By David Harsanyi
Thursday, June 07, 2016
Believe it or not, you can simultaneously believe a
number of things about the Iraq war and its aftermath.
You can believe Saddam Hussein wasn’t merely a “bad guy”
but that he harbored terrorists and offered them safe haven and material
support. You can believe that the Bush
administration genuinely believed Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass
destruction and also that the war turned out to be a massive strategic failure.
You can believe that the administration believed the Iraqi people would embrace
democratic institutions once the Baathist regime was overthrown and also that
the project failed, leaving us with a bloody mess.
Not one of these things undermines the other.
You should not, however, believe that pundits and
politicians are uniquely blessed with the capability of seeing alternative
realities. Yet the way people talk about Iraq these days, they probably think
they are.
It is completely rational to hold politicians who
supported the Iraq War (and the ones who claim they would extricate us from it)
accountable for their votes and policies. It’s an incredible mess. It’s
irrational, though, to claim you know what the Middle East would look like had
Hussein (or one of his depraved sons) remained in power. Yet nearly every
contemporary counter-history of the Iraq War tells us hundreds of millions of
people would be living quietly under stable tyrannies that counteract each
other and suppress terrorism.
To accept this as a truth, you must also revise history.
And Trump’s take on Saddam and Iraq is a complete falsehood. “He did that so
good,” Trump told a crowd in North Carolina. “They didn’t read them the rights.
They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for
terrorism. You want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq. It’s like Harvard, okay?
So sad.”*
Not everyone celebrates the ability of a government to
kill its own people without any semblance of due process, but less-severe
iterations of this sentiment are repeated often by anti-war proponents. We made
everything worse.
Well, for starters, Saddam didn’t kill terrorists, he
killed those who threatened his power, which sometimes happened to include
those we might deem terrorists. Whether it was the Sunni or Kurds or Shia
theocrats, his goal was to consolidate power. No, he didn’t read them their
rights or talk, he gassed civilians (“a little,” according to Trump) and
tortured and raped the families of his enemies in his Stalinist purges. At the
time, there was an underlying moral argument for changing the lives of victims
and with it the trajectory of the Middle East. It failed.
The Chilcot report into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq
War was published this week, as well. It found that the war was based on flawed
intelligence, launched before all diplomatic options were exhausted. This may
be true. But as Brendan O’Neill notes, the motives of Western nations at the
time were far more complicated than these revisionist reports would have us
believe:
In short, the treatment of Iraq as
special, and Blair as uniquely bad, and bloodthirsty, does a grave disservice
to history — to understanding the causes of the Iraq War, the ideas behind it,
the role played by vast swathes of the political and media elite in cultivating
the climate in which it could happen and the notion that Britain had a new,
neo-imperialist role to play in rescuing the repressed peoples of the world. It
tears Iraq from this political and historical continuum, it elevates it above
the elite’s consensual creation of a new kind of interventionism, and treats it
as a one-off act of madness that sprung from Blair’s warped mind and black
heart. It’s a whitewash of the worst order.
The American conversation is much the same. It’s one
thing to argue that allowing Saddam to stay may have helped counterbalance Iran
or save Christians or avert a Syrian civil war. It’s something else to
perpetuate the fiction that Saddam did not export terrorism. If Iraq wasn’t
Harvard for terrorists, it was a surely a safety school for top-notch
extremists. Not only did Saddam aid and shelter the murderers of American
citizens, the United States designated Iraq a terror state for providing bases
to a number of violent organizations.
At the Weekly
Standard, Stephen Hayes offers a long list of ways Saddam aided terrorists,
including:
…a 2008 Pentagon study, based on
600,000 Iraqi regime documents captured in postwar Iraq, that concluded:
‘Evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for
terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.’
Without any evidence to support his claim, Trump
professes to have opposed this war before the invasion. Let’s concede that’s
true. It’s worth pointing out that many anti-war progressives and
paleo-conservatives — and because Trump most resembles Buchananites, I’ll lump
him in with them — do not possess any prescience on Middle East matters because
they happen to be partially correct about the Iraqi war’s aftermath. Even if
weapons of mass destruction were found on day one and Iraq was a stable
democracy today, they would have still have opposed it. They are in blanket
opposition to any military action at any time for any reason against any terror
state or regime that threatens American interests.
Some segments of this opposition perfunctorily
rationalize and justify the actions of enemy regimes, including the Iranian
state and Palestinian terrorism. Plenty of people deserve credit for warning
Americans about the downsides of the invasion, but Trump-style paleos are not
among them.
Nor should we fool ourselves. In a Reason-Rupe poll
conducted a couple of years ago, 51 percent of Americans claimed they had
opposed to the Iraq War back when it started in 2003. Only 39 percent say they
supported the war, 6 percent claim they had no opinion, and 5 percent couldn’t
remember.
This is highly unlikely. A year after the invasion, 72
percent of Americans interviewed in a CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll were still in favor. Only 25 percent were opposed. In the
same poll, only 41 believed it necessary to find weapons of mass destruction to
justify the conflict (as opposed to 38 percent who thought it would be
necessary). Support for the Iraq War didn’t begin to crumble when it was
obvious we wouldn’t find a large cache of weapons of mass destruction. It
crumbled when Americans realized that creating a viable nation was futile.
I regret my support for the Iraq invasion, as well. But
the decision was far more complex, both morally and politically, than today’s
revisionism implies. Let’s debate the war. Let’s not change history.
*Trump has been
using this line for a while now. It was particularly helpful as a distraction
yesterday as Hillary, who voted for the Iraq War, was again caught blatantly
lying to the American people.
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