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How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I didn't.

By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, March 17, 2008, at 4:29 PM ET

Editor'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.

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This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say "attempt" rather than "do," which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice." But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Photograph of toppled statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad by Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images.
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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)

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