WHEN Barack Obama confirms next week that all American combat forces have left Iraq, you can be sure of one thing. He will not repeat the triumphalism of George Bush’s suggestion seven years ago that America’s mission there has been accomplished. Mr Obama always considered this a “dumb” war, and events have proved him largely right. America and its allies may have rid the Middle East of a bloodstained dictator, but Saddam Hussein’s vaunted weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a chimera and the cost in American and especially Iraqi lives has been hideous. Iraq, it is true, is no longer a dictatorship. Thanks in part to Mr Bush’s lonely refusal in 2007 to heed the calls to cut and run, the sectarian bloodletting that followed the invasion has abated. But the country’s new democracy remains chronically insecure (see article), which is one reason why some 50,000 American “support” troops are to stay behind to shore it up.
Where to begin? From the beginning, I suppose.
I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who understood at the time that when President Bush on that carrier noted the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, he was speaking of the formal end on May 1 of the force-on-force conventional phase of the war. No, he didn't (any more than I did, since I assumed wrongly that the hard part of the fighting was over) speak at that point of defeating an insurgency that had not yet begun, but he did speak of the hard work we still had to do. And few war opponents saw the insurgency, with major leaders in Congress complaining that Bush had conspired to win a war decisively to enable Republican gains in the 2004 elections.
The main part is the defense of President Obama's judgment as a candidate that the Iraq War was "dumb" and that events have proven him right. Really?
So ridding Iraq of a blood-stained dictator was dumb?
The cost in American and Iraqi lives was hideous? Our losses have been tragic at an individual and family level, but the losses we endured are historically low. Judging them "hideous" says more about the West's low tolerance for any casualties far more than it speaks of the casualties themselves. As for Iraqi lives, the responsibility for those losses lies with our enemies who either deliberately targeted civilians or who violated the laws of war to risk civilian lives. We acted far more cautiously to avoid civilian casualties than international law requires. Over 100,000 dead is a lot, but Saddam inflicted far more on his own people in his reign and we shouldn't assume that his killing spree would have been over had we not overthrown that admitted "blood-stained dictator."
And eliminating a dictatorship is meaningless because the democracy in Iraq remains chronically insecure and requires 50,000 troops to maintain? Oh, come on! This circular logic in defeatism and willful refusal to recongize success is amazing. Getting rid of a dictatorship is not a good thing because the democracy that replaced it is insecure? An insecure democracy is worse than dictaroship because it still requires 50,000 US troops to protect? But our troops were necessary in the first place to end that dictatorship that in theory was a bad thing, right? One day, if we don't convince ourselves we've lost as The Economist editors have done, we won't require troops at all in Iraq. Heck, I still hope that one day we won't need troops in NATO countries, Japan, and South Korea (with a strong dissent to the author's assertion that we "broke" Iraq so have an obligation to fix it--Saddam "broke" Iraq before 2003 and terrorists backed by Syria and Iran bounced the rubble after that) to protect those democracies. Is it really so outrageous that we would need to stay in post-war Iraq for pershaps decades to come?
And the biggest outrage of the opinion: so Iraq's WMD were a "chimera?" A chimera, my dictionary tells me, is "a creation of the imagination; an impossible and foolish fancy."
In what way, dear writers of the mother tongue, was the issue of Iraqi WMD a creation of the imagination? Did not Iraq manufacture and use chemical weapons against Iran and against their own Kurds in the 1980s? Did not Iraq have a nuclear weapons program until we ended it in the Persian Gulf War of 1991? Didn't we discover in the mid-1990s from a momentarily defecting son-in-law of Saddam that Iraq had an active biological weapons program? Did not President Clinton engage in four days of Operation Desert Fox, along with our British allies most notably, in 1998 to destroy Saddam's continuing WMD infrastructure? Didn't the UN itself confess in the months before the Iraq War of 2003 that Iraq had failed to account for all its WMD raw materials? In what sense did our imagation create the Saddam WMD threat?
It is true that we did not find actual post-1991 WMD in Iraq (but I don't rule out that they are buried in Iraq or stored in Syria). But is it possible to declare the ability and intention of Saddam to get WMD an impossible and foolish fancy given that he kept in place--at great cost in human and financial terms--the infrastructure and raw materials of a WMD project that could have put mustard gas into his arsenal within months of ending sanctions, and worse in the years that would follow the ending of international sanctions?
Does anyone really believe that given that Saddam bluffed that Iraq had at least some WMD in order to deter an Iranian attack to exploit Iraq's conventional weakness, that Saddam would not have tried to cover that bluff the instant he could get away with it? Really? An effing "chimera," you toadies of conventional history-forgetting wisdom who think that PBS-style upper crust English language usage is all the authority you need to judge the WMD issue a slam dunk as a "chimera"?
What a bunch of dandified a-holes. And those words mean exactly what I think they mean.
I know the US-British relationship must remain special when I can read crap like that from their prestige press and still consider Britain our best ally.
