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July 01, 2005,
1:17 p.m.
Iraqi Doubts
Was it worth it? How many do we hold responsible for 9/11?
Two observations about Iraq survive the thousand and one made since the speech of President Bush. They are not coped with in the general slush of arguments for or against our intervention in Iraq, demanding discrete argumentation. The first was given thematic importance in a radio forum, the second was an afterthought on a seminar about Iraq.
The first: Was it worth it?
The air waves seemed to hang in suspense — was it worth the lives we've lost, money spent, alliances disrupted? The difficulty in the formulation is instantly seen. We do not know what has been accomplished, in the sense that we can know how many birds were killed at the dove shoot, or how many dollars were spent by the federal government last year.
So much depends on whether seeds were sown which will bear fruit. In a stirring essay in Commentary, Charles Krauthammer sets out his belief that democratic globalism is afire, and that that which has brought life and hope to the Iraqis is as consequential as the introduction of self-government in the new world proved in the 17th century. One could argue that the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the affirmation of that destruction by the voters in January serve to freeze our accomplishments in place, so that we can think of Iraq, unencumbered some time soon by insurgencies, as if it were Switzerland set down in the Middle East, there to cultivate its distinctive freedom on into the future.
Krauthammer does much better, reminding us that it has become U.S. tradition to compromise in hard cases, as most notoriously we did in accepting the Soviet Union as an ally in order to defeat Hitler. A long but properly oriented process of strategic purification sets in as when, the Soviet challenge having diminished, we proceeded to refine our articles of confederation with problematical allies. "Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against Communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators."
Now is the time, in this analysis, to move to disrupt Syria and to affirm the independence of Lebanon. "Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon Israel, Jordan, and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. We should . . . be doing everything in our power, both overtly and covertly, to encourage a democratic revolution in Iran, a deeply hostile and dangerous state, even while trying carefully to manage democratic evolution in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan." The eye turns to a geopolitical globalism, and the mind turns to the hard substance of freedom expanded, and the meaning of it for U.S. security.
The second matter of arresting influence is the genealogy of terrorism, and the bearing of it on the U.S. venture in Iraq. "Surely we know," writes a student of the war, "that hardly any of the insurgents (if any at all) that we are now fighting in Iraq had any connection whatsoever to 9/11. The claim that we are fighting today the same war that began on 9/11 makes sense only on the assumption that in some more-than-metaphysical sense, the entire Arab-Muslim world was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps this assumption is defensible, but it is at the very least not obvious, and needs to be spelled out."
There weren't that many individual human beings involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor. But it was the act of a government and blessed by a live, indeed immortal, emperor, so that we ended by dropping atomic bombs on people who hadn't the least connection with Pearl Harbor. The people involved in 9/11 weren' numerous — perhaps only a few hundred. How many hundreds — thousands? — tens of thousands? — do we hold responsible?
A useful term here would be the Talibanate. Our direct post-9/11 assault was against the Taliban government in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda met and plotted. The involvement of the government of Iraq with the Talibanate was at many levels. Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, published a 4-page essay on al-Qaeda and Iraq in National Review Online the day after the president's speech. The essay has a tag line: "Just tell us one thing," he addresses the skeptics. "Do you have any good answer to what Ahmed Hikmat Shakir” — an Iraqi intelligence officer — “was doing with the 9/11 hijackers in Kuala Lumpur,” at the meeting where 9/11 was plotted?
The Talibinate today is most heavily concentrated in — Iraq.
