Over at The corner, Victor Davis Hanson makes the argument that the real problem with the war was the way it was sold: rather than WMDs, the people pushing the war should have emphasized:
they were considerable humanitarian questions dealing with the Kurds, Shiites, UN embargo, bounties for suicide bombing, etc., and continual reference to them would have made the Congress more invested in the war they voted to authorize.
The problems with these justifications:
The humanitarian questions get a lot of sympathy, but the American people are unwilling to take on a project to reform some foreign society by military occupation. Besides, things did not turn out so hot in the war's after math after all (more on that later), so in the end the humanitarian argument would have turned just as sour once the civil war began as the WMD argument did when they were not found.
The bounties for suicide bombers was not a winning issue other than the fact that it tied Saddam to some form of Muslim terrorism. Moreover, the idea that we had to spend billions of dollars to stop him from paying $25,000 to the families of Palestianian suicide bombers would have made it difficult to argue that we weren't just fighting for Israel's sake.
As for the embargo and the UN resolutions, the problem is two-fold. First, most people don't care much about UN resolutions or making the UN a stronger, more respected institution. Secondly, those who do study the issue and are honest about it know that the U.S. did not exactly deal honestly with the inspections or with the embargo, insisting that the embargo was to stop WMDs and then refusing to end it as long as Saddam was in power regardless of how well he complied. Secondly, Clinton used the inspections to spy on Saddam with the goal of bringing regime change.
In short, none of these reasons was convincing without the udea that Saddam was actively threatening us. Notice how unconvinced people are by the "but Saddam was himself a WMD" argument, which sounds just like what it is; an attempt to reform the language to rationalize a bad decision.
Andrew McCarthy chimes in on the fact htat Saddam had violated several resolutions, again not mentioning how the U.S. government (specifically Clinton) had abused those resolutions.
Rich Lowry rationally points out that the WMD were the only rationale which the public would really care about - you suggest that a nuke will go off in their backyards if they don't invade, it gets their attention. He also makes the rational point that if things had gone well, people would not have cared how good or bad the rationales for war were.
Hanson still sticks with his original idea, saying that this is all the more reson why we needed to have other rationales to remind people of when things got tough (Lowry sensibly points out that once things got bad, lot of people would not have cared about the other ratinoales (indeed, I quesiton whether anybody who was not invested in the war for their own reasons really would be persuaded by the violation of UN resolutions, the suicide bombers, or Saddam's cruelty to his own people) .
In particular, this line annoys me:
Second, by default we wouldn't have invested only in the democracy argument that was tied to Bush alone and caricatured as naivete (rather than admirable idealism which it was) when the Congress proposed and owned the numerous others.
Naivete rather than admirable idealism? His "idealism" was not backed up by any understanding of Iraqi culture or of how to fit democracy to their culture. It was based on the liberal idea that all societies are exactly as capable of democracy, and that you could essentially drop any form of government on them and it would work. It's essentially like arguing that it is "idealism" to try to run Mac 10.5 on a Pentium 1 chip, or to install Windows Vista on an Apple II.
Note what Hanson is really saying: what matters is that Bushs intentions were good. That, and not whether he had a realistic plan, is what matters.
And look at the surreal situation we are in today: all those legitimate reasons to remove Saddam which were so carefully explained by the Congress are now irrelevant or forgotten; and those who proposed and authorized them all hid their flip-flopping in the WMD bogeyman../
None of which really mattered to anyone who did not already want to go into Iraq for other reasons (such as establishing an imperial base, conquering an enemy of Israel, securing control of an oil field for the future, etc.).
He also makes half of a good point:
Left unsaid is the obvious: had the insurgency been crushed at the outset, all this hindsight would be now irrelevant.
True.
Had Iraq looked in 2003 like it does today, there would have never been 'Bush lied, thousands died'.
No, the violence level today is similar to that of the summer of 2003, at least in terms of deaths of coalition Troops. And Iraq today may be peaceful, but it has the marks of a lot of civil war, ethnic cleansing, and destruction from the past five years.
What Hanson means is that if the violence level of May 2008 had predominated throughout the war, there would not have been "Bush lied, thousands died." But of ocurse that assumes that today's lower level of violence could have been achieved without the intervening years of civil war, ethnic cleansing, and violence burning itself out to some extent. In other words, it is based on the idea that sending a few dozen thousand more soldiers and changing tactics slightly suddenly turned everything around.
That is all.
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