It’s getting hard out here for a neoconservative. If you supported the war in Iraq, like I did, then you’re probably bemoaning how rough recent times have been. Over the past year, a disheartening slew of mea culpas have come from the war’s original supporters, including intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama and William F. Buckley.
So I feel it is time for the still-unwavering supporters of this war to come out, with the benefit of both hindsight and insight, to revisit and remake the case for war.
I would say the arguments for this war rested on three distinct but related parts, the first of which was the humanitarian motivation to fight. If you believe, as I do, that an integral part any liberal democracy’s foreign policy is to promote the universal values of human rights and freedom, and to oppose states that limit these values, then it follows that the U.S. was right in acting against Saddam Hussein. For to say that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy is not only a gross understatement, but a simple dismissal of some ugly and horrifying truths.
Saddam was a dictator who nearly ruined his country’s economy and rendered its population immobile under a cult of the individual and an atmosphere of paralyzing fear. This is a man who gassed 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq, persecuted the majority Shiite population, and established prisons of torture reminiscent of Soviet Gulags and Nazi death camps. Saddam led two military invasions, killing and injuring scores of innocent Iranians and Kuwaitis, and tragically wasting many young Iraqi lives.
Journalist Paul Berman outlines Saddam’s grave record: “We have learned about the 300,000 Shia killed after the 1991 war, the perhaps 30,000 people buried in a single grave, the 40,000 Arabs killed, the millions of refugees, and so forth-mass destruction with and without weapons of mass destruction.”
History tells us that the UN’s sanctions strategy to punish Saddam after the Gulf War all but fell apart after the Oil-For-Food imbroglio. In fact, Saddam’s regime grew stronger due to French and Russian weapons-for-oil contracts. In the face of such atrocities and the collapse of any diplomatic initiative to punish Saddam, there was already enough justification for the U.S. to remove such an evil presence from power.
As we all know, war is a terrible and costly thing to engage in. The U.S. may always want to do the humane thing in the world, but it certainly is not always able to do so. There had to be, then, something that made Saddam’s existence in power exceptionally threatening for war to be waged. That something was security.
As shocking as it may sound with all that’s come to light, I still believe in the conventional WMD threat. Let’s establish what was affirmed before the war by the intelligence agencies of the U.S., UK, Israel, Germany, and the collective intelligence of the UN. We knew or had good reason to believe that Saddam had every intention of restarting his nuclear and chemical weapons program after the sanctions had been completely lifted. We knew that he had never been candid with the UN inspectors from the start, playing games with them for nearly a decade while breaking 17 Security Council resolutions in the face of a spineless UN.
And what, after the war, do we know now? We know that Saddam didn’t have nuclear weapons, which does nothing to prove any of our original assumptions wrong. For based on new Iraqi intelligence-verified by UN security experts-Saddam was indeed trying to restart a weapons program in Iraq.
UN scientists have confirmed, based on declassified Iraqi documents captured after the war, that Iraq was only a year away from creating an atomic bomb. The very fact Saddam didn’t have a functional weapons program means that the invasion was not too late. The U.S. had intervened in time, before Saddam could dominate the region (through the oil market) and bolster his power by creating a nuclear deterrent against foreign intervention.
And the war took away Saddam’s capability to deal in the arms trading network that Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups like Hezbollah now engage in. All of this speaks volumes about the exceptional danger this dictator posed to the world.
Hindsight has led to some other interesting revelations. The notion that we were imposing a democracy on Iraqis, and that they quite simply didn’t want such freedoms, has been proven false. Iraqis have voted in two federal elections in the face of bombs and mass intimidation by foreign terrorists and homegrown insurgents. Contrast those results with voter turnout in Canada or the U.S, where citizens whose only obstacles are bad weather and sheer laziness vote in lesser number than did the Iraqis.
More vindicating is the trend of incremental democratic reform that has been established in the Middle East, in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and even Palestine. Even in terms of security we have seen positive results, in Libya’s scrapping of its own weapons program and Pakistan coming clean over its nuclear weapons deals with North Korea.
Since I have used hindsight a great deal, I should say that I believe that the U.S. certainly could have executed the reconstruction of Iraq better. But while I have not been happy with Bush or Rumsfeld’s incompetence, I am not about to ignore the humanitarian and security-related cases on which the war was-and remains-justified. There are of course many more arguments for and against the war, but considering the issues we have looked at here, it is sufficient to say that this was the right war for the right reasons.
