The Weekly Standard
A War to Be Proud Of
From
the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue:
The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable.
Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher
Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write
it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its
proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have
improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of
Coalition troops in Baghdad."
I could undertake to defend that statement against any
member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International,
and I know in advance that none of them could challenge
it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib
was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration
camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international
byword for Yankee imperialism 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? And where should one begin?
I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War
liberal Utopia had actually 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 prison, or the referendum defeat suffered by
Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the publication of
Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of
history" and the unarguable triumph of market
liberal pluralism), it was an epoch that in retrospect
was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, Saddam
Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was
attempting to erase the identity and the existence of
Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means
escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist,
and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in
another way, and within approximately the same period,
the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the
right to offer money in his own name for the suborning of
the murder of a novelist living in London, and the
génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could
probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan
of mass murder into operation.
One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes
and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini,
for example, was attempting to compensate for the
humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled
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 same war. Milosevic
(anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps
Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist
nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed
in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were
killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their
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, must also involve a confrontation
with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush
administration right to leave--actually to
confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from
Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his
delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did
not "have a dog in the fight" that involved
ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia?
Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat
from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N.
resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of
the U.N. forces in Rwanda?
I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination
with complete credit. There were neoconservatives who
jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who couldn't see the point
when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. There were
leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie
and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps
because of a bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't
face a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even when he
annexed a neighbor state that was a full member of the
Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit
that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But
there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for
example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any
aggression, 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 intervention, he
warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention
to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with
Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American
"poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes
like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over
Kosovo and was insisting 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 cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001
millennium without the feeling that one is revisiting a
hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected home. 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
world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add
a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of
the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat
still exists, but it is no longer so casually
overlooked.)
The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony
in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and
defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal.
It took care of the last attack. But what about the next
one? 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 invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own
soil, harbored and nurtured 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 managed 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 been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the
U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species
of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro 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 U.N. resolutions but as some
corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had
just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the
case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of
people in Europe and America, that the whole operation
for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its
traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at
worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?
THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and
pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki's short story The
Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who
has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk,
rejoices 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 Edwardian author were always happy to see
the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility
in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less
charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that
Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants
on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of
this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said
mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day,
at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman
Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center
attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in
Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior
physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear
centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete
centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on
the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in
Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to
purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that
Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the
inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for
the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a
face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these
eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my
repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted
that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely
because they preferred to scare people rather than
enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real
strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or
pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.
I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an
agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which
is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say).
Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay
at home if the authorities could bother to make their own
case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I
actually do know about the permanent hell, and the
permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having
debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar
faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently
asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer.
"If what you claim is true," the honest citizen
at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the
White House hasn't told us?"
I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep
and bitter is the split within official Washington, most
especially between the Defense Department and the CIA,
that any claim made by the former has been undermined by
leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who
maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice
not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan,
that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor
and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and
calculating one.)
There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting
bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president
into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness.
It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The
claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over
there" we won't have to confront it "over
here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof
by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a
coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in
the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the
grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that
American civilians are as near to the front line as
American soldiers.
It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the
sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus
and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a
struggle "global" if you then try to localize
it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere
they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well
as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria
is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The
peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end?
The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or
defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add
that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is
just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the
algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender
to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not
even worthy of consideration.
Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every
time an antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse
mythology has been permitted to take hold in the present
case, where bad news is deemed to be bad news only for
regime-change. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq
knows that its society and infrastructure and
institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by
three decades of war and fascism (and the
"divide-and-rule" tactics by which Saddam
maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority
in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore
compare the current state of the country with the likely
or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been
allowed to go on ruling.
At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have
been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to
an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from
Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their
respective interests or confessional clienteles. This
would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody
intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and
on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of
Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I
have made this point in public, I have never had anyone
offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no
matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat
conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person
could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of
abstention.
Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who
go out on the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The
first is contingent: There are an astounding number of
plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest)
in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to
tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki
ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques
Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . .
a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into
early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant,
and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain
to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So
that's easy enough.
The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a
huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant
drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing
commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and
hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that
these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of
the question--plainly and absolutely out of the
question--that we should surrender the keystone state of
the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between
Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous
insinuation that this alliance has only been created by
the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines
that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on
fascism. The more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark
Danner and Harold Meyerson, like to employ the term
"a war of choice." One should have no problem
in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not
deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam
Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the
"choice" of time and place have fallen? The
clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so
dub them--is that this decision should have been left up
to Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .
DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of
fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We
need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and
even the crimes, because these in some ways argue
themselves. But a positive accounting could be offered
without braggartry, and would include:
The overthrow of Talibanism
and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly
suggestive links between the two elements of this
Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who
moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the
coalition intervention, has even gone to the
trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia.
The subsequent capitulation
of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass
destruction--a capitulation that was offered not
to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.
The consequent unmasking of
the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of
nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North
Korea.
The agreement by the United
Nations that its own reform is necessary and
overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal
network within its elite.
The craven admission by
President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when
confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating
and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on
the part of Iran, that not even this will alter
their commitment to neutralism. (One had already
suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)
The ability to certify Iraq
as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word
of a psychopathic autocrat.
The immense gains made by the
largest stateless minority in the region--the
Kurds--and the spread of this example to other
states.
The related encouragement of
democratic and civil society movements in Egypt,
Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has
regained a version of its autonomy.
The violent and ignominious
death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators
into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect
of greatly enlarging this number.
The training and hardening of
many thousands of American servicemen and women
in a battle against the forces of nihilism and
absolutism, which training and hardening will
surely be of great use in future combat.
It
would be admirable if the president could manage to make
such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and
his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war
within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the
secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi
society, while they are not our clients, can in no
circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.
The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it
asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes
or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies
is not in fact possible. One should welcome this
conclusion for the additional reason that such
coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort
to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular
democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep
for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing
too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not
having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed
that contributed to a defeat.
Christopher
Hitchens is a
columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is
"Thomas Jefferson: Author of America". A recent
essay of his appears in the collection "A Matter of
Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq",
newly published by the University of California Press.
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