No. I think you’ll find it was seized upon by the left because it was the only one that actually justified war. At least, according to international law which many on the left still care about.
I am awed by the historical revisionist skills of the Bush Apologists. I mean, we’ve all got access to the Internet, one of the greatest repositories of recent history known to man, and you can still find grown adults (or, at least, folks we assume to be grown adults 
) making statements like “the left has managed to bury all the other reasons for going to war with Iraq” with a straight face.
Orwell would have been proud.
I don’t think the proposition is novel at all. For example, where was the threat to world peace when the French went into the Ivory Coast, or when America went into Somalia or Grenada or Panama, or when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands? Heck, where was the threat to world peace after Hussein took over Kuwait? At most, we’re talking about situations that involved limited conflicts within the borders of a particular country … just like Hussein and the Kurds.
Moreover, I don’t accept the proposition that Iraq did not pose any threat to us. I don’t think they were within days of launching a full, frontal assault on us or anything, but they were an avowed enemy of the US that everyone agreed would have hurt the US if they had the power to do so, and no one really knew what their capability was, and there was nearly unanimous agreement that they would hurt us if they ever got the power to do so. They tried to assassinate a former President, they frequently launched missile attacks against American and British planes patrolling the No Fly Zones, and they supported terrorist attacks against our friends and allies in the Middle East and elsewhere. In short, they were a disquieting influence on a region in which we had very strong interests, and that was a threat to our interests.
Sam Stone: *The dissident movement in Iran will gain strength.
[quoted from an earlier thread]
*
Actually, the evidence indicates that the “dissident” (or reform) movement in Iran has weakened since the Iraq war. As Iranian reform advocate Majid Mohamadi wrote last August,
I remember Sam and other war supporters launching similarly triumphalist threads back in 2003 when Iran allowed IAEA nuclear inspectors in after pledges to suspend its nuclear programs. Look, the hawks exulted, flexing our military muscle has had good results! The Iranians know that we’re not to be messed with and are falling into line! See? Ha!
When Iran resumed its nuclear activities this past summer, of course, the hawks stopped crowing about the success of our initiative in that regard. Now they’re changing the subject to new alleged indicators of progress in other countries, like Lebanon and Egypt.
To be fair, I don’t think that anybody is seriously trying to argue that the Iraq invasion has had, or could have, absolutely no good effects for development and democracy in the ME. Any major foreign-policy action is likely to have a lot of varied consequences, and generosity and sacrifice usually pay off to some extent. And I think it’s clear that, despite some appalling counterexamples, there has been a lot of generosity and sacrifice on the part of coalition forces and their taxpayers. Many freedom-minded people in the ME naturally will feel some gratitude for that and be inspired by it.
However, that’s not enough to prove our involvement a “success”. We have to consider more difficult questions, like: Will the good effects ultimately outweigh the bad effects? What is going to be the overall impact in the long run? Will it end up being better or worse for our interests than the situation when we went in?
What worries me is that the pro-war faction will be tempted to “cherry-pick” the results they like and ignore the ones they don’t, as in the case of Iran. Change in the ME is likely to follow a very zigzag course, as it has for decades, and we have no business trying to take credit for all the good stuff while disclaiming responsibility for all the bad stuff.
The blood isn’t in your ears, its on your hands.
:dubious: You are not, I hope, suggesting that any of those wars were justified?
I think thats got to do with the political organisation of the Party, and not at all anything to do with the Iraqi invasion. A democratic Shia Iraq would be the deathknell for any legitimacy of rule the Iranians had.
The French sending troops to the Ivory Coast, us in Somalia (even though we made a mess of it), and Panama, and the first Gulf War to get Iraq out of Kuwait were definately justified. You can make an argument for our invasion of Grenada. As for the Falklands, I think the British were justified, and not the Argentines.
Your prognostication track record is a bit uneven:
Kimstu said:
Well, I wasn’t trying to claim that I was omniscient or right about everything. I posted the quote to show that many of us were talking about Iraq causing sweeping changes in the middle east well before the war.
However, I still think the dissident movement in Iraq is going to grow. As Ryan_Liam said, having a democratic, Shia-led Iraq next door has got to be a huge blow to the legitimacy of the Iranian government. Also, the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon could either A) weaken Hezbollah dramatically, or B) cause Hezbollah to morph into a legitimate political party. Either outcome will further weaken Iran, as will peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Look, a lot could still go wrong in the middle east. Syria could get stupid and crack down in Lebanon. Iran could cause all kinds of havoc in Iraq. But so far, the signs are good, and things are working out the way the President and some of us said they would work out after the war.
