It was a farrago of lies and half-truths, of delusion and doublethink. Aside from the viewers of Fox News, most people are now aware that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no ties between secular Saddam and Islamist Osama. The fall of the Ba’athist dictatorship failed to usher in a democratic or human-rights revolution. Every argument advanced by the hawks proved to be utterly false.
The Iraq war was a strategic disaster – or, as the Tory minister Kenneth Clarke put it in a recent BBC radio discussion, “the most disastrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime . . . worse than Suez”. The invasion and occupation of the country undermined the moral standing of the western powers; empowered Iran and its proxies; heightened the threat from al-Qaeda at home and abroad; and sent a clear signal to “rogue” regimes that the best (the only?) means of deterring a pre-emptive, US-led attack was to acquire weapons of mass destruction (see Korea, North).
Let's have a go at this heart of the article's misrepresentation of the past, shall we?
One, while it is true that Saddam did not have WMD when we invaded, it was clear that Saddam had the capacity (with technicians, raw materials, and scientists) to revive his chemical weapons production rather rapidly.
Recall that Saddam was under the obligation to prove to America and the West that he had disarmed. He refused to prove he disarmed and anti-war critics insisted we had to prove he had not disarmed.
And in an effort to bluff foes--including Iran--Saddam actually tried to appear to have WMD. So much so that every intelligence agency in the world (with the possible exception of our State Department's) were convinced Saddam had WMD. Had sanctions faltered, Saddam would have created WMD to deter Iran.
Further, given the long time it took to actually invade Iraq and the long time it took to secure Iraqi territory, we still can't be sure what was in Iraq in the year prior to the invasion.
Don't forget that we most certainly did find chemical weapons all during the post-invasion fight. Admittedly, they weren't post-1991 ammunition. But they were there and Saddam wasn't supposed to have any. It certainly showed that chemical arms could survive undetected for years even as we had access to the entire country.
Two, while there is no evidence that Saddam helped plan 9/11--and Bush never argued he did--there is ample evidence that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda and to terrorists in general. Indeed, Saddam imported jihadis in the thousands (Saddam's Fedayeen) before and during the war to fight us and to be ready to suppress the Shias if we failed to capture Baghdad as Saddam expected.
Three, the assertion that Iraq isn't better off politically and in regard to freedom is so dense as to defy comprehension. Iraq isn't as good as I'd hope at this point, but we aren't there to help and Iran and al Qaeda still kills Iraqis. Despite divisions within Iraq, there is a democracy and the government isn't resorting to Saddam's gentle methods of poison gas and people shredders to cow opposition.
The idea that Iraq was a strategic disaster is amazingly wrong. Imagine, the moral standing of the West is reduced so much in Islamic lands as the result of the Iraq War that the Arab world's leaders asked us to intervene in Libya to stop a slaughter and even participated in our regime change there. Our moral standing was reduced so much that Arab people are angry that we haven't intervened in Syria to stop Assad's slaughter of civilians over the last two years. Our moral standing is so reduced that Arab states are working with us to contain Iran, and France had the global green light to intervene in Mali.
Hell, we dumped Osama bin Laden's corpse at sea and there was hardly a peep from the Arab Street, which could recognize a weak (and quite dead) horse when they saw one.
Iran has more room to maneuver in support of their proxies in Iran, it is true. But that is only because we aren't there to oppose them as I long assumed we'd do. And it requires you to say that Saddam's brutality is preferable because he hated Iranians as much as he hated Shias and Kurds (and any Sunni Arabs who opposed him, for that matter). It also requires you to ignore that we have far more influence in Iraq than we did before, notwithstanding Iran's opportunities that have not erased Arab hostility within Iraq to Persian influence. When Iraq is stronger militarily, Iran's influence will decline because Iraq's government will have less reason to fear resisting Iranian influence.
And proxy-wise, Iran is having major problems with bolstering Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Being empowered is not one of those problems.
While al Qaeda did invade Iraq after the invasion, their distraction from Afghanistan has led them to be defeated in both nations. So much so that they seek weak spots to run to--currently Mali. And al Qaeda's mass murder spree in Iraq harmed their reputation so much that the Arab Spring has not witnessed jihadi take overs of regimes as many feared ten years ago when the anti-war side said the Arab Street would topple autocrats out of sympathy for al Qaeda.
The idea that the Iraq War caused rogue regimes to seek nuclear weapons ignores the fact that both Iran and North Korea had nuclear programs long before we invaded Iraq a decade ago. Amazingly, Bush Derangement Syndrome has bent the time-space continuum. I hope not many more pixels must be expended to refute that so-called cause and effect.
Oh, and the author says that just between 2003 and 2006 that over 600,000 Iraqis died (citing the discredited The Lancet, no less!), when the toll for the entire war was 20% of that (and insurgents were 20% of that toll). And again, don't forget that the vast majority of the death toll came after our invasion and can be laid at the feet of those who resisted the new government of the majorities.
And the ideas that we bombed Iraq's infrastructure and that Iraq is economically worse off today are ludicrous.
So the results of the war bear no relationship to the anti-war side's assessment as this author asserts. They are as wrong about this as they were wrong about the impossibility of defeating Saddam (Stalingrad on the Tigris and Euphrates when we reached Baghdad?) and as wrong as they were about our ability to defeat the so-called national resistance that was always from a small but well-armed and well-financed minority of Sunni Arabs and Shia Sadrists bolstered by Syria, Iran, al Qaeda, and much of the Sunni Arab world (and don't forget the global Left that championed the murderers) who supported the small resistance to the majority.
And they call themselves the "reality-based" side of this debate when they can put out something as utterly wrong as this piece? Amazing. I was way too optimistic about the ability of reality to penetrate their skulls.
