ARE WE BETTER OFF NOW ?

 

Published on The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com)

Are We Better Off Now?

Looking back at the Iraq war

Noemie Emery

July 6 – July 13, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 41

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Robert Kaplan called his regime “anarchy masquerading as tyranny. .  .  . Saddam was beyond ‘brutal.’ The word brutal has a generic and insipid ring to it .  .  . that simply does not capture what Iraq was like under his rule.” In 1980, he invaded Iran, starting a war that killed more than a million people and lasted eight years. In the aftermath, he gassed thousands of Kurds who tried to shake off his domination. In 1990, he invaded Kuwait, in an attempt to seize control of its oil fields, from which he was ejected months later by an American-led coalition assembled by the first President Bush. He spent the next decade in attempts to avoid the conditions of weapons inspections on which the cease-fire was based.  (see more below)

Is the world better off than it was eight years ago?

Is the Middle East? Is Iraq? These questions, echoing the one asked by Ronald Reagan in his debate with Jimmy Carter just before the 1980 election, should be posed by all Republicans until the polls close in November 2016. Added to these are a few other things .  .  .

Is Ukraine better off? Do we have more allies? Are we more trusted by them? Of course some countries are better off now than they were before Barack Obama unleashed his transformative powers, but these include Iran, Russia, and Cuba, which may not be a good thing. (On the other hand, our relations with Israel, the Gulf Arabs, and the former possessions of the Soviet empire have hit a new low.) Is the Western world safer from terrorist violence? Since ISIS exploded, violent incidents triggered by it have taken place in countries as widespread as Denmark, Australia, and France. By contrast, since the shock of September 11, 2001, nothing of the sort has taken place again in America, which most at the time would have thought an unlikely development. In the weeks and months after, President Bush, in a very short time and under a great deal of pressure, constructed protocols for the containment of terror that prevented further attacks on this country, and that Obama, despite much complaining, once he was in office did nothing to change. It is a fact that after a brilliantly executed invasion in 2003, Bush let the occupation of Iraq begin badly, and become a catastrophe, but it is a fact too that at the very last moment he changed course dramatically, and—against the intense opposition of the Democrats—turned the situation around by the time he left office, so dramatically that in a few years the Democrats would be saying it had been their accomplishment.

Despite the complaints from the left (and from some on the right) that the Bush foreign policy had been a disaster, the facts are that his security policy was a success, and he left Iraq on a fairly sound footing and in the process of evolving into an imperfect democracy. (If you don’t believe that, see what the Democrats were saying circa 2010-2012, or just prior to our leaving that country.) The last two are facts, based on what did and what failed to happen, and the assessments made at the time, and not later in retrospect. On the contrary, the complaints made by critics—that the invasion of Iraq was unwise and unwarranted, and that the world would have been better off had Saddam stayed in power—are based on conjecture, and the creation of alternative outcomes in projected scenarios that have no basis in fact.

Take the grilling of Republican candidates about whether the Iraq war was worth it, or if they would have launched the war had they known already that no caches of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons were there on the ground to be found. The answer to this is “of course not,” but neither Bush nor anyone else could know this at the time, and one purpose of war was to find out if they were there, something Saddam had made obvious would take a war to find out. Several candidates had struggled to say this, until Charles Krauthammer explained it in the Washington Post: “The question is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war—the basis for going to the U.N. and to Congress and indeed to the nation—was Iraq’s possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War.” Indeed, it is possible, even logical, to say that had we known there were no WMDs, we would not have invaded, but since we did not know that, the possibility of leaving WMDs in the hands of an erratic, despotic enemy of the United States who had a score to settle with the president’s family and indeed the whole country, was too great to take. The far-left, or paranoid, reading—that Bush was not merely swayed by bad information but actively lied or cherry-picked information to make his case plausible—has to contend with the failure of the president to plant evidence or arrange later that it somehow be “found” by inspectors. What kind of war-mad stage villain tells lies that are bound to be found out as lies later? Isn’t faking what good villains do?

Then there’s the question of “was the war worth it?” which rests on conjecture, too. What would Saddam have done had he been left in power? Here, wishful thinking tends to take over, and crystal balls become cloudy indeed. The argument has been made (and by some on the right) that Saddam kept Iraq “under control” if just by brutality; that dictators tend to keep order and sometimes can act as a source of stability, fending off the wrong kind of “change.” But Saddam was not your ordinary type of regional strongman, such as Mubarak, content to tamp down dissent at home and push around his own subjects in what passes sometimes for peace. He was a loose cannon, a predator, an irrational force, a crosser of borders without provocation, over a timeline of decades. Unlike most regional strongmen, he was dynamic, an unguided missile, an unstable force.

Robert Kaplan called his regime “anarchy masquerading as tyranny. .  .  . Saddam was beyond ‘brutal.’ The word brutal has a generic and insipid ring to it .  .  . that simply does not capture what Iraq was like under his rule.” In 1980, he invaded Iran, starting a war that killed more than a million people and lasted eight years. In the aftermath, he gassed thousands of Kurds who tried to shake off his domination. In 1990, he invaded Kuwait, in an attempt to seize control of its oil fields, from which he was ejected months later by an American-led coalition assembled by the first President Bush. He spent the next decade in attempts to avoid the conditions of weapons inspections on which the cease-fire was based.  