What we’ve been refuting in this thread is the claim by those on the left after the war that the sole justification for invading Iraq was WMD, and that Bush only fell back on the Middle East democracy thing after WMD failed to materialize. That way, you can claim that this was all just dumb luck and wasn’t planned for. But I think we’ve shown in this thread that that simply isn’t true. Bush talked a lot about spreading Democracy through the middle east before the war, and the whole crux of the Neocon case for war was that the war would cause a domino effect throughout the Middle East. Go read what Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, or any number of other Neocons have been saying since 1991. It was almost their entire reason for going to war with Iraq. They didn’t even want Bush to go to the U.N. with the WMD angle. Bush did so primarily because that was a condition that Tony Blair required to sign on to the invasion, and because the ‘realists’ in the cabinet (Powell, etc) thought that was the way to go. They may even have been right, in the sense that if the U.S. had gone into Iraq without even trying to get U.N. approval it might have hampered post-war reconstruction and led to a lot more suspicion about U.S. motives.
But the bottom line is that some of us were saying that the spread of Democracy in the middle east would be a result of the war, and we were saying it before the war. I can particularly remember a blast of sneering invective from Collounsbury over the ‘domino’ theory. As I recall, his claim was that the war would radicalize Arabs, cause the other dictatorships to band together and become even more belligerant, and set back the prospects of peace in the ME as the U.S. beccame the new common enemy. And that anyone who thougth otherwise was a drooling moron.
As a left-leaning moderate (well pretty far left in some respects), I’m willing to give Bush his props if a democratic Middle East emerges. If that happens, the true view will be that it is somewhat multivariable, with Ukraine, Georgia, and the death of Arafat playing pretty large roles. But there is no doubt that Iraqi elections play a big part and that more or less can be pinned squarely on Bush. So like Reagan and the death of the Soviet Union, he will get the lion’s share of the credit. In that occurance, I will have no problem with BWI airport renamed B Dubya I, I will not blush at sending my daughter to W Bush High School, etc.
But in return, I ask 2 things from conservatives.
-
Acknowledge that we are not there yet and we have a long way to go. The Lebanese are marvelous at fighting civil war. Now that they are united against the Syrians, there is a lot of false unity there that will abruptly disappear once they are gone. Iraq is not much difference, with 2% Sunni voter turnout and apparent problems assembling a Shia/Kurd coalition government. Let’s at least wait until there are democracies (not just protests or elections) before we start with the triumphalism, OK? It is still costing us around 500 soldiers and $75 billion a year.
-
For every good thing, let’s not blind ourselves to the bad things. If Bush allows Iran or North Korea to get nukes, this is A Very Bad Thing, much worse probably in the long run than establishing fragile democracies in Iraq and Lebanon. This was accomplished while we turned a blind eye to our friend the Pakistanis having the AQ Khan Nuclear Garage Sale and Bake-Off.
For every Saddam half-brother and other “blow to the insurgency” I don’t see it slumping yet. Let’s not focus on how grand we are until we can get the power on and make the streets safe. Or at least help the Iraqis to gain a modicum of control.
Let’s not ignore torture and unjust imprisonment. We don’t need to destroy our free society in order to give the Middle East one.
Let’s see if we can return some accountability to Washington. I was against the Iraq War because I thought the most they had was chemical weapons, but I have been susceptible to the Hitches/Friedman “Let’s Roll The Dice” argument (that the OP seems to share). There were mistakes made; some are still being made. Restoring accountability will put us back on track to identifying and correcting these mistakes.
And that’s just the start. I’m willing to give your man props if you promise not to rub my nose in a pseudo-triumphalism yet unsupported by facts.
Sam: I think there is some truth behind what you’re saying, but it’s all a matter of proportion. I, too, rememeber the multiple messages Bush was sending out prior to the war. In fact, I can remember commenting on this board, prior to the war, how badly Bush was doing in getting his message across because every day he seemed to be giving some new reason for war.
But, and this is the crux, the WMD argument was far and away the major reason. It was the sine qua non of the war. No other reason, or set of reasons, would have been sufficient to pursuade Congress to pass the resolution authorizing him to use force against Iraq.
Maybe Bush, egged on by the PNAC crew, really did intend all along for the Iraq war to be mainly a democracy driving event. Maybe this was foretold by Wolfowitz’s famous line: (and I paraphrase) “the WMD reason was just the one we thought would be most easy accepted”. But that is NOT how the war was sold to Congress and NOT how it was sold to the American people. How can you not see how people would feel betrayed at this point? War cannot be considered a simply foreign policy tactic-- something like determining who sits where at the conference table. War is the ultimate, last resort measure.
And even if there are positive moves towards deomcracy in the M.E. as the result of the Iraq war, many of us are completely unconviced that war was the best catalyst. There are plenty of Arab states in the M.E. over which we hold considerable sway. We could have gotten the democracy ball rolling by any number of peaceful means.
