Restating the Case for War (Christopher Hitchens on Iraq)

Slate ^ | 5 November 2003 | Christopher Hitchens

[Stultis]

Restating the Case for War
Waiting for Saddam to change is what got us into this mess in the first place.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003, at 8:00 AM PT

The following is a dense paragraph of apparent prescience that was first published in 1998:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under these circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations's mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

This is taken from Chapter 19 of A World Transformed, by President Bush senior and Gen. Brent Scowcroft. With allowance made for a few differences of emphasis (and of confusion, possibly willful, about the historical record—Manuel Noriega was in fact fairly easily apprehended), it is now the pattern for an emerging conventional wisdom. Like its more recent emulators, extending from many Democratic candidates to an increasing number of commentators, it represents the anti-Saddam war, or the "regime change" campaign, as something elective and voluntary rather than as something inescapable. (It is also, you may notice, the same logic that was used by Bush, Scowcroft, and others to justify staying out of Bosnia.)

I have noticed lately a distressing tendency on the part of those who support the intervention in Iraq to rest their case largely on underreported good news. Now, it is certainly true, as I have said myself, that there is much to celebrate in the new Iraq. The restoration of the ecology of the southern marshes, the freedom to follow the majority Shiite religion, the explosion of new print and electronic media, the emancipation of the schools and universities, and the consolidation of Kurdish autonomy are all magnificent things. But those who want to take credit for them must also axiomatically accept the blame for the failure to anticipate huge lacunae in the provision of power, water, and security.

More to the point, one has to be prepared to support a campaign—or a cause—that is going badly. The president has been widely lampooned by many a glib columnist for saying that increased violence is not necessarily a cause for despair and may even be evidence of traction. He is, in fact, quite right to take this view, which was first expressed, to my knowledge, by Gen. John Abizaid. Those who murder the officials of the United Nations and the Red Cross, set fire to oil pipelines and blow up water mains, and shoot down respected clerics outside places of worship are indeed making our point for us. There is no justifiable way that a country as populous and important as Iraq can be left at the mercy of such people. And—here is my crux—there never was.

The counsel of prudence offered above by Bush and Scowcroft was all very well as far as it went. But it did leave Saddam Hussein in power, and it did (as its authors elsewhere concede) involve the United States in watching from the sidelines as Iraqis were massacred for rebelling on its side and in its name. It left the Baathist regime free to continue work on weapons of mass destruction, which we know for certain it was doing on a grand scale until at the very least 1995. And it left Saddam free to continue to threaten his neighbors and to give support and encouragement to jihad forces around the world. (The man most wanted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled straight from New Jersey to Baghdad, though there are still those in our "intelligence" services who prefer to grant Saddam the presumption of innocence in this and many other matters.) It also left Saddam Hussein free to try and assassinate former President Bush on his postwar visit to Kuwait—an act of such transparent lunacy that it far transcends any sneers about George W. wanting to avenge his daddy. (It also demonstrates, by the way, Saddam Hussein's urgent personal need for a revenge for 1991—a consideration that deserves more attention than it has received.)

This already lousy status quo was volatile and unstable. Saddam Hussein's speeches and policies were becoming ever more demented and extreme and ever more Islamist in tone. The flag of Iraq was amended to include a verse from the Quran, and gigantic mosques began to be built in Saddam's own name. Even if, as seems remotely possible, he was largely bluffing about weapons of mass destruction, this conclusion would destroy the view maintained by many liberals that, for all his crimes, Saddam understood the basic logic of deterrence and self-preservation. (That he was "in his box," as the saying went.) Not only was he able to defy the United Nations, but with French and Russian collusion, he was also increasingly able to circumvent sanctions. The "box" was falling apart, and its supposed captive was becoming more toxic. As he became older and madder, there emerged the real prospect of a succession passing to either Odai or Qusai Hussein, or to both of them. Who could view that prospect with equanimity? (Qusai Hussein was at the heart of the concealment program, for centrifuges and other devices, that has recently been partly exposed by David Kay's report.)

Meanwhile, the no-fly zones managed to protect the Kurds and Shiites from a repeat performance of the mass murders of 1991 and earlier but did not prevent, for example, the planned destruction of the largest wetlands in the Middle East, home to the 5,000-year-old civilization of the Marsh Arabs. The smoke from this drain-and-burn atrocity was visible from the space shuttle. I shall leave open the question of whether "we" had any responsibility to prevent this and other mutilations and tortures of Iraqi society, except to say that the meltdown and trauma of that society, now so visible to all, were always inescapably in our future and would in any case have had consequences beyond themselves for the wider region. The continuation of this regime was indeed an imminent threat, at least in the sense that it was a permanent threat.

