Michael’s comment is so good that it deserves a post of its own.—Meryl
The WMD issue was only one of the reasons for the Iraq Campaign, and the other reasons bear directly on the War Against the Jihadist Terrorists, although Senator Obama, and many others, are not sophisticated enough to understand it.
The “root causes†of terrorism, the actual ones not the fantasies of those who generally use the term, lie in the dysfunctional Arab and Persian political culture. It is that political culture that keeps thtrowing up tyrants into power there. For those who are enamored of the economic “root causes†foolishness, it is those tyrants whose rule brings about the lousy economic conditions of the Middle East. So even that grows directly out of the dysfunctional political culture. The radical Islamists arose as an alternative to the failed Pan-Arab Nationalists like Nasser who had made such a mess of things yet still clung to power as tyrants. This movement actually has no more promise of success than the earlier one, as we can see in Iran. But frequently the mosque is the only political breathing space people have in Arab countries.
So if the jihadists are to be permanently defeated (or as permanently as possible) the dysfunctional political culture will have to be reformed, as it was in Germany and Japan after WWII. The virus of liberty had to be injected into the Middle East. Western specialist in the Arab culture have always thought Iraq was the most promising Arab country for modernizatrion because of the character of its people. So Iraq was the logical place to start this process.
There was also the matter of Saddam being a long time enemy of the USA, certainly at least since 1990. His continued presence tyrannizing his people and threatening war with others made a mockery of the US. It was a sign of US weakness that we did not need after 9/11, which was brought on in part by the perception of US weakness.
The Iraq Campaign also gave the US the opportunity to fight the jihadists on grounds of our own choosing. Geographically we could fight them in the Middle East instead of in New York. Tactically we could pit skilled US soldiers and Marines against them, instead of relying on unarmed airline stewardesses and passengers to do the fighting. Strategically it allowed us to seize the initiative from the jihadists, to make them react to our moves rather than we to their’s. Taking the initiative away from the enemy is always important in winning a war. Finally it allowed us to pit our big idea against their big idea. The jihadists’ big idea is a new caliphate, where Muslims will swagger around lording it over the wretched dhimmis. It’s an attractive vision for Muslims stuck under tha thumb of Mubarak, Assad, or some despotic King or Amir. Our big idea is liberty and prosperity in the modern world. That is also an attractive idea. Which will win? It’s still in dispute, and will be for a long time.
There was an additional aspect that I think we did not expect but has helped us in the war of ideas. Nobody expected the jihadists to be so savagly bloodthirsty against fellow Muslims. Their terrorism, approved by so many Muslims when directed against Jews and Americans, sickened them when directed against them. This has led to a major diminution of support for the jihadists in the Muslim world.
Sorry for the long post, but WMD is only a part of the story, and I think not the greater part, however necessary it was to make sure that Saddam or his psychopathic spawn did not have nukes to throw around the next time they wanted to invade Kuwait for its oil, or to throw at Israel in support of Saddam’s fantasy of being the new Saladin.
Very good points here. It also helps to bear in mind that we were already there militarily, keeping Saddam in his supposed box, and if we chose another theater those troops would have been needed elsewhere, but, moving those troops without finishing Saddam would have emboldened him greatly, so that was another impetus to act in Iraq first.
There were many reasons to go into Iraq, Bush most loudly cited WMD (due to the lack of courage and clear-thinking on the part of our lovely world community) but there were many valid reasons. We’ll see how the experiment goes, but as noted above, letting the Muslims live at the mercy of their beloved extremists was an eye-opener they could not have experienced if we simply hunkered down while they cheered their jihadi brethren.
Many of the points Michael makes were refuted four years ago in an outstanding e-mail reprinted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog when President Bush was running for reelection. See http://time-blog.com/daily_dish/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_09_01_dish_archive.html#109648034044882770 . The whole e-mail is worth reading in full.
He starts off noting how dysfunctional Arab political culture is, but then writes how he and his wife “…both thought that a shock to the system and a scheme to jar at least one Arab country onto the right track might be worth it. In the end, we both decided that it would be a bad idea, and for good conservative reasons. Utopian social programs rarely work domestically, in circumstances in which the architects of social engineering share a language and culture with their subjects and in which the surrounding society is stable and prosperous. If this is the case, how can we expect a radical experiment in social engineering to succeed in a foreign country with a radically different culture, and in which distrust of the United States is imbibed with mother’s milk? Arabs are fixated enough on what they perceive as past humiliations, how can adding another defeat to the list help them?”
He continues: “Subsequent rationales for the war were not convincing. Engage the terrorists in Iraq or face them here? Does anyone really believe that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had a one-way ticket to the US and a scholarship at a flight school but decided to turn around and have a go at us in Iraq after he heard about the invasion? Iraq, in fact, supplies a theater for attacking the US that most of the fighters there, foreign and Iraqi, would not have if we had not given it to them.”
The e-mailer concludes: “Now, we are stuck fighting to try to democratize a polity that is inherently unstable. If there are democratic elections, the result is not likely to be a liberal democracy, but rather one of the illiberal sort. Defeat would be a disaster, victory will be hard to define and unlikely to bring great reward.”
Four years after the e-mail was written, it’s pretty obvious that the e-mailer was correct. The best anyone can hope for in non-Kurdish Iraq is the establishment of a creakily functioning pseduo-democracy that’s only one shove away from collapsing into civil war, just like Lebanon before the Lebanese civil war. That’s better than Ba’athist tyranny, but there’s little evidence that Iraq is inspiring democratic reform anywhere else in the Arab world.
Four years after the emailer wrote it’s pretty obvious he was wrong. Al Qaeda accepted battle in Iraq. Had they not done so we could have midwifed democracy there without significant opposition. Bin Laden and Zawahiri proclaimed it the central front of the jihad for them, and poured thousands of jihadis and other resources into Iraq. They are now being run out of the place, with thousands dead, captured and discouraged. As I mentioned about jihadist bloodthirstiness, the jihadists have taken a massive black eye from their behavior there and another from the growing perception that they are a bunch of losers. That counts for a lot, not just in the Arab world but elsewhere too. There is an old Russian proverb that goes “We are right who are with the strong.” It’s not jsut Russians who believe that and act on it.
As for the quality of Iraqi democracy it is hardly set in stone yet. I prefer to talk about consensual government, which may be democratic or may differ from that somewhat, so long as it fits the consensual ideas of the culture. Democracy will have to adapt to Muslim/Arab culture, just as democracy has had to adapt to various other cultures. Japanese democracy is not the same as American or French. Why should we expect Arab democracy to be the same as ours? Yet people scream to high heaven when it seems to differ.
Let’s have a bit less self-reighteous carping from Americans about this. Before we get too critical of Iraqis how about going and cleaning up the incredibly corrupt Democratic Party machines in Chicago and New Orleans. We see daily stories of ACORN trying to steal the election this year through vote fraud. The Iraqis have had democratic government for only three years after 24 years of Saddam, 21 previous years of Pan-Arab nationalist fascism, and previous to that authoritarian royal rule by an Arab dyansty imposed by the British. We are giving the Iraqis the opportunity to make their own future, not imposing some utopian social engineering on them.