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Radical Thoughts About Iraq
“Knowing what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq in 2003?”
This question, posed by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly to potential presidential candidate Jeb Bush, created a stir this week when Bush first answered “Yes, of course” (I paraphrase) only to later claim that he wasn’t listening closely to the question and had mis-answered. This appears to have been an honest mistake (although a dumb one). Bush evidently was listening for the question as to whether he would have invaded Iraq if he had been in his brother’s shoes at the time. Given what we all know now, however, he absolutely would not have gone to war.
The whole kerfuffle was all just a misunderstanding. But it was instructive and depressing nevertheless.
Because after everyone thought that they heard Jeb Bush saying that with today’s knowledge he would still have invaded Iraq in 2003, there was a mad rush by most of the other Republican presidential candidates to bury him. Even the normally stalwart conservative Laura Ingraham piled on during an appearance on The Kelly File in which she suggested that America had passed judgement at the polls by voting out Republicans in 2006 and 2008. It would appear, therefore, that the view that invading Iraq was, all things considered, a good thing is now considered not merely wrong but also unspeakable.
I disagree.
I have mentioned on these pages previously my admiration for philosopher Willard von Orman Quine’s theory on the web of beliefs. According to Quine, one’s beliefs are not independent ideas in a vacuum. Rather, each belief reinforces “neighboring” beliefs on related topics in such a way that one’s whole philosophy is ultimately a connected mesh. So changing a single belief can often require an entire gestalt shift. In consequence of this structure, we interpret the whole world and filter evidence according to the orientation of our web.
I point this out because nowhere are preconceived ideas so important as when one is interpreting complex data filled with subtle and sometimes conflicting patterns…such as in history.
If Ingraham is right and America has concluded firmly that invading Iraq was a mistake based on faulty intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, it is with true humility that I say that the patterns and motions of history that I perceive, filtered for my own web, tell a very different story.
The first story they tell is about Iraq in the era following Saddam Hussein. During the invasion of Iraq, when the existence of WMDs was still an open but increasingly dubious issue, Tony Blair commented (again paraphrasing) that if we were, after all, wrong about the WMDs history would forgive us. Blair was roundly skewered for this comment, but I think he was also roundly misunderstood. What he was saying, I believe, is that even if Hussein did not possess WMDs it would have been worthwhile on humanitarian grounds alone to fight to have him removed.
And so, with conventional wisdom running to the contrary, I wonder whether anyone remembers the hundreds of thousands of souls discovered in mass graves? Or the grave with hundreds of children found in the Kurdish region of Iraq? Has the steady drumbeat of leftist Bush-hating propaganda about the horror of Iraq after the war led us to forget Iraq before the war? As disruptive and dangerous as sectarian warfare in the region today is, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein was both more cruel and — what is most terrifying — a remarkably stable regime.
And Saddam’s regime was, according to the subtle currents that I perceive, the lynchpin of the whole dictatorial structure of much of the Middle East. I believe that the day that millions of Iraqis voted in meaningful elections – raising their purple fingers high – for the first time in their lives was, like the tearing down of Saddam’s statue, a bell of freedom that sounded across the region, notably to Egypt and Libya.
The secular tide which the freed Iraqi people unleashed has been accompanied by a sectarian and fractured fundamentalist Islamic tide as well. It will take a while for the secular forces to win out over the Muslim Brotherhood. But in Egypt, for example, the battle for civilization seems to be going pretty well. It seems not merely cruel but hopelessly naïve as well to simply say we would have been better off keeping Saddam and Mubarak and Qaddafi right where they were.
The efforts of the Islamic radicals like ISIS to govern are reminiscent of regimes like that of Pol Pot, where maniacal sermons are given by black-clad “brothers” standing knee deep in gore. But as horrific and dangerous as these regimes are, they are, compared to the machines of dictators like Saddam, flimsy and fragile. Only the insane (i.e. the fanatics) want to live in Jonestown.
What do you say, Ricochetti? Was it a mistake to invade Iraq? Or was our mistake the way that we lost the war after we had already won it?
Published in Foreign Policy
I think that the Iraq invasion was probably not responsible for violence that preceded it, and the violence that followed in Yemen seems to be a continuation of previous trends without an obvious link to Iraq. If you explain your theory, perhaps I can respond to it.
