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WARNING: The page you have accessed is dependent on JAVASCRIPT which is n ot supported by your browser. Due to this limitation, you may experience unexpected results within this site. The Weekly Standard A War to Be Proud Of From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowin g Saddam was unimpeachable.
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears les s than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Ab u Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Co alition troops in Baghdad." I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Ri ghts Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghr aib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, a nd not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperial ism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post- Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had a ctually lasted. Whether you chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from pr ison, or the referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed f rom the publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history " and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an epo ch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, S addam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that w e had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expan sionist, and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in another wa y, and within approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for t he suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the gnoc idaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away wit h putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation. One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares a s a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to co mpensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelle d to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very s ame war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perha ps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into nat ional socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing th eir neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States. The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, mus t also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history . Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Sadda m Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Bak er correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United St ates did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing fo r the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prud ent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the UN r esolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the UN forces in Rwanda? I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination with complete cre dit. There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who c ouldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. French s tatecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any a ggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force. The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo interve ntion, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far fr om being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insistin g on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas. Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one still cann ot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without the feeling tha t one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected ho me. I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this wo rld-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recogniz e in time. For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq- -had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invad ed its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtu red international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had manage d to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have bee n due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the UN Conference on Disarmament . Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Laur o hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam 's crumbling roof. One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored UN resolutions but as s ome corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. An apparent consensus ex ists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole ope ration for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumati zed society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked agg ression. THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalis m In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child N icholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, r ejoices in his triumph over the adults who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish: "You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground. Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwa rdian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses disc omfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerabl y less charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had f riends in al Qaeda. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the ver y least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemi cals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicis t, was able to lead American ...
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