Why Iraq? One reason is that after 9/11, a number of leading figures in the Bush administration came to the conclusion that, in the face of a catastrophe of this magnitude, it would not be sufficient to go to Afghanistan and shoot some people on the monkey bars. Rather, America needed to take action in the heart of the Middle East. Remember the old Western movies where John Wayne is called into town as the new sheriff to apprehend a bunch of cattle stealers? He goes into the bar, where the bad guys are shouting and jeering at him. He doesn’t know who the culprits are, but he finds a couple of obstreperous hoodlums and slams their head together, or pistol-whips them, and then he walks out of the bar. The message is that there is a new sheriff in town. After 9/11, I believe, the Bush administration wanted to convey this message to the Islamic radicals. In Saddam Hussein, Bush located an especially egregious hoodlum who would become the demonstration project for America’s seriousness and resolve.
The Bush administration also chose Iraq because of its strategic importance. Iraq borders on Iran, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Thus an American military presence in Iraq could be vital in preventing Islamic radicalism from overrunning the Middle East. Moreover, Iraq is an oil-rich country. By conquering Iraq, America would convince the entire oil-producing world that it has vital interests in the region and is willing to act to protect them. In addition, there was a legal pretext to invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein was openly violating his Gulf War commitments. The United States could invoke his treaty violations as a justification for action. So these were some of the unspoken reasons for the invasion. They were unspoken because in democratic societies nations frequently act on the basis of realpolitik but they cannot always defend their actions in these terms. Consequently democratic leaders have to give idealistic reasons for actions that frequently have both idealistic and Machiavellian motives.
Of course, the stated justification—the belief that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction—was also a genuine reason for the invasion. It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to fault Bush for being wrong about WMDs. But unlike pundits and rival presidential candidates, statesmen do not have the benefit of hindsight. They must act in the moving current of events, using information that is available to them. At the time there was little doubt across the political spectrum that Saddam Hussein was pursuing WMDs. Hussein himself acted as if he had such weapons, constantly evading the efforts of United Nations inspectors to monitor Iraqi weapons facilities. Bush had to weigh the risk of invading Iraq and being wrong, against the risk of not invading Iraq and being wrong. In the first case, he would be risking American troops in an unpopular war that would, nevertheless, result in the removal of a vicious dictator. In the second case, he would be risking Hussein acquiring a deadly weapon, which could end up in the hands of terrorists. If as a consequence a massive bomb exploded in Chicago killing half a million Americans, then who would take the responsibility? Weighing the risks, Bush decided it would be better to take preventive action and invade Iraq. Given what he knew at the time, it was the right decision.
In retrospect, Bush was wrong to invade Iraq at the time that he did, in the way that he did. With the benefit of hindsight, I think Bush might have done better to focus on Iran, which had nuclear aspirations of its own and was pursuing them—it turns out—with greater effectiveness. Statesmen, however, do not have the luxury of making decisions in retrospect. Consider a similar decision made by President Roosevelt. In the period leading up to World War II, a group of émigré German scientists warned Albert Einstein that the Germans were building an atomic bomb. The émigrés told Einstein that the German project was headed by that country’s greatest scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Acutely aware of the dangers of Hitler possessing an atomic bomb, Einstein took this information in the fall of 1939 to President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. The United States built the bomb, and later dropped two of them on Japan. Many years later, Americans discovered that the Germans were nowhere close to building an atomic bomb. Their project was on the wrong track, and it seems to have stalled in its infancy. Some historians believe that Heisenberg was trying to thwart the project from the inside. Be that as it may, in retrospect we now know that the intelligence that led to the Manhattan Project was wrong. But no one goes around saying, “Einstein lied,” or, “FDR lied.” They didn’t lie; they used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation. The same is true of Bush. Acting against the somber backdrop of 9/11, he may have acted in haste, and he might have acted in error, but he did not act in bad faith. Therefore the claim that “Bush lied” is itself a lie.
IN THE DEBATE leading up to the Iraq invasion, hardly anyone objected to the war on the grounds that Hussein was not trying to make weapons of mass destruction. Leading Democrats agreed with Bill Clinton’s 1998 assessment that Iraq had become “a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists.” During the Iraq debate, former presidential candidate Wesley Clark took it for granted that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs but argued that this fact did not justify an American invasion. “After all,” he said, “other nations have weapons of mass destruction. Are we going to invade them?” Others opposed Bush’s plan because of their fear that Saddam Hussein would use WMDs. Historian Arthur Schlesinger said, “The one thing that would very probably lead Hussein to resort to his ghastly weapons would be just this invasion of Iraq by the U.S.”19 This record is important because many liberals today fault Bush for his erroneous judgments while conveniently forgetting their own.
