One question that anyone is likely
to be asked nowadays is "What do you think of the war?" My answer
begins in turn with a question: "Which war?" The 2003 action
to depose Sodom—I mean, Saddam "Hussein" (not his real name)
was a different conflict from that going on in Iraq now, which has been incited
not by partisans of the late strongman but by terrorists and militants from
various countries who have flocked to the region for the opportunity to kill
Westerners and anyone else who opposes them. With that distinction made, I say
that the first war was a necessary evil and that the second ought not to have become
necessary. Let me address the 2003 invasion first.
The decision to go to war versus
Iraq five years ago was the only one that a statesman could have made. During
the dozen years that had elapsed since Operation Desert Storm, Sodom, though a
rather inept tyrant of a minor military power, had made a laughing-stock of
world diplomacy's efforts to enforce the resultant peace settlement (to which,
remember, he had consented, in order to spare his armed forces utter
annihilation). Some of the UN weapons-inspectors changed their story after the
2003 invasion, but prior to it, they repeatedly stated their consensus that the
Iraqi regime was not cooperating with them. This alone ought to refute the
leftist conspiracy-theory that President Bush knew all along that Iraq had none
of those "weapons of mass destruction," but lied as a pretext for war:
if Sodom had nothing to hide, why did he try so hard to hide it?
Besides, the question of whether
what lay behind the dictator's defiance was actual harboring of illegal
ordnance, or merely the ambition to harbor it—that he had at least the latter
is indisputable—is moot. The sole responsible position for a member-country of
the 1991 coalition to take was to tell Sodom: We defeated you before, and we
can do so again. End your noncompliance, or prepare for another invasion.
Further, imagine for a minute that
weapons of mass destruction were never an issue. Wouldn't there have been ample
justification for ousting Sodom anyway? Where were the self-righteous
"peace activists" in 1994, when Mr. Bush's predecessor brought the
USA to within a hair's-breadth of war in Haiti? The ostensible purpose
of that misadventure was to topple a different ruler: Manuel Cedras, a
distasteful person to be sure, but not one whom anybody ever suspected of
stockpiling nuclear, chemical, or biological weaponry.
As for the second war, which has
proceeded from the effort to give the Iraqis a new government and to suppress
the jihadists: the USA and her allies showed a pronounced lack of imagination
in rebuilding Iraq as a "democracy," based on the sharing of power
between mutually antagonistic groups. Why not carve off the northeast section
of the state to become an independent Kurdistan, as was provided anyway in the
unratified Treaty of Sèvres, intended to bring Turkish participation in World
War I to a formal close? The remainder could
simply be annexed to Jordan, the royal dynasty of which also reigned in Iraq
prior to the 1958 coup (which, unsurprisingly, was followed by more coups,
culminating in the rise of Sodom).
Finally, I do not deny the
undeniable success of the new policy that the Bush Administration adopted in
2007. (It must be noted, though, that the reason why it has borne fruit is not
really the addition of 30,000 troops—this is why the name "Surge" is
misleading—but the fact that the military now has a counterinsurgency strategy,
whereas, previously, the presence of US and other forces in Iraq served no
evident function other than that of a crutch for the chronically, and, I still
believe, terminally-ill elected government.) Our soldiers and others are
defeating thousands of terrorists, and this fact does deserve recognition.
