Iraq
Right war, wrong pretext
Last month marked the first anniversary of the
invasion of Iraq. Today there is a two
front insurgency challenging the American led occupiers and
threatening prospects for peace and democracy. A lot of previous supporters of
the war are having seconds
thoughts. I still think the war was justified but I'm worried the
occupation is going to be a lot longer and more brutal than we had
hoped.
I wasn't paying a lot of attention to world events last year. My employer kept adding more work to my job and I was seriously considering retirement. I felt ambivalent about the war but didn't have much energy for examining the issues.
Ever since the Vietnam War I've been antiwar and identified myself as a leftist, an enemy of capitalism, especially American imperialism. I wasn't a pacifist, being a fan of revolutionary socialism. But the modern day adventures of American presidents, from Cambodia to Grenada, were nothing to me but arrogant acts of aggression.
Starting with the first Gulf war however, I began to have doubts. At least Saddam Hussein's defeat by the first Bush created some measure of freedom for the Kurds in Northern Iraq and did expose how close the Baathists were to acquiring nuclear weapons back then.
Clinton's bombing in Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing raised more mixed feelings. The UN's approval of the action came after the fact and the intense nationalism and tribalism in the area is still a danger today. But there was some humanitarian justification to the intervention, crude and destructive as it was.
Then 9/11 happened and the second Bush retaliated by invading Afghanistan, home of al-Qaeda's training camps and their sponsors, the Taliban government. This time I had no trouble supporting a war. The Taliban was a fascist tyranny and al-Qaeda terrorist fanatics.
After Afghanistan the Bush administration indicated that Iraq was next. By then I had discovered blogs and was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan, who argued in favour of ending Hussein's regime. I thought there was some merit to the arguments of the pro-war camp. But an article in the Atlantic by James Fallows, The Fifty-First State, convinced me that the post war occupation of Iraq would create far too many problems and that the Americans would be unwilling to bear such a burden.
I thought Bush was bluffing and was surprised when it became clear he really intended to invade and occupy Iraq for a number of years.
By last summer the war was over and I had retired. Starting my own blog I wanted to write about Iraq, but not before I had a better understanding of what it meant. So I began to read. The writer who impressed me the most was, and is, Christopher Hitchens, who comes out of the same Marxist tradition of which I've had a small part. Hitchens supported the war first as the only means left that would liberate the Iraqi people from a sadistic despot and secondly as an important step in the war against terror, promoting an alternative to the culture of death and hate that overwhelms the mid-east. Another writer who made sense was Michael Ignatieff who "supported war as the least bad of the available options."
I became convinced that the liberation of the Iraqi people from the Baathist regime was sufficient reason to support the war, even if the Bush administration exaggerated the current threat Hussein posed to those outside his borders. In this case the Americans owed it to the Iraqis.
The first Bush called on the people of Iraqi to rebel against Hussein at the end of the first Gulf war and then allowed Hussein to remain in power and put down the rebellion with helicopter gun ships. It was a shameful betrayal.
In the previous decade Hussein, with the encouragement and support of the US, started a war with Iran that left hundreds of thousands dead on the battle fields.
Within Iraq Hussein conducted three campaigns of genocide against his own subjects: The Kurds in 1988, the Shiites at the war's end in 1991 and then the destruction of the wetlands and forced relocation of the Marsh Arabs throughout the 1990s. The United Nations should have ordered his government's removal on that basis alone, as mandated by the UN charter. Instead the UN sanctions punished ordinary Iraqis and enriched Hussein's family and friends.
It would have been best if the UN Security Council had explicitly endorsed the latest war, but existing UN resolutions and the cease fire agreement after the first war provide an argument that the Iraqi war was legal, more so than Kosovo. That isn't, I admit, saying much for the current sad state of international law, which frankly I don't respect anyway when it places the defense of sovereignty over the rights of an oppressed people.
Hussein may not have been allied with al-Qaeda, yet, but he certainly sponsored Palestinian suicide bombers and had aspirations to lead the jihad against America himself. We do know from the Kay report he was attempting to obtain prohibited missile systems from North Korea. He was biding his time, waiting for the sanctions to expire.
I have no illusions that the humanitarian element of this invasion now being advanced by Bush would not still have been a pretext if it had been the rallying cry in the first place.
The real reason Bush invaded was to establish a client state to serve as a mid east base of operations to replace Saudi Arabia, where American troops have never been welcome. By fostering democracy he's hoping to eventually earn the support of not just the new Iraqi government, but the people as well. That's a long shot, but at least it gives the people of Iraq the opportunity to make their own destiny. Even if they don't succeed and a civil war breaks out I think this was the only chance they were going to get for a long time to come. Most people in Iraq think It was worth the risk, much as they dislike the occupation.
I'm sure Bush didn't invade Iraq to atone for the sins of his father. But his actions had that effect nonetheless.
So I've given up my antiwar sentiments and decided that I'm an anti-fascist before I'm anti-imperialist.