If we review the debate leading up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, there was the leftist objection to the war and there was the mainstream liberal objection. Cindy Sheehan expressed the leftist view when she said, “Our country has been taken over by murderous thugs…war criminals…a pack of cowards and murderers who lust after fortunes and power…by spreading the cancer of imperialism in the Middle East.” In this view Bush didn’t really care about Saddam Hussein, any more than he really cared about bin Laden. In fact, Katha Pollitt and Chalmers Johnson pointed out, America used to support Saddam Hussein, just as America once supported bin Laden. I attended one rally in which a speaker said, “We probably sold Saddam those weapons of mass destruction.” More broadly, the left sensed the Iraq invasion was part of a larger plot, what Edward Said termed “an old-fashioned colonial occupation” of Iraq. Many on the left cheered Arundhati Roy’s claim that “Bush is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein.” Writing in salon.com, Michelle Goldberg quoted anti-Bush activists predicting, “If bombs start falling on Iraq, expect insurgency at home.”20 The objective of the left was evidently to keep Saddam Hussein in power.
Contrary to popular perception, America never supported bin Laden. Yes, bin Laden was part of the Arab Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In order to maintain “deniability” in its diplomatic dealings with the Soviets, however, America’s aid was channeled through Pakistan. Author Steve Coll reports that never did America directly deal with or fund bin Laden.21 Bin Laden denies he received any U.S. aid, and clearly he didn’t need it. His faction never lacked for money, partly because of his own fortune and also because of the financial support that came from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Muslim countries. What about the charge that America created Saddam Hussein and sold him dangerous weapons? Pure fantasy. America sided with Hussein during the 1980s, but that was during the period of the Iran-Iraq war, when Hussein was battling the ayatollah Khomeini. In that contest, it was not unreasonable for America to tilt toward Hussein, at least to prevent an Iranian victory. Even so, at no time did America sell any weapons to Hussein.
Despite its fundamental flaws, the leftist view of the war has been taken up by leading Democrats. Former presidential candidate Al Gore now alleges that Bush’s Iraq invasion “was preordained and planned before 9/11.” Senator Kennedy claims that Bush concocted the scheme to invade Iraq and then “announced to the Republican leader
ship that the war was going to take place and was going to be good politically.”22 In the debate leading up to the invasion, however, this was not the view of most Democrats or even of most liberals. The liberal position was not opposed to force, it was opposed to force in the absence of collective action and the support of the United Nations. Leading critics like Senator Robert Byrd and former president Carter demanded that George W. Bush do what his father, George H. W. Bush, did in the Gulf War of 1991: assemble a broad international coalition of countries and then act with the authorization of a United Nations resolution. Ironically when George H. W. Bush did this—line up the U.N., bring in the Europeans, even win the support of many Muslim countries—a majority of liberal Democrats opposed his action to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In the House of Representatives only 86 Democrats supported the Gulf War, while 179 voted against it. In the Senate, 10 Democrats voted to liberate Kuwait by force, while 45 Democrats opposed the plan.
It is true, as liberals say, that multilateral action is usually preferable to unilateral action. But even collective action has its limitations. Many people today express regret that in the Gulf War of 1991 American troops didn’t go all the way to Baghdad. Certainly Operation Desert Storm could have been extended to overthrow Hussein, which would have saved America enormous expense, both in money and in lives. So why didn’t American troops, having ejected Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, pursue them as they retreated into Iraq? The reason is that America was part of a multilateral coalition. The coalition decided in advance that it would repel Hussein from Kuwait, and then stop. If America had gone further it would risk the shattering of the coalition and the opposition of its own allies. Therefore Hussein was permitted to stay in power.
Moreover, the question facing George W. Bush in 2002 was not whether to act with or without international backing. Germany and France were from the outset strongly opposed to U.S. military action. The United Nations was generally uncooperative. Bush had to decide whether to act without this support or not to act at all. Recognizing this, many Democrats insisted on Bush’s obtaining broad international support—support that they knew was not there—as a tactical device to constrain Bush’s options and prevent him from using force to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
So what about the United Nations? Liberal scholars fault Bush with foolishly ignoring the U.N. As a consequence of America’s disregard for international law, the United States has, in the words of political scientists Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, “assumed many of the features of the rogue nations against which it has done battle over the years.”23 Liberals like to refer problems to the United Nations because it carries the aura of legitimacy. But there is a problem, and it goes beyond the membership of the U.N.’s human rights committee or the corrupt windbags who make up the U.N.’s bureaucracy. Actually, the problem is with international law itself. The core principle of international law is sovereignty. Sovereignty means that the borders of a country are legally and morally inviolable. You cannot trespass across a nation’s boundaries or you will be violating its sovereignty.
Now consider the dictators that have inhabited the world over the past half century, from Pol Pot to Idi Amin to Mobutu to Bokassa to Kim Jong-Il to Saddam Hussein. Ask yourself: by what right do such men rule their countries? The obvious answer is none. So what is the moral objection to some other power stepping across the border and pushing the dictator out? None. Yet the hallowed principle of sovereignty says that this is prohibited. The conclusion is that international law, in its current form, gives legal and moral protection to many of the bad guys in the world, allowing them to oppress their people and preventing any outside force from displacing them. Thus for Bush to accede to his liberal critics and refer Iraq to the United Nations would have produced the same outcome as if Bush had adopted the left’s recommendation to leave Saddam Hussein alone. Either way, the murderous dictator would still be the sovereign head of Iraq.
