As we all know, it has become standard fare within even some Republican circles to “acknowledge” that liberating Iraq in 2003 was a mistake, and even that President Bush “misled” us into Iraq . It is refreshing then, from time to time, to hear that there is still some sense in our higher circles and editorial boards.
Arthur Herman’s Why Iraq Was Inevitable is a dose of needed perspective. Herman goes into great depth into the evidence concerning the decision to invade, and traces the viewpoint supporting strong military action back to 1998, rather than any “bloodthirsty” George Bush and his “pack” of neocons. Indeed, many Democrats, such as Joe Lieberman and Al Gore, were threatening invasion even during the Clinton Administration. It is a rather long article, but I will post some excerpts below along with my somewhat tenably linked commentary.
Herman starts:
According to an April 2008 poll in U.S. News & World Report, fully 61 percent of American historians agree that George W. Bush is the worst President in our history. Some of these scholars cite the President’s position on the environment, or on taxes, or on the economy. For most, though, the chief qualification for obloquy lies in Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.
I hear this line from liberals all the time; “George Bush is a failed president” or “History will remember Bush as a failure”. But the folks who were polled here will by and large not be writing the history books, and many of these same liberals would be loathe too recall their similar rantings against a President Reagan, a figure that now receives very large approval ratings now that the history has begun judging him.
Aside from that, Herman continues:
The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.
Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.
Am I the only one who can imagine a President Kerry, after being inaugurated in 2005(assuming Herman’s alternate reality), proclaiming that he will take a “hard line” on Iraq and confront Saddam? Am I the only one imagining that the New York Times would not have questioned his every move, or even not acted to sabotage the war effort? Democrats rank hypocrisy on this issue is simply startling.
There is simply too much of this article for me to really pick all the good parts. But here is another:
In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”
Darn, he sounds like one of them dirty neocons, folks! Time to get the tar and feathers! Bush’s 2002 and 2003 State of the Union addresses sound eerily similar when compared to these statements. “Unholy axis” or “Axis of Evil”? You tell me the difference.
On Clinton’s famed foreign policy forays in his final two years:
In his final year in office, Clinton decided that his contribution to Middle East peace would lie not in the removal of Saddam Hussein but in a grand attempt to resolve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. With this, he missed his last chance to deal forcefully with the man he was publicly committed to overthrowing. Worse, by focusing his energies on a futile effort to placate Yasir Arafat, he diverted American attention not only from Saddam but from the mounting challenge represented by Osama bin Laden—not to mention the possibility that these two sinister figures might some day find common ground. As Clinton’s administration ended and George W. Bush’s began, Iraqi defectors were claiming that Saddam had set up camps in which terrorists connected with bin Laden were training to attack the United States.
Let’s tack that onto the list of problems the Clintons left the incoming President Bush, along with a trashed White House. An imminent recession, a looming threat from Al Queda, health care problems, entitlement programs facing shortfalls and a partisan environment. Bush solved the Iraq issue along with the first two, made a good faith effort on the third, was ridiculed for trying to solve four, and as for five…….whose fault is that, Tom Daschle?
On Iraq’s supposed neutrality in all things Jihadist:
We now know, thanks to captured Iraqi documents, that American intelligence seriously underestimated the extent of Saddam’s ties with terrorist groups of all sorts. Throughout the 1990’s, it emerged, the Iraqi intelligence service had worked with Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front, and Yasir Arafat’s private army (Force 17), and had given training to members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Saddam also collaborated with jihadists fighting the American presence in Somalia, including some who were members of al Qaeda. It may be that al Qaeda had no formal presence in Iraq itself, but the captured documents show that it did not need such a presence. Saddam was willing to work with any terrorists who targeted the United States and its allies, and he reached out to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups (and vice-versa) whenever the occasion warranted.
Any comment, Senator Jay Rockefeller(D-WV)?
As the leaves turned in Washington in the fall of 2002, mainstream Democrats were on board with Bush, just as they had been on board with Clinton. The real reluctance for war came from Republican ranks—and from within the administration itself. The most serious dissenter was Secretary of State Colin Powell, together with his assistant Richard Armitage. Both men wanted to find a way to prop up the containment “box” around Saddam without having to resort to drastic military action.
So President Bush does exactly what Congressional Democrats wanted him too, and what does he get? Makes you wonder if the Kossites will be as forgiving and nice when they recieve their obligatory screwing from Reid, Pelosi & Obama.
Those who condemn Bush’s decision to go to war, bemoan its cost in material and human terms, and deplore the damage it has allegedly done to the American image around the world should consider what would have happened if there had been no war. It is not just that millions of Iraqis would still be in the iron grip of Saddam and his police state. The fact is that, by 2002, no inspection regime and no amount of international pressure, no matter how plumped up by yet another UN resolution, would have kept him contained any longer. The Oil-for-Food corruption would have continued to grow unrestrained, finding reliable co-conspirators in Europe and the Middle East. Rising oil prices over the next half-decade would have kept Saddam awash in cash, allowing him to rebuild his military and cement his connections with powers like Syria and Russia. He had called our bluff before; but this time it was no bluff.
Given the logic of the situation, at what point could Bush have avoided war? To have taken the military option off the table before going to the UN would have undercut everything his analysts and policy advisers, including at the CIA, had been saying since 9/11—and brought howls of protests from leading Democrats in Congress. Doing so after the passage of Resolution 1441 would have made a mockery of the rationale for going to the UN in the first place, and, as Powell explicitly recognized, undermined the resolution itself.
Anyone not blinded by the Kossite pack of lies can clearly recognize how badly the UN was damaged by and before Oil-For-Food. Even I recognized it at the time, and I was 12-13 at the time. I remember seeing the kids at our local middle school collecting money for UNICEF and thinking, I will NEVER give money to an organization that coddles dictators, gives money to “peacekeepers” that rape children, and organizes mockeries of diplomacy to benefit crackpot dictators(Then I asked myself when I lost my innocence, but that’s another point).
Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq war, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster. If, after 9/11, Bush had then blinked in his turn, he might indeed have found himself out of office by January 2005, and someone else would have had to tackle the job under much more disadvantageous conditions.
To judge by his unequivocal pronouncements pre-2003, and as improbable as it sounds now, that someone might well have been Al Gore, the erstwhile hawkish Vice President who had championed the Iraq Liberation Act, or indeed John Kerry, who back in 1998 told Scott Ritter that containment of Saddam was not working and that the time had come to use force. If Bush had failed to act, either one of these two men might have come to office in January 2005 publicly prepared to deal with the “gathering threat” that his predecessor had unaccountably allowed to grow larger and closer and ever more virulent.
George Bush has displayed unwavering courage in his years in the White House, and he fought a war that cost him his own popularity because he knew it was right. That alone earns him very high marks in my mind. He made a choice in March of 2003, a very difficult choice, and stuck with it, and for this he deserves our support.
If you are interested in this topic, I am told that Douglas Feith’s recent primer on the war is good reading material, and it is a well-sourced journey through the decision to go to war without any of the self-serving nonsense in Scott McClellan’s book. I would read it myself, but my reading list, and my to-do list in general, is way to full.
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