It is also highly likely that the post-Saddam Iraq we have now is far better than the post-Saddam Iraq we would have gotten had we failed to invade in 2003.
Hitchens notes something that should always be considered when discussing Iraq. We didn't cause the Shia-Sunni-Kurd fighting in Iraq and if we hadn't invaded it is likely there would have been a civil war in Iraq with the Iranians, Saudis, and Turks intervening to protect their interests. So-called 'stability' was never really an option with Saddam's regime.
Wrote Hitchens:
Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity imposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribal Tikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over the divisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds had already withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time the coalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decades old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty. Nothing was going to stop their explosion, and if Saddam Hussein's regime had been permitted to run its course and to devolve (if one can use such a mild expression) into the successorship of Udai and Qusai, the resulting detonation would have been even more vicious.
And into the power vacuum would have stepped not only Saudi Arabia and Iran, each with its preferred confessional faction, but also Turkey, in pursuit of hegemony in Kurdistan. In other words, the alternative was never between a tranquil if despotic Iraq and a destabilizing foreign intervention, but it was, rather, a race to see which kind of intervention there would be. The international community in its wisdom decided to delay the issue until the alternatives were even fewer, but it is idle to pretend that Iraq was going to remain either unified or uninvaded after the destruction of its fabric as a state by three decades of fascism and war, including 12 years of demoralizing sanctions.
Indeed, I recently wrote about what a civil war in 2003 would have meant:
Consider that if Iraq devolves into civil war we would consider it a defeat. Then remember that in February 2003, we would have considered a civil war in Iraq as a great victory. It would have meant that the people of Iraq had risen up against the Baathists. It would have meant that the Shias were battling the entrenched Sunni Baathist regime with a chance of ending the regime. We would have had the opportunity to try and send in special forces to repeat our Afghanistan success. Civil war and chaos would have been an improvement over an enemy regime running Iraq that supported terror, threatened the stability of the region, and wanted WMD.
Had we helped the Shias and Kurds win that insurrection, we would have gotten a Shia-run Iraq with the Kurds still safe in their mountain redoubt. The death and destruction that would have been necessary for the Shias to defeat the Baathists when the Shias had only their numbers going for them would have dwarfed the losses of the last three and a half years. The Baathists probably wouldn't have accepted their defeat whether the Shia victory meant Shias marched on Baghdad to take the capital or just managed to eject Saddam's security apparatus from the Shia south.Sounds worse than what we have today, eh? And that scenario would have been an improvement over the status quo of February 2003.
And I didn't even broach the possibility that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey would have overtly intervened to protect their own interests.
I'm sure our sanctions would have been blamed for this outcome, too. And there is little chance we would have intervened to separate the combatants and end the bloodshed until after the sides had exhausted themselves by killing. Like our Bosnia intervention, we would only go in after the killing when the killers themselves were tired of killing and after the combatants themselves had determined the boundaries to come.
And remember, too, that this outcome is exactly what many anti-war advocates wanted. They wanted the Shias and Kurds to do the job themselves. Saddam was bad, of course, they said. But we shouldn't do it. Let the Iraqis do the job themselves. Or the Arab League. At most send in our special forces like in Afghanistan. Of course, those who wanted these things always implicitly assumed a Kumbaya moment when the Sunni Arabs would just give in when faced with people power. And Saddam would have just turned himself in to Kofi Annan for a nice international trial (and no death penalty, of course!)
But recall the Saddam Fedayeen--the imported jihadi killers--who Saddam planned to unleash on the Shias to control them. Recall the brutality of the last three years of Saddam's henchmen and al Qaeda terrorists. The regime would not have gone quietly into exile. The Baathists would have fought with the same ferocity as today, but with far greater relative power against the ill-armed Shias.
At least the way we've done it by invading and toppling Saddam's regime, we have a chance to keep Iraq intact and the neighbors out. Plus we eliminated a country that was actively working against us. And if we keep on the path we are, and don't panic and hand victory to the stunned and staggering enemy that our troops are killing every day, we can gain an ally in the war on terror. This will be a good new stability.
The Iraqi kids will probably even fly kites.
