War morally justified, but poorly executed
Some time ago, Congress passed a resolution declaring that “it should be the policy of the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.”
Support for the bill was unanimous in both chambers of Congress, and it was signed by the then-president, who said, “The United States favors an Iraq that offers its people freedom at home. … Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else.”
The year was 1998. The president at that time was Bill Clinton.
The shock you might be registering here is understandable. With those long, difficult years of conflict in Iraq now behind us, it is hard to remember that support for the removal of Hussein was once unanimous.
It is even harder, now, to assert that there were justifiable reasons for going into Iraq. I’ll try my best.
The first reason was humanitarian. I’m not religious in the least, but I’m having a hard time avoiding the use of the word “evil” here. What else could you call a regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons?
Remember when Hussein suddenly declared that Kuwait, a U.N. member state, was now the personal property of his personal crime family? (And who, exactly, are the imperialists in this situation?) Also, by the time an international coalition forced him out of that poor nation, he set the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire for no reason at all, creating a miasma of death that could be seen from space.
As with all complete totalitarian states, the atmosphere of general terror inside that country-turned-prison is impossible to relay accurately. Everyone was an informant. Those who were caught were either tortured or killed.
Remember, the Iraq war was not a war with the Iraqi people. It was a war against one of the worst dictators since the death of Stalin.
The second reason was political. There are four violations that automatically void a country’s national sovereignty: invading neighboring nations, conducting genocide, harboring and supporting terrorism and flaunting the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
As you might expect, Iraq broke all of these.
For those unsure about the last two charges, Iraq harbored Abdul Rahman Yasin after he helped bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. He managed to escape the country before coalition troops arrived. As for nuclear weapons, Iraq received nuclear centrifuges from Pakistani weapons peddler A. Q. Khan and altogether refused to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1998.
With these violations in mind, one idea becomes blatantly obvious: It was the U.S. and its allies that were enforcing international law in 2003, not the U.N.
At this point, I think it’s time for a few concessions: Of course, the war was horribly run. Everyone now knows about the indifference to looting, the horrors at Abu Ghraib, the disbanding of the Iraq military, the gutting of the Iraq National Museum and all the rest.
But there were great successes, too. The creation of a democratically elected government and some long-overdue autonomy for the Iraqi-Kurdish population can’t be dismissed out of hand.
Nevertheless, there is no denying now that the Iraq venture was a failure in almost every way, no matter how sound the arguments were for intervention.
I can’t help but think about how much suffering we could have avoided, how many people we could have saved, how much shame we could have spared ourselves had we simply removed Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf War.
But we didn’t. And everyone has paid the price.