Do you honestly think that was the best and only option? And if not, how can you support it?
edwino said:
Absolutely. As I said in the last message, things could still go badly, and there’s still a long way to go. And while the death of Arafat was a big deal, Bush also deserves credit there, because his isolation of and refusal to negotiate with Arafat went a long way towards making sure that once Arafat was gone he wouldn’t be succeeded by some crony cut from the same cloth.
Let’s not forget that we found out about the whole AQ Khan thing because Libya rolled over on him, and Libya’s change of heart was also connected to the Iraq invasion. Also, I don’t think that the Iraq war was an alternative to stopping Iran and North Korea (In other words, if the war hadn’t happened we could have focused on those two regimes instead). Rather, I think those problems still exist because they are quite intractable, and in fact the democratization of the Middle East may turn out to be the real solution to that problem as well, at least with respect to Iran. Wouldn’t you rather see Iran come under pressure from its Democratic neighbors and dissidents than to have Saddam next door while the U.S. attempts to solve the problem?
Sam Stone: What we’ve been refuting in this thread is the claim by those on the left after the war that the sole justification for invading Iraq was WMD, and that Bush only fell back on the Middle East democracy thing after WMD failed to materialize.
Actually, I don’t think that this is a representative viewpoint on the left. I’ve never seen any leftist claims—even in adamantly antiwar leftist journals like [i}The Nation* and American Prospect—that the Administration considered only WMD as a good reason for attacking Iraq. All the leftist sources I’ve seen are quite familiar with the longstanding neocon/PNAC advocacy of the “democratic domino theory”.
What I think is being argued on the left is that the “Iraqi WMD threat” claims were the only legal justification that the Administration could offer for the war. And that, since there turned out not to be any WMD, Bush is now banging the “spread democracy” drum harder than he would have if his legal casus belli had been valid.
Which I think is a perfectly reasonable argument. If invaders had actually uncovered Iraqi warheads pointed at DC, you can bet that that’s what the Administration would have emphasized.
I’m not arguing (and I don’t think anyone else here is either) that the Administration and the neocons don’t sincerely believe (along with the rest of us) that a more free and stable ME would be advantageous. But I think it’s fair to say that they wouldn’t be talking about it so much if they had turned out to be right about what they were previously marketing as the pre-eminent, critical, urgent, compelling motive for going to war.
Sam: *That way, you can claim that this was all just dumb luck and wasn’t planned for. *
Here, I think, we have to avoid confusing sincerity with competence. Just because Bush sincerely wanted a more democratic ME doesn’t mean that he planned for it competently. We have seen—and many decidedly non-leftist critics, such as senior Pentagon officials, have repeatedly pointed out—that the Administration screwed up a number of things in the conduct of the war and occupation, from excessive credulity (at best) about WMD intelligence, to pink-slipping an entire armed military force, to condoning detainee torture. We have also seen that these screwups, and the invasion itself, have sharply increased resentment towards the US throughout much of the Muslim world.
If Middle Eastern Muslims nonetheless manage to get more open and democratic governments (which is hardly a new idea for them; Muslim popular resentment against oppressive ME autocracies long predates the Iraq war), nobody will be happier about it than I will. And I won’t begrudge Bush the adulation he will get from the post hoc ergo propter hoc crowd who will assume that his actions must have been responsible for it.
However, that doesn’t mean that the results will automatically have justified what the Administration actually did. Anybody who seriously wants to argue that Bush’s war deserves the lion’s share of the credit for ME democracy will have to produce convincing evidence. No fair merely asserting that the connection can’t be proved but is “obvious to anyone with any sense”.
(Oh, and thanks, quixotic! :))
I’ll give you an inch on the Falklands, since the Brits were simply defending what was British territory (as much so as the Channel Islands) and inhabited almost exclusively by British colonists. And the American intervention in Somalia was less an invasion than a humanitarian peacekeeping mission. Ivory Coast I don’t know much about.
But – unless you begin with the assumption that military action to oust a dictatorial government is justified in and of itself – there was no reasonable justification for the American invasion of Grenada, nor Panama. Any problems we had with either country could have been resolved diplomatically.
Nor for the Gulf War. Yes, Hussein was wrong to annex Kuwait – but why was that any of our business? Hussein was never a global threat on the scale of Hitler, despite contemporary attempts to draw parallels. And our intervention merely re-established Kuwait’s absolute monarchy, while defending and preserving the even more egregious monarchy-cum-religious-despotism of Saudi Arabia, and weakening a significant threat to the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Iran. It really would have been more in our national interest, and more just, to keep our noses out of it and let all those dicatators settle their own differences.
