What Do I Think About the Iraq War? Part II

When Bush Sr. decided against removing Saddam at a fairly convenient time, he took the risk that Washington would end up doing it at a far worse time, which is essentially what happened. (It's like the story of the man who spotted Death in his hometown and fled to Samarra, but Death had an appointment in Samarra...) It's almost as if the US was waiting for the WRONG time to remove him!

IMHO the "War on Terror" was misconceived from the start. The carpet-bombing of Afghanistan struck me as gratuitous overkill, bombing for the sake of bombing. Depending on air power to win your wars single-handedly is a bad habit, both her and in the former Yugoslavia. But perhaps we can look at the bombing as a minor issue. What isn't minor is the question of timing. Washington would have been well-advised to focus first on catching Osama and all the al-Qaea leaders they could, and then deal with the Taliban. Firstly, as regards terrorism al-Qaeda was the bigger fish of the two; secondly, in tactical terms al-Qaeda was more of a moving target so attacking them first made strategic sense. Instead, the Americans tried to eliminate both at the same time, and failed to do either completely enough. They took the lazy path of fighting the same war they'd fought in the past, with varying degrees of success.

Many people have called the Iraq invasion a distraction from fighting al-Qaeda, yet the Afghanistan invasion was also a distraction. And it was a crucial precedent for invading Iraq. I don't think that's hindsight judgement; it was pretty obvious at the time. That's why the many liberals who supported the Afghanistan campaign while hoping Iraq wouldn't be next were naive. But don't expect them to give any credit to the leftists who opposed it because they saw what was coming next. "Balance" is more important than far-sightedness.

My own nation of Canada, then under Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, sent our troops into Afghanistan, largely to appease Washington after he rejected joining the Iraq invasion. (Such difference-splitting is typical of today's Liberals.) I have real misgivings over whether we should still be there, particularly after reports that our soldiers have handed over POWs to a regime that often tortures them. If we can't operate in Afghanistan without doing that, we shouldn't be there at all.

But Afghanistan is a sideshow compared to Iraq. Oddly, it seems that the largely disastrous Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld originally had the right idea about how to invade Iraq: go in, get rid of Saddam, get out. I wouldn't have objected if they'd done things that way. But most of the Bush Jr. administration was infected with hubris and planned on a longer presence.

Bush Jr. had frozen the United Nations out of the war process, but didn't have to continue that way after the invasion was completed. Once the whole country was occupied, Washington might then have deferred to the United Nations and brought in forces from other countries, particularly Iraq's Arab neighbors, to make the occupation genuinely international. In fact, the Americans did encourage other countries to join, but made a mockery of this "internationalization" by insisting on retaining sole control of the things that counted. (How much control do they have in the country now?)

In my last post I said that the best case for removing Saddam was that it meant taking responsibility for Iraq, in theory. I can pinpoint the moment when things started going wrong with the US occupation, after the rash of looting in liberated Baghdad. A reporter at a press conference asked Rumsfeld, "Why did you let the looting happen?" He could have answered, "We only had a limited number of GIs on the streets and had to make hard decisions about what was most important to protect to prevent total chaos. And things could have turned out far worse than they did." But instead he belittled the question and said, "We didn't let it happen, it just happened," like a little boy saying "The window broke!" Rumsfeld sent a signal to the Iraqi people that Washington was going to continue the "power without responsibility" approach.

Many people have gone into detail about the incompetence of the American regime, in matters such as the premature decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces and police. The question is, what do we do now? That'll be the subject of Part III.