Victor Davis Hanson: Terrorists and Tyrants, Rethinking why we are at war in the Middle East

As American casualties mount in Iraq, politicians at home now fight over who said what and when about weapons of mass destruction and the need for going to war. One of the most frequent charges is that President George W. Bush hyped a non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida — and that as a result, we diverted our efforts from finishing off the real terrorists to start a new and costly war to replace a secular dictator.

This charge is false for several reasons — and illogical for even more...

....Saddam worried little over the agendas of ...diverse terrorist groups, only that they shared his own generic hatred of Western governments. This kind of support from leaders such as Saddam has proven crucial to radical, violent Islamicists' efforts.

After Sept. 11, it became clear that these enemies can only resort to terrorism to weaken American resolve and gain concessions — and can't even do that without the clandestine help of illegitimate regimes (from Saddam in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the theocracy in Iran, Assad in Syria and others) who provide money and sanctuary while denying culpability.

Middle Eastern terrorists and tyrants feed on one another. The Saddams and Assads of the region — and to a less extent the Saudi royal family and the Mubarak dynasty — deflected popular anger over their own failures on to the United States by allowing terrorists to scapegoat the Americans.

Yet, for a quarter-century, oil, professed anti-communism and loud promises to "fight terror" earned various reprieves from the West for these dictatorships, who were deathly afraid that one day America might catch on and do something other than shoot a cruise missile at enemies while sternly lecturing "friends."

That day came after Sept. 11. To end the old pathology, we took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, pressured the Syrians to leave Lebanon, encouraged Lebanese democracy, hectored the Egyptians about elections, told Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to come clean about his nuclear plans, and risked oil supplies by jawboning the Persian Gulf monarchies to liberalize.

The theory behind all these messy and often caricatured efforts was not the desire for endless war — we removed by force only the two worst regimes, in Afghanistan and Iraq — but to allow Middle Easterners a third alternative between Islamic radicalism and secular dictatorship. No wonder that wherever there are elections in the Middle East — Afghanistan and Iraq — legitimate governments there have the moral authority and the desire to fight Islamic terrorism.

Americans can blame one another all we want over the cost in lives and treasure in Iraq. But the irony is that not long ago everyone from Bill Clinton to George Bush, senators, CIA directors and federal prosecutors all agreed that Saddam had offered assistance to al-Qaida, the organization that murdered 3,000 Americans. That was one of the many reasons we went into Iraq, why Zarqawi and ex-Baathists side-by-side now attack American soldiers — and why an elected Iraqi government is fighting with us.

From the Response to Readership section, November 2005 (http://victorhanson.com/articles/Private Papers/Question Log/November05.html)

Is it accurate to say that the cooperation of four nations — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran — would take us a long way toward "eradication" of the global jihadist threat? While that cooperation is needed, the assessment of its impact seems too optimistic. Radical Islam will always be with us until there emerges within Islam something analogous to Christianity, a religion, remember, that at one time excluded and executed "heretics" and practiced zealous, sometimes brutal missionary works. Can Muslim leaders curb similar impulses in Islam? If Islamic communities can't separate jihad from their religion, do you believe there is hope of a separation of mosque and state?

Hanson: We have little problem with a Turkey or the 200 million plus Muslims in India. So just imagine: Pakistan shuts down the border with Afghanistan, hunts down Osama bin Laden and others, while Saudi Arabia ceases funding the charities and madrassas; Assad is out and a reform government in Syria stops sending terrorists into Iraq while Iran became democratic and renounces terrorism and the bomb. That would radically change the Middle East.
We must detach radical Islamicists from Islam by killing the terrorists who attack the West, defeating the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then discrediting the appeasers who live in or wish to visit the West. We are making good progress, but the day is coming for so-called moderate Muslims to pick sides and either condemn the radicals in their midst who count on either appeasement or stealthy support, or suffer guilt by their silence.
The world wishes to know from Muslims abroad and inside the West what explains their silence: is it secret admiration for radical Islamic fascism that gives them some sort of psychological glee at seeing a dominant West attacked? Do they really wish a new caliphate? Or are they simply in fear of assassination should they speak out? Buddhists did not tolerate the Bushido strain outside of Japan during World War II; in the same way Wahhabism must be likewise discredited if Islam is not going to be tarred by those fascists who speak the loudest and most threatening in its name.

Why do you say it is no accident regarding Iran becoming a nuclear threat? Is it a deliberate policy?

Yes, and it has many advantages — if the Iranians can get away with it: blackmail Arab oil producers to cut production and increase profits; supply terrorists with nuclear material and then deny the link; use the nationalist angle of whipping up sinking public confidence in the mullocracy by proclaiming a Darius-like Achaemenid, rather than Islamic, bomb; threaten Israel; get blackmail money from Europeans in missile range. And those are just the rational inducements.
There are the loony considerations as well: lose 10 million Iranians to wipe out Israel, and thus be forever rewarded in Paradise as the Islamic destroyer of the Jews. So we should all be very worried about this lose/lose situation in which doing nothing creates a nightmare and doing something means that the United States, as the world's sheriff, is trashed once more as a "preemptor" even as we have our hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan and world oil prices skyrocket. I assume China will do all it can to ensure Iranian oil stays on the market and that means opposing us in way they can to their own self-interest.

The Angry Reader section

http://victorhanson.com/Books%26Things.html

October 15, 2005

The Iraq war is a bungle. Why? To get 1,900 Americans killed and spend $200 billion to make Iraq a puppet state of Iran is idiocy. This is the stupidest Mideast policy since 1979 when the Peanut Farmer President greased the skids for the Shah permitting Khomeni to take over Iran. In truth, the Sunni terrorists are our allies, if they prevent Iran's takeover of Iraq. Who cares if the Iraqis have a dictatorship as long as it's no threat to us? I don't.