In 1994, President Clinton sent U.S. aircraft, ships, and troops to the Gulf region, where Saddam, as Kanan Makiya wrote, was “yet again engaged in a game of chicken with the American president .  .  . that had reached the stage of armed conflict on at least ten previous occasions since the cease-fire .  .  . came into effect.” In August 1996, he “sent his tanks and forty thousand Republican Guard troops into Arbil, inside the safe-haven area set up by the allied coalition in 1991 .  .  . penetrating deep into Iraqi Kurdistan, killing hundreds. .  .  . The whole array of arrangements by which the United States had sought to ‘contain’ Saddam Hussein since the Gulf War came tumbling down.” 

In December 1998, Bill Clinton ordered targeted strikes on Iraqi facilities, saying, “Six weeks ago, Saddam Hussein announced he would no longer cooperate with the U.N. weapon inspectors. .  .  . So long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of the region, the security of the world.” A year later, U.N. inspector Richard Butler wrote in Talk magazine that Saddam had “put an end to all attempts to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction. .  .  . It’s impossible to know exactly what Saddam has been up to. .  .  . If Saddam gets away with facing down the U.N., he could destroy the world community’s ability to deal with rogue states.”

Before George W. Bush had made his decision to take out Saddam, the two presidents before him had made regime change in Iraq a national object and goal. Steering just wide of the taboo on assassination, Bush 41 and his commanders clearly intended Saddam to be a casualty of their war to repel Iraq’s Kuwaiti incursion. Failing that, they hoped Saddam would be deposed and/or killed by his countrymen: As Bush and Brent Scowcroft wrote in their memoir, “We were disappointed that Saddam’s defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted, and we had come to expect.” 

In 1998, while bombing targets in Iraq in response to Saddam’s latest defiance of U.N. inspectors, Bill Clinton made regime change in Iraq a de facto goal of American policy, though through cooperation with dissenting elements inside that country, rather than U.S. force of arms. Until 2003, Bush 41 had felt obliged to apologize for his decision in 1991 not to follow Saddam back to Iraq and finish him off, giving him additional time
to torture his people, and unsettle the rest of the world. 

The road not taken quite often seems better in retrospect, and only a few years after that the same sort of second-guessing would be directed at his son for having settled the question of Saddam’s fate once and for all. In the shocking aftermath of September 11, Saddam’s defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors gave Bush 43 his chance, though Saddam had in other ways, too, long since established himself as being qualitatively different from, and more dangerous than, the other strongmen and thugs in his region, and not the sort of dictator likely to foster stability. As a result, Kaplan argued in 2014, the road taken in 2003 was likely to have been not wholly unjustified, and perhaps not the worst thing for Iraq: “Nobody can know what would have happened .  .  . if President George W. Bush had not invaded, and Saddam was still in power to face the Arab Spring. .  .  . A Shiite revolt against Saddam would have had one of two results: either Saddam would have crushed it with his trademark level of brutality .  .  . or the revolt would have succeeded, with a sectarian war and the break-up of Iraq as a consequence. That, too, would have led to a scale of bloodshed comparable with the Syrian conflict. .  .  . If George W. Bush had not invaded Iraq and the country violently blew apart in the course of the Arab Spring, Bush would have been blamed for not ridding Iraq of Saddam when he had the chance.”

Right now, Bush is being blamed by some for the whole Arab Spring in its absence of glory, for having, as Robert Merry informs us, “destabilized the Middle East” by the invasion of Iraq, which “lit it on fire and fostered the resultant rise of the Islamic State and the deepening sectarian war.” Has he a case? Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, and eight years later—on December 17, 2010—a Tunisian vendor, distraught after a government official shut down his fruit stand, set himself on fire and set off the rolling series of riots that toppled the governments of four different countries, almost as night follows day.

But if the invasion had set off these disasters, why did they wait for eight years to happen—and five years after Iraq had been pacified? If these countries were primed to explode, they ought to have done so in 2006, when Iraq was on fire, not six years later, when the tumult there had long subsided. In 2010 Vice President Biden called Iraq a signal success for his administration, and in 2011—a year after the Tunisian vendor set himself on fire—President Obama spoke of a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” whose future seemed limitless. What stood between this sovereign, successful Iraq, in which al Qaeda had been destroyed by the Sunnis and Shiites acting together with the Americans, and the events of July 2014, when the Islamic State burst over the Syrian border and quickly annexed almost half of that country? The truly destabilizing event that unhinged the whole region—Obama’s decision, argued against by all his advisers, to pull all U.S. troops from Iraq.

What stemmed from this ill-advised, almost feckless, decision? Nothing good. “We didn’t just withdraw our forces,” said Charles Krauthammer. “We abandoned, destroyed, or turned over our equipment, stores, installations, and bases. We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. And .  .  . we abandoned the vast intelligence network we had so painstakingly constructed in Anbar province, without which our current patchwork operations there are largely blind.”

No wonder we were blind to the emergence of ISIS (Obama dismissing it as no cause for worry), until it burst over the border from Syria, murdering and torturing thousands and beheading a well-chosen few. And lest we forget, there were a few other destabilizing events that occurred in the Middle East after 2009: Obama’s tilt towards Iran, which unnerved Israel and the Gulf Arabs and may yet lead to an arms race and/or a preemptive war in that region; the many red lines in Syria that Obama first drew and then refused to enforce once they were crossed; and the “liberation” of Libya, undertaken by Obama and Hillary Clinton in a strange fit of hubris, and then dropped when that country turned into hell on earth.

Meanwhile, terrorist plots against citizens in the West are unearthed every day, including some to kill American servicemen and their families. Which brings us back to our series of opening questions: Is the world better off than it was eight years ago? Is Iraq better off? Is the Middle East better, or safer? Are we?

Noemie Emery, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, is author most recently of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families



 

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