BY ITSELF, AMERICA’S military operation against Iraq was a magnificent success. One of the largest land armies in the world was defeated in a matter of days. American casualties were minimal. Saddam Hussein went into hiding. America’s victory, however, brought a strange reaction from some in the leftist camp. “Our government has declared a military victory,” columnist Howard Zinn wrote following the fall of Baghdad. “As a patriot, I will not celebrate.” In a later column, Zinn went on to challenge the “unexamined premise that military victory would constitute success.” Clearly he was hoping for a different outcome, and so were others on the left. “It’s scary for Democrats, I have to say,” former Clinton official Nancy Soderberg said on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. “There’s always hope that this might not work.” Equally revealing was Gary Kamiya’s comment on salon.com. “I have a confession,” he wrote. “I have at times secretly wished for things to go wrong, wished for the Iraqis to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage.”24
America’s victory, however, brought two unexpected outcomes. The first was a deadly and resourceful insurgency against American occupation. The resistance was largely made up of former Hussein loyalists who were used to running the country but now found themselves rudely ejected from power. The insurgents were supported in their efforts by Islamic radicals, some of them Iraqi, some from other countries. As is now widely recognized, the Bush administration blundered in failing to anticipate this resistance. Bush’s dismay, however, was not shared on the American left. On the contrary, leftists welcomed the insurgency as the legitimate voice of the people of Iraq. We can see this by consulting our two bin Laden Book Club authors. According to William Blum, “The resistance is composed of Iraqi citizens who are simply demonstrating their resentment about being bombed, invaded, occupied, tortured, slain, and subjected to daily humiliations.” Robert Fisk exulted, “America’s war of ‘liberation’ is over. Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin.”25
From the outset, the left sought to portray America’s military campaign against the insurgency as barbaric and immoral, while ignoring the barbarity and immorality of the insurgents’ actions. Since the left had to be careful about praising men who chop off the heads of innocent civilians and exhibit their handiwork on the Internet, the focus of the left’s outrage was on innocent Iraqi civilians who were killed in America’s military campaigns. Arundhati Roy terms America’s civilian casualties “the new genocide.” George Soros argued that “the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than have the attacks on the World Trade Center.”26 Of course, the left is entirely aware that unlike the 9/11 assassins and the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, American troops do not target civilians for attack. With rare exceptions, they have been careful to minimize civilian casualties.
Even so, the left points to civilian casualties as evidence of American immorality. A favorite figure is 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. This figure was published in the British journal Lancet. It turns out to be highly exaggerated. The journal conducted a very small survey, and then extrapolated its results to cover the whole country. It did not actually count bodies. Iraq Body Count has produced more reliable estimates, which are in the range of 30,000.27 This is still a high number. But it pales before the 300,000 people whom Saddam Hussein deposited in his mass graves. Hussein’s bloody rampage was halted by the dictator’s overthrow. The 30,000 figure also pales before the 500,000 Iraqi children who reportedly died as a result of United Nations–imposed economic sanctions against Iraq. The effect of Bush’s invasion of Iraq was to end the cruel and ineffective sanctions policy and thus prevent more Iraqi deaths from malnutrition and starvation. In view of these preceding conditions, it seems obvious that America’s war in Iraq has ended up saving innumerable Iraqi lives that would otherwise have been lost.
For the left, however, the purpose of emphasizing civilian casualties was candidly given by former CNN reporter Peter Arnett. Speaking on Iraqi state television in the early days of the Iraq invasion, Arnett said, “I
t is clear that within the United States there is a growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war. So our reports of civilian casualties here are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.”28 Arnett was fired for those remarks, although his expulsion may have been based less on the fear that political bias would infect his reporting and more on his candor in revealing his motives.
Following the capture of Baghdad, a further surprise awaited the Bush administration: no weapons of mass destruction! Immediately the left seized on this fact as a stunning confirmation of its long-standing charge that there was no justification for the war, Bush had acted on false premises, and therefore America should cut its losses and get out of Iraq. Bush responded with a bold and surprising rationale for why America should stay—to bring democracy to Iraq and to the Middle East. From the outset, leading liberals expressed skepticism and even ridicule. Gary Hart expressed the common view among Democrats that democracy cannot be imposed “at the point of a bayonet.” George Soros wrote that “with all the experience I have gained…I would consider Iraq the last place to choose for a demonstration project” in democracy.29
These objections were premature. With due respect to Soros’s experience, it seems odd to suggest that countries should postpone their bid for democracy until he considers them eligible. We know that after World War II the United States did impose democracy at the point of a bayonet in Germany and Japan, with excellent results. The deeper point being made by some of the critics seemed to be that it was somehow wrong to use force to establish freedom. How can coercion be used to create liberty? This argument seems plausible, until we realize from history that where freedom has come to a country, it has usually come by force. America got its freedom as a result of a Revolutionary War. How did African Americans get freedom? It took the invasion of a Northern army to secure for the slaves a liberty that they were in no position to secure for themselves. Regrettably, force is often required to establish freedom because tyrants rarely relinquish power voluntarily.
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