The question then, becomes this: Should the date or timing of this unpostponable confrontation have been left to Saddam Hussein to pick? The two chief justifications offered by the Bush administration (which did mention human rights and genocide at its first presentation to the United Nations, an appeal that fell on cold as well as deaf ears) were WMDs and terrorism. Here, it is simply astonishing how many people remain willing to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt. The late Dr. David Kelley, whose suicide has so embarrassed the Blair government, put it very plainly in an article he wrote just before the war. Seriousness about "inspections" required a regime change in Iraq—no credible inspection could be conducted on any other terms. This point has since been amply vindicated by the Kay inquiry, still in its early stages, which has already unearthed compelling evidence of a complex concealment program, of the designing of missiles well beyond the permitted legal range, of the intimidation of scientists and witnesses, and of the incubation (in some cases hidden in scientists' homes) of deadly biological toxins. Some of the other leads have turned out to be false, or at any rate not proved, and no major stockpiles have yet been found. Nonetheless, the Baathists declared a very impressive stockpile as late as 1999 and never cared to inform the U.N. inspectorate what they had done with it. (If they destroyed it themselves, it deserves to be pointed out, they were in gross and open breach of the relevant resolutions, which anticipated this tactic and specified that all weapons were to be turned over, listed, classified, and only then neutralized in the presence of certified witnesses.)

Before the war, it was a staple of anti-interventionist argument that Saddam was too well-armed to be attacked and would unleash weapons of mass destruction in a horrific manner. (Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany opposed the war despite being—possibly wrongly—informed by his intelligence services that Saddam was no more than three years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb.) Any failures of prediction on this point can thus be shared equally, but there is no moral equivalence between them. Thanks to the intervention, Saddam Hussein has been verifiably disarmed, and a full accounting of his concealment and acquisition programs is being conducted. Where is the objection to that? Why so much surliness and resentment?

I am pleased to notice the disappearance from the peacenik argument of one line of attack—namely that Saddam Hussein was "too secular" to have anything to do with jihad forces. The alliance between his murderous fedayeen and the jihadists is now visible to all—perhaps there are some who are still ready to believe that this connection only began this year. Meanwhile, an increasing weight of disclosure shows that the Iraqi Mukhabarat both sought and achieved contact with the Bin Laden forces in the 1990s and subsequently. Again, was one to watch this happening and hope that it remained relatively low-level?

The literal-minded insistence that all government rhetoric be entirely scrupulous strikes me, in view of the above, as weird. It can only come from those who were not willing to form, or to defend, positions of their own: in other words, those for whom Saddam would not have been a problem unless Bush tried to make him into one. An example: In trying to justify the earlier eviction of Saddam from Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker put forward the case that "jobs" were the main justification. I thought that to be both stupid and ignoble at the time (and was generally antiwar at that date) but did not think that it automatically, or even partially, invalidated the case for restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty by force of arms.

Arguments about democracy and reform cannot be phrased in terms of U.N. resolutions—especially when two of the relevant regime's clients are among the permanent membership of the Security Council—but there is every reason to believe that the United States has chosen the right side in the region, in principle as well as in practice. To take the salient case of Iran, does anybody believe that the mullahs' regime would have agreed to searches and inspections, or that Messrs Straw, de Villepin, and Fischer would have been able to seize the initiative on behalf of the European Union, except in the case that a) the main rival of Iran had been itself disarmed and b) a certain pedagogic lesson had been instilled? And that is to leave to one side the coming "people power" revolution in Iran itself, which seems to have been substantially encouraged by the "regime change" policy next door.

We are fighting for very large principles, in other words, and for extremely high stakes. And yes, part of the proof of this is the horror and terror and misery involved. Only a few months ago, the first elected president of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was shot down in the street by the alliance of mafiosi and ethnic fascists who constitute the legacy of Slobodan Milosevic. That gruesome reverse took place years after Milosevic himself had been put under arrest (and only a short while after the corpse of his murdered predecessor, Ivan Stambolic, had been finally unearthed). But do you want to try and imagine what former Yugoslavia would look like now if there had not been an international intervention (postponed and hobbled by the United Nations) to arrest the process of aggression and ethnocide? Both Bush and Scowcroft—and Baker—did make the irresponsible decision to let the Balkans bleed, which is why I mistrust the counsel of prudence that I opened by quoting and find even more suspect the tendency of today's left to take refuge in neutralist and conservative isolationism.

[Stultis]

Ping for your scotch-swilling, left-leaning love interest. (O.K., O.K., he's right, again.)

