removal at that time would have done little more harm but a lot more good. Of course, I can't say for sure that if an occupation back in 1991 had been carried out with the same incompetence as post-2003, the results wouldn't have been equally disastrous. But several factors would have improved the odds of success considerably: there would have been a far larger force to keep order, a genuinely international force with Arab nations well-represented. And there was no Al-Qaeda back then to exploit the disorder.

My first objection to the "containment" policy that Washington settled for is moral. Leaving Iraq in Saddam's hands meant condemning the Iraqi people to the worst of both worlds, caught between Saddam's dictatorship and the privations of a strict sanctions regime, with no means of escape. If Saddam was too dangerous to be left in power without these sanctions--and I'll take their word for it--then he was too dangerous to be left in power at all. As it worked out, about 500,000 innocent Iraqis seem to have died just from the effect of these sanctions, a number greater than the previous war and still comparable to the later one. (It's always seemed to me that Washington's Oil for Food program was a spin operation, to distract people from the fact that the Iraqis had been abandoned to their fate.) Bush Sr. may have said that America's fight was with Saddam and not with the Iraqi people, but look who paid the price in the end! I shuddered when I heard Bush Jr. say that his quarrel was with the Taliban and not the Afghan people.

Bush Sr.'s decision to bomb Iraq halfway to the Stone Age and then leave Saddam in power struck some people as "inconsistent." The way I see it, these two choices actually reflected a contemptible underlying consistency: the pursuit of power without responsibility. The best argument for the 2003 invasion was that it meant taking belated responsibility--at least in theory-- for a nation that had borne the brunt of American power without any accompanying benefits.

For those who dismiss me as a naively moral pwog incapable of realpolitik, my second objection is strategic: containment embodied short-sighted prudence. It wasn't that containment couldn't work on its own terms, though we can't be completely sure that Saddam could never have found some new way to become dangerous again. Rather, effecting containment meant stationing a large US force in Saudi Arabia to prevent Iraq from invading its neighbors again. And there were a lot of Saudis who didn't like the foreigners' presence in Islam's central "holy" land. One of them, Osama Bin-Laden, responded by forming Al-Qaeda and declaring the US an enemy of Islam. At the very least, the Americans had handed Osama a convenient pretext for turning other Arabs against them. The result was that several of Osama's rich friends gave generously and helped finance the building of a terrorist army from scratch. In 2001 the policy literally blew up in Uncle Sam's face. Containment itself was the true "root cause": the US presence in Saudi Arabia was only inevitable to the extent that leaving Saddam in power was inevitable--in other words, not at all.

Since I'd always considered containment despicable, I wasn't really in a position to oppose the 2003 invasion that ended the policy. (Consistency, of course, is "the hobgoblin of little minds.") But I did feel more than a bit skeptical about whether the Bush Jr. administration had the skills to pull it off successfully. More on Iraq in my next post.