I agree that it may have been the best course of action given perfect hindsight. But Arafat was marginalized in 2002 and confined to his headquarters; I personally don’t see anything that has been accomplished that couldn’t have been accomplished with him still alive. He didn’t have cronies because like all good tinpot dictators, he created a power vacuum so his leadership wouldn’t be threatened. It is a moot point, though, since we can’t argue on hypotheticals. So I’ll concede, reluctantly. Don’t like Sharon or Bush, but I do like what has gone on under their leadership…
The Libya change of heart is disputable, Qaddafi was trying to reintegrate for years before the Iraq invasion. Still, finding out about it is one thing. I still find it very disturbing that there were essentially no consequences for him or for Pakistan. The complicity seems to go all the way up in Pakistan yet we will never find out or pursue it more, just because we need them as a convenient ally. But the consequences may be far, far worse than establishing a democracy in Afghanistan…
Again, it is hard to argue on hypotheticals. But the movement I’ve seen in Iran is towards radicalization, not towards reform. The population was much more focused on seeing Khatami and his reformist platform stand up to the mullahs until a US invasion next door allowed the mullahs to re-radicalize the population by preying on their fears of American invasion. Who knows what Iran would be like if Iraq was still around? But I think it is equivocal – it would be easy for me to argue that elections in Iraq, with the presumable result of establishing a Shia government with some leanings towards Iran, would in fact empower the mullahs much more.
As to North Korea, the situation is somewhat independent, and only connected to the extent that invasion of Iraq has played on Kim’s paranoia and made him cagier. IMHO the failure of the North Korea policy has been sheer incompetence. Unlike Iraq, we may not end up smelling like a rose. IMHO Kim Jong Il is a person that can only be contained, apparently, by bribery. Clinton bribed him and he didn’t develop nukes. Bush refused to bribe him and now he is close to nukes and is more threatening. It is an ugly situation that the Bush regime has only made worse and continues to worsen with every day that we refuse to bribe him. It is bizarre that the Democrats and progressives have become the party of stark realpolitik a la Kissinger without the war crimes and the Republicans have become the party of pie-in-the-sky idealism a la Carter…
Yes, and if you add the word “primarily” I’d agree with your NOTs. Conceding to the demand for one clear reason was a mistake, and choosing WMD was a bigger one, certainly given what we know know about the limitations of our intelligence.
Having said that, I was far from being alone in understanding from the start the root motivation here: according to Kimstu, I was joined by “All the leftist sources.” While people who do not pay close attention and, say, only get their news once a day at 6:30 or not at all might very well come to the conclusion that no WMD inevitably equated to abject failure of the whole venture. But intelligent people who really seek out information and try to stay deeply informed on world affairs have much less of an excuse.
Which is irrelevant. No one here is claiming that the execution has been flawless. Wars never go without problems, including all the ones you list. Pointing those out is a red herring.
An identifiable, goal of increased democratization in the Middle East. was clearly set, long before the war. This has been cited extensively in this thread. Three years on, those goals seem to be beginning – note the word – to be met, largely in the way that was predicted: autocrats are intimidated, and reformers emboldened. Knowlegeble and influential people in the region are making the connection. Dismissing this out of hand is absurd. If you wish to argue that these things would have happened anyway, please do so. I started this thread to have that very discussion, and so far only edwino has taken it up.
I asked Brainglutton I ask you: What evidence would you find acceptable? I posted this in G friggin’ D for a reason, because I knew it wasn’t a factual question. I can’t prove, but can nonetheless defend, a thesis that “Einstein’s theories had a deep influence on society far beyond Physics.” This is the sort of conversation adults have.
So, I will ask you, and anyone else: do you wish to take and defend a contrary position and hence advance the discussion?”
I do begin with that assumption, but even if I didn’t, both of those countries were a threat to US interests. Grenada was becoming a third Soviet satellite in the Western hemisphere, and the Panamanian government was, firstly, harrassing US troops, and secondly, involved in major drug transshipment operations into the US.
It was our business because Iraq was hostile to us and Kuwait was an ally, because Sadaam was aggressive to his neighbors, and because it wasn’t in our interest to let him control Kuwait’s oil as well as his own.
:dubious: That kind of thinking might have justified the Bay of Pigs invasion, Captain. Don’t go there! And what, by the way, was the second “Soviet satellite in the Western hemisphere”? You’re not thinking of Nicaragua, I hope. Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was not even a satellite of Cuba.
Which, I repeat, could have been resolved through diplomacy, or, failing that, sanctions. And the invasion happened just days before the canal was scheduled to be turned over to Panama, pursuant to the Torrijos-Carter Treaty – meaning, U.S. troops weren’t going to be there much longer in any case.
Errmmm . . . Iraq was also an ally, Captain. At least, we gave Hussein aid when he went to war with Iran. Furthermore, Hussein acted on the U.S. ambassador’s assurance (at least, he could reasonably interpret it as assurance) that we wouldn’t have a problem with his invading Kuwait – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_war:
Iran and SA. So much the better.
What was he going to do with that oil but sell it on the world market? Besides, just because we need something another country has does not justify our taking military action to secure the supply.