[Stultis]

"I have noticed lately a distressing tendency on the part of those who support the intervention in Iraq to rest their case largely on underreported good news. Now, it is certainly true, as I have said myself, that there is much to celebrate in the new Iraq. The restoration of the ecology of the southern marshes, the freedom to follow the majority Shiite religion, the explosion of new print and electronic media, the emancipation of the schools and universities, and the consolidation of Kurdish autonomy are all magnificent things. But those who want to take credit for them must also axiomatically accept the blame for the failure to anticipate huge lacunae in the provision of power, water, and security.

More to the point, one has to be prepared to support a campaign—or a cause—that is going badly. The president has been widely lampooned by many a glib columnist for saying that increased violence is not necessarily a cause for despair and may even be evidence of traction. He is, in fact, quite right to take this view, which was first expressed, to my knowledge, by Gen. John Abizaid. Those who murder the officials of the United Nations and the Red Cross, set fire to oil pipelines and blow up water mains, and shoot down respected clerics outside places of worship are indeed making our point for us. There is no justifiable way that a country as populous and important as Iraq can be left at the mercy of such people. And—here is my crux—there never was."

[JmyBryan]

Thanks for this post.

[McGavin999]

I find it amazing that the Greens of europe have been totally silent about the Marsh Arabs. The marshes were almost totally destroyed and the people who lived that life were almost destroyed along with it, yet these supposed lovers of the environment have remained totally.....silent.

[duckln]

But do you want to try and imagine what former Yugoslavia would look like now if there had not been an international intervention (postponed and hobbled by the United Nations) to arrest the process of aggression and ethnocide?

What the heck is he talking about? We sided with terrorist who were raising hell in Bosnia and Kosovo. Milosevic responded and we chose the Islamists. What we have now is a bigger problem with the Islamists in defacto control of the area.

It was a 'civil war' and should have stayed as such.

[Billthedrill]

It's been a good evening for real meat here on FR, between the Ralph Peters article and this one by Christopher Hitchens. While I would caution the latter against an over-reliance on the Noriega point - Saddam has, in fact, proven quite difficult to apprehend if he's still alive - the bulk of the article is relentlessly accurate.

One is left with the impression that Bush fils has embarked on an absurdity - that a modern representative government may be established over the bones of a vicious despotism despite the desperate resistance of the latter's apologists and fellow-travelers, first by force of arms and then by force of persuasion. Everything in that is entirely topsy-turvy. We'll probably pull it off, and what is most terrifying to both the radical Islamicists and to an equally ossified Old Europe is what the world is going to look like when we do. Bismark and Richelieu would be groaning, but Franklin would be laughing. Interesting times.

[Stultis]

It was a 'civil war' and should have stayed as such.

I'm with you (to a certain extent) on Kosovo, but not Bosnia. The later was a blatant, murderous, aggressive and gratuitous land grab by the Bosnian Serbs (supported by the serbian serbs and the communist criminal Milosevic). The current dysfunctional mess, and the asurdly jur-rigged Dayton Accords, are the result of our failure to deal with aggression and ethnic cleansing early and forcefully. If we had done so (or even lifted the one-sided arms sanctions so the victims could have defended themselves without help from jihadis) there is at least a chance that we would now have several moderately stable and functional states in the former Yugoslavia that we wouldn't have to babysit for the next freakin' thirty years.

[Stultis]

but Franklin would be laughing

Not only that, but he'd probably be going toe to toe with Bechtel and Halliburton for reconstruction contracts too, God bless'm!

[NutCrackerBoy]

The bulk of the article is relentlessly accurate.

Real meat, indeed. I love how Hitchens rakes through the still-smoldering arguments of the left.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

*ping*

[lainde]

Bump for later read

[Askel5]

=== Those who murder the officials of the United Nations and the Red Cross, set fire to oil pipelines and blow up water mains, and shoot down respected clerics outside places of worship are indeed making our point for us.



Gosh, I hate it when he makes it sound like the acts of Terrorists somehow confer legimitacy. Some folks might get the wrong idea.

I think Hitchens ought to stick to the high road and simply defend his claims ... maybe putting something a little more substantive in the Lead Accomplishment of the Liberation and Democratization of Iraq than the potential restoration of the marshland ecology.

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

Good post. Thanks Stultis.

I have noticed lately a distressing tendency on the part of those who support the intervention in Iraq to rest their case largely on underreported good news.

 

...More to the point, one has to be prepared to support a campaign—or a cause—that is going badly

 

Sorry Christopher. I have noticed a distressing tendency on the part of the mainstream press to attempt to repeat what they did to our troops during Vietnam. Putting out the good news in the first place was to prevent the press from doing what they're doing now - working to make our cause 'go badly'.

