How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I didn't.
Updated Monday, March 17, 2008, at 4:29 PM ETEditor's note: To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?" We have invited contributions from the best-known "liberal hawks," many of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early 2004. We will be publishing their responses through the week. Read the rest of the contributions.
An "anniversary" of a "war" is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region. I am one of those who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of "fragile truces," until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is not at all to redefine warfare and still less to contextualize it out of existence. But when I wrote the essays that go to make up A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, I was expressing an impatience with those who thought that hostilities had not really "begun" until George W. Bush gave a certain order in the spring of 2003.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponAnyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath Party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.
If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam Hussein, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favor in our nation's capital at the precise moment when he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favor until the very moment when he decides to "engulf" his small Kuwaiti neighbor. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam's regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war." We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him. The president's speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.
That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups. Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had ever believed or than the Bush administration had ever suggested.
Most Fast Food Restaurants Thrived During the Recession. Not Arby's.
Did Anti-Communists Really End Communism? Two Historians Say No.
Dear Farhad: How Does Facebook Know I'm Gay?
What Ever Happened to Hood Ornaments?
Are Doctors Allowed To Say They're Sorry?
Hitchens: Let's Not Get Sentimental About Communism
Comments from the Fray
Many arguments can be made about Iraq that seem to suggest ambiguous results: maybe the invasion was moral or maybe it wasn't; maybe it was a dramatic change in policy or maybe it was the inevitable extension of prolonged policy; maybe more lives were saved than not or maybe more lives were endangered; maybe the political structure of Iraq is better or maybe it's just more fragile; and on and on...
The problem with this maybe/maybe-not argument is that war (not anything resembling war, but physical boots-on-the-ground invasion) itself is not normative. By default, war is a failure unless a dramatic, clear, incontestable success results. War carries an exceptionally high burden of success because the tactic is among our most monstrous. Iraq has failed to meet this burden.
--Jams
(To reply, click here)
Hitchens makes fun of his opponents by invoking what he calls the Bishop Berkeley principle, which is the argument that if something isn't caused by the US, it isn't our responsibility.
But the truth is, since the US isn't the world's government, the Bishop Berkeley principle is actually correct. Substitute any other country for the US in that formulation: if something isn't caused by France, or China, or India, or Suriname, is it that country's responsibility? So what Hitchens must be arguing is that we are a world government, and everyone else must bow to our will.
In fact, Hitchens has no appreciation for the limitations on American power: America can't be everywhere and do everything-- we don't have unlimited resources, our armed forces aren't unlimited, and interventions don't always work and are counterproductive. Hitchens wants to point to Saddam's terror, or Darfur, or Rwanda, or wherever bad things are happening, and scream "do something!". Then when the "something" turns out to be a disaster (as it did in Iraq), he bears no responsibility, because after all, "we had to do something".
No. Enough American exceptionalism. We aren't any different from any other nation-state. We have our own problems, and we can't solve all the world's. The best we can do is intervene selectively when the benefits clearly exceed the costs. And when our reach exceeds our grasp, the people who called for us to stick our arms out (like Hitchens) certainly are responsible. No, Chris, we didn't have to do anything. In fact, we shouldn't have.
--Dilan Esper
(To reply, click here)
(3/17)