In Egypt, though, I knew people who were involved who believed that Iraqi democracy and the freedom of the Iraqi media were important elements behind the motivation of the Egyptians. Granted, some of the people I knew who spent time in Egypt were Iraqis, and some politicians, who would both naturally want to exaggerate their role and who would be presented with the most Iraq-relevant portions, but I think it’s safe to say that there was some role.
If Hitler was in power today, and had been engaging in continuous acts of violence towards Jews and other minorities (even in the peaceful years the rape rooms stayed open and violent oppression continued, with those peaceful years being peaceful in part because his regime was retreating, handing over ever more of the country to warlords), had engaged in the five of the most violent campaigns of atrocities in Europe in a half century over the previous two decades, maintained an active program of terrorism against foreign states, and openly promised to restart mass killings when it became feasible again. Which is to say, not even remotely similar.
I think that Iraqi Freedom was a factor in democratization, in the increased opposition to Islamist terrorism, in the governmental alliance with the US (free trade agreements, intelligence and other support improving, etc.), and in improving life in Iraq. There’s lots of other great stuff happening in the Middle East, though, that isn’t about that.
I think that the only thing that I’ve really blamed Obama for is his slow response in Syria, and that I’ve conceded is partly because of war weariness with Iraq, and partly because of Republican opposition chiefly produced by Iraq. If you accept that I’m sometimes blaming Obama, I don’t see how you can say I’m not blaming Iraq, when I give Iraq more credit than Obama for Obama’s decisions (I don’t think that Obama particularly cares, that the terrible situation has been caused, in part, by him and Cruz primarily focusing on opinion polls, and that Iraq is a key cause o the opinion polls).
It’s not true that 90% of the Iraqi forces are led by Iranians. It is true that Iran has supported a lot of the militias, but the Iraqi militias are mostly led by Iraqis. There are Iranian militias, too, and Al Quds, etc., but it’s not even true that 90% of those fighting are Shia; until Ramadi fell, none of the shia groups were allowed to fight in that theater, so some other theaters did become very militia heavy, but there’s still more Iraqi army personnel than Iranian led militias in Iraq.
My claim, if you go back and read it, though, was that the Iraqi parties loyal to Iran are marginalized. This remains true even when there are Iranian soldiers in Iraq; Iran is attempting to buy influence by offering aid, but that’s not the same thing as having a proxy state. Being the only people willing to supply aid at a time that aid is critically necessary comes closer to that situation, but there’s every chance that the US and pals may increase their aid efforts, too. If not, perhaps the Iranian parties in Iraq will increase, but we’re not there yet.
James, the no-fly zone yielded really positive results in the North of Iraq – results which look to be sustainable.
With the benefit of hindsight, do you think a similar no-fly zone in the South would have been a good idea?
Wrt:
Hindsight really is 20:20, but it looks really like it might have been a good thing. Your thoughts?
There was a no-fly zone in the south. I think it was a good thing.
I think that opinion in the south was more pro-American than the polls would lead you to believe; if you live in a society where a pollster claiming to be from Pew might be from Pew asking for academic reasons, or might be from the Badr Brigades asking if they ought to target you, it’s wise to err on the side of supporting the bad guys.
Look at how they voted, though, and they mostly voted to support America supporting parties and few voted to support the serious Iranian loyalists. I mean, they’re not keen to be an American proxy any more than an Iranian proxy, but they’re moderate on the issue rather than being Sadr City-ish.
Silly me.
Why was the outcome so different? Meaning if the Kurds wallied off and did their thing why didn’t the Shia take similar advantage of the NFZ in the South?
The Kurds didn’t really have anything that Saddam wanted. I mean, he wanted to rule all of Iraq, but he repeatedly showed that this wasn’t all that important to him; by 2002, he’d surrendered big chunks of Anbar to warlords and withdrawn from other parts, too; he’d have taken them back after sanctions were lifted, but the principle wasn’t as vital as one might have thought.
The Shia wanted Saddam gone. There is no serious argument that you can partition Iraq. It really was a question of the Shia revolt failing or Saddam leaving office, and Saddam’s unique personal style made it unlikely that he’d leave peacefully.
It was also much less cohesive; most of the Shia soldiers in the army fought hard against Shia civilians. “Shia” wasn’t really an identity in the way that it is now (genocide really amps that up), but formed its intensity, and rivalry with “Iraqi” as a result of the horrors, whereas “Kurdish” has always been a thing.