 

For my part, the good news is not an attempt to ignore reality, but to portray the bigger picture, to defend the troops, to inform the world -  to counter the wilfull destruction of our efforts by a partisan press who played this deadly, anti-American game in Vietnam - inciting unrest on the ground, sowing dissent at home - getting our troops killed, extending the war, and assisting a deadly enemy spread a deadly philosophy around the globe.

Fact is, by ignoring most of the good news - the successes of the troops daily from day one - the mainstream press is complicite in the "unrest" in Iraq today. They do have "blood on their hands". They hyped bad news and handed their mighty pens to our enemies daily, and still treat our enemies as moral equivalents. Our FREE press had a REAL part in the war "going badly." By misinforming the world, America's FREE (thanks to our troops past and present) press helped  turn opinion both home and abroad against our efforts, as they did pre-war by promoting Saddam's apologists at ANSWER - and giving cowardly international leaders an excuse to pull out promised troops and $$$$.

We need an army fighting the culture war at home. Defending the troops. Perhaps Christopher can show us how to restate "why we fight" any more than we do daily to reach the  people who feed 24/7 on Rather, Couric and Oprah.

More to the point, one has to be prepared to support a campaign—or a cause—that is going badly

No question. And to call to account those who are aiding our enemies daily. Too few columns re. your destructive Dem. press peers over the past seven months, Mr. Hitchens.

I am glad you are on the side of the troops, and the war.

If you want on or off my Pro-Coalition ping list, please Freepmail me. Warning: it is a high volume ping list on good days. (Most days are good days).

[Alamo-Girl]

Fact is, by ignoring most of the good news - the successes of the troops daily from day one - the mainstream press is complicite in the "unrest" in Iraq today. They do have "blood on their hands".

So true. So very true.

[duckln]

Most Americans were carried away by the Clinton adminstration and media twisted reporting of the facts. I was unconvinced and especially ashamed of the 78 days bombing and our siding with decapitating 'terrorists'.

are the result of our failure to deal with aggression and ethnic cleansing early and forcefully. If we had done so,..

That's exactly right, we failed to support Serbia in it's fight against local Islamic cop killers. He was having the same problem as Israel has in Palistine, Russia in Chechnya, and many other places world wide.

A few words on Bosnia. Before the war, it was governed democratically by Croates, Serbs and Muslims. The Muslims, with a large birth rate, became the larger group of the three. They then wanted full control of Bosnia, not democratic control. That's when the crap hit the fan. We didn't let them settle it but went in and devided Bosnia into three sections. How long will that last?

Serbia itself has large percentages of Hungarians, Muslims, ect. and they get along and govern themselves just fine. They would also, IMO, do a better job in one Bosnia, than the EU/Nato landgrabbers are doing.

http://www.antiwar.com/malic/m-col.html
All the facts are coming out now at the kangaroo tribunal in process in the Hague. Ref link.

[Stultis]

I'll ask that this debate not be brought into this thread. I can't engage in dicussion with defenders of Milosevic and the Bosnian serbs. If frankly sickens me and is likely to get be banned.

[PhilDragoo]

Arguments about democracy and reform cannot be phrased in terms of U.N. resolutions—especially when two of the relevant regime's clients are among the permanent membership of the Security Council—but there is every reason to believe that the United States has chosen the right side in the region, in principle as well as in practice.

The generator missiles were half french, half Russian.

The UN routinely puts the likes of Syria or Libya at the head of its commissions.

We need the UN building for a decent USO for our warriors' R & R.

It's nice that Hitchens figured out the greens are full of crap--but then, some of us were never taken in.

[duckln]

It takes two to debate, if you chose not to, then don't. Just pointing out that Hitchens should know better than peddling that crap buried in the article. If he's not taken to account, people will believe it. Same goes with his bashing of Mother Theresa.

The truth hurts, I know, but check out the facts that are coming out in the Hague trial. No wonder Bush refuses to sign onto a corrupt international court.

You were the one compounding the lie in your post. I can't leave it go unchallenged. When you falsely slam the Serbs in favor of Clintons's NATO goons, then expect an informed rebuttal. It's odd that your friend Hitchens hates everything about Clinton except his cleansing of Bosnia and Kosovo in favor of terrorists.

[Stultis]

It's odd that your friend Hitchens hates everything about Clinton except his cleansing of Bosnia and Kosovo in favor of terrorists.

Again, fighting separatists in a breakaway province (Kosovo), even when done by a communist/militarist/authoritarian government, is worlds different than thirty percent of the population trying to grab seventy percent of the land, and engaging in a clear-eyed and fully intentional campaign of forced displacement and murder to do so (Bosnia).

You sir, are defending the murderers, and this is perfectly odious. As for the terrorists, they gained their foothold in the Balkans because Europe and the United States were slow to act in defending innocents against genocide, and because when he did act it was half-assed and insufficiently guided by moral clarity.