Hanson: I think you are far too pessimistic. So far there is little evidence that Iraq will be a puppet of Iran, but may end up subverting the theocracy in Teheran more quickly than it ruins Iraq. I agree that President Carter had no clue how to handle the hostage crisis, and that our war started in some sense in November 1979 when there was nothing real done about the attack on the American embassy.

No terrorists are our allies. And our support for Realpolitik inevitably leads to the current mess as these "friends" always divert popular angst against us and make unholy alliances with terrorists. Saddam killed over 1 million and was not someone we wished to have anything to do with. For all the misunderstanding and caricature of the present policy it will lead to a more permanent solution to the Middle East than backing the latest autocrat who, we can be sure, will always turn on us and kill his own in the process.

The Angry Reader section

http://victorhanson.com/Books%26Things.html November 3, 2005

Below are a series of questions asked and answer in turn by VDH.

1.) Should we not have invaded Saudi Arabia first and foremost, and if so,
2.) Is the "Right," by defending the invasion of Iraq, merely making the best of what everyone can objectively agree might have been better put farther down the "to do" list?

Hanson: No, we should not have invaded the kingdom. No one has been more critical of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia for its support of terrorism than I. But it had no prior history of war with the U.S. (cf. 1991-2003 of hot fighting and no-fly zones in Iraq), did not exterminate its own people, did not try to kill a former President, and in general did not do the sort of things outlined in the U.S. Senate's October 2002 resolution calling for war against Saddam. I cannot imagine the war against terrorism could be won with Saddam still in power. Look at the recent nefarious activity of Syria — after Saddam was removed — and it is a poor and insignificant player compared to Iraq. So for good or evil, all the marbles are up for grabs in Iraq; its transition to a constitutional government will alter the region for the good and deflate the impetus for terror, or its descent into chaos will make Lebanon or Vietnam look minor.

3.)Why can't I shake the feeling that otherwise intelligent people are suffering from desperate denial that we have, at best, a "guileless fool" and at worst a "village idiot" in the White House? Or doesn't it really matter in the "big picture"?
Hanson: I think you measure leadership largely by rhetorical skills and most of us do not. True, Clinton was a brilliant ad hoc debater, and his oratory even without preparation was impressive. He had a keen political mind, and almost instantaneously could fathom political factions.
But? He was often paralyzed in wishing to be continually liked by all sides which led to inaction and temporizing — sending Americans to Somalia but without tanks in hopes of not antagonizing anyone, shooting cruise missiles into terrorist compounds but not at hours when the occupants might be there, bombing Saddam's facilities but then ceasing before Ramadan, and so on. That pattern of the 1990s led to a sense of passivity and contributed to 9/11 when al Qaeda was assured that there would be very few consequences to bombing New York and Washington.
In contrast, we acted after 9/11 and freed 50 million in removing the two worst governments on the planet, despite almost universal criticism of the type that the U.K. endured in 1940 when it was alone. We have not had another 9/11-type attack and in this brutal war have lost 2/3s so far in Iraq that we lost on the first day of the conflict. I don't think a village idiot could do that. Part of the Left's problem is this insistence that intelligence is measured by glibness, when it is often not. John Kerry learned that in the debates when his impressive command of facts and language did not matter much when he came across as indecisive and contradictory, however glib in the process.
True, Mr. Bush's problem is his failing to sound like Tony Blair or Winston Churchill — often critical in a war of this type. But in your 'big picture' the ability to make tough decisions and stick with them in the face of opportunistic criticism trumps deft speech, however valuable the latter is.
4.) Is your view of warfare any different than the conventional fascist view of civilization's Highest Achievement?

Hanson: I think, if you have read anything I have written, the theme is that the true amorality is going to war and allowing troops in the field to be killed without a rational plan on how to win, end the war and solve the political objectives that started it. Even worse is a bellum interruptum that costs lives but leaves the problem unsolved and for another generation to repeat the bloodletting.
Was it a high achievement to allow 50 million to vote, or to allow the Taliban to keep butchering innocents and use Afghanistan to plan more attacks on thousands of civilians? Or perhaps you could out-debate those who gassed the Kurds? What was the high achievement of Mao and Stalin, who without going to a "fascist' war, butchered between them 100 million in "peace"? Or I suppose the Southern Planationists could have been persuaded to give up millions in slavery over tea? To your silly question, I answer ask those at Dachau, or Nanking, or today in Darfur. Wars are prevented by having credible defenses to convince lunatics like Hitler or Osama bin Laden not to try something foolish, and when such deterrence is lost, then things get very dangerous. How such thinking is "fascist" only someone of your smugness could determine.

Yes. Good point.

Looking retrospectively, I can only say that Mark Steyn, who was advocating the Iraqi campaign to start as soon as possible, was all too right.

The consequences of the current ankle biting and revisionism are 2-fold and in part are opposite of the declared goal of having a thorough debate about the major steps like war before it begins.

First. The threshold of acting is raised up again. It is again like in the 9/10 world, hard to get the political consensus to act.

Second. A future leader, being all too aware that Bush/Powell methodical preparation for the war and attempt to cover all bases before the action started did allow anti-war forces to consolidate and mature, thus this future leader may be tempted to act too soon in order to circumvent opposition and present them with a fact-accompli. He (she?) would realize that no matter what -- the opposition will be against it, so why bother? And that CAN be a big mistake because a healthy debate is very much needed.

In whole this political circus since 2000, I think the worst outcome of the Left hysteria is the removal of normal debate and replacement of it with the 10 seconds sound bites and shrill and loud accusations; which is fundamentally unhealthy for our society.

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