I do hope though, that Bush gets defeated this fall. His administration has bungled the post war reconstruction. See Fallows' "I told you so" essay, Blind into Bagdad. Bush should have responded with alacrity to Sistani's call for early elections and submitted the provisional constitution to a popular vote. Instead the plan seems to have been to deliberately provoke the extremists among both the Shia and the Sunni to armed insurrection.
And of course Bush should also be held accountable for misleading the American electorate. The explanation which the President gave for going to war was incomplete and deceptive. He presented a worst case scenario on weapons of mass destruction that has come back to haunt him.
I wasn't paying a lot of attention to world events last year. My employer kept adding more work to my job and I was seriously considering retirement. I felt ambivalent about the war but didn't have much energy for examining the issues.
Ever since the Vietnam War I've been antiwar and identified myself as a leftist, an enemy of capitalism, especially American imperialism. I wasn't a pacifist, being a fan of revolutionary socialism. But the modern day adventures of American presidents, from Cambodia to Grenada, were nothing to me but arrogant acts of aggression.
Starting with the first Gulf war however, I began to have doubts. At least Saddam Hussein's defeat by the first Bush created some measure of freedom for the Kurds in Northern Iraq and did expose how close the Baathists were to acquiring nuclear weapons back then.
Clinton's bombing in Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing raised more mixed feelings. The UN's approval of the action came after the fact and the intense nationalism and tribalism in the area is still a danger today. But there was some humanitarian justification to the intervention, crude and destructive as it was.
Then 9/11 happened and the second Bush retaliated by invading Afghanistan, home of al-Qaeda's training camps and their sponsors, the Taliban government. This time I had no trouble supporting a war. The Taliban was a fascist tyranny and al-Qaeda terrorist fanatics.
After Afghanistan the Bush administration indicated that Iraq was next. By then I had discovered blogs and was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan, who argued in favour of ending Hussein's regime. I thought there was some merit to the arguments of the pro-war camp. But an article in the Atlantic by James Fallows, The Fifty-First State, convinced me that the post war occupation of Iraq would create far too many problems and that the Americans would be unwilling to bear such a burden.
I thought Bush was bluffing and was surprised when it became clear he really intended to invade and occupy Iraq for a number of years.
By last summer the war was over and I had retired. Starting my own blog I wanted to write about Iraq, but not before I had a better understanding of what it meant. So I began to read. The writer who impressed me the most was, and is, Christopher Hitchens, who comes out of the same Marxist tradition of which I've had a small part. Hitchens supported the war first as the only means left that would liberate the Iraqi people from a sadistic despot and secondly as an important step in the war against terror, promoting an alternative to the culture of death and hate that overwhelms the mid-east. Another writer who made sense was Michael Ignatieff who "supported war as the least bad of the available options."
I became convinced that the liberation of the Iraqi people from the Baathist regime was sufficient reason to support the war, even if the Bush administration exaggerated the current threat Hussein posed to those outside his borders. In this case the Americans owed it to the Iraqis.
The first Bush called on the people of Iraqi to rebel against Hussein at the end of the first Gulf war and then allowed Hussein to remain in power and put down the rebellion with helicopter gun ships. It was a shameful betrayal.
In the previous decade Hussein, with the encouragement and support of the US, started a war with Iran that left hundreds of thousands dead on the battle fields.
Within Iraq Hussein conducted three campaigns of genocide against his own subjects: The Kurds in 1988, the Shiites at the war's end in 1991 and then the destruction of the wetlands and forced relocation of the Marsh Arabs throughout the 1990s. The United Nations should have ordered his government's removal on that basis alone, as mandated by the UN charter. Instead the UN sanctions punished ordinary Iraqis and enriched Hussein's family and friends.
It would have been best if the UN Security Council had explicitly endorsed the latest war, but existing UN resolutions and the cease fire agreement after the first war provide an argument that the Iraqi war was legal, more so than Kosovo. That isn't, I admit, saying much for the current sad state of international law, which frankly I don't respect anyway when it places the defense of sovereignty over the rights of an oppressed people.
Hussein may not have been allied with al-Qaeda, yet, but he certainly sponsored Palestinian suicide bombers and had aspirations to lead the jihad against America himself. We do know from the Kay report he was attempting to obtain prohibited missile systems from North Korea. He was biding his time, waiting for the sanctions to expire.
I have no illusions that the humanitarian element of this invasion now being advanced by Bush would not still have been a pretext if it had been the rallying cry in the first place.
The real reason Bush invaded was to establish a client state to serve as a mid east base of operations to replace Saudi Arabia, where American troops have never been welcome. By fostering democracy he's hoping to eventually earn the support of not just the new Iraqi government, but the people as well. That's a long shot, but at least it gives the people of Iraq the opportunity to make their own destiny. Even if they don't succeed and a civil war breaks out I think this was the only chance they were going to get for a long time to come. Most people in Iraq think It was worth the risk, much as they dislike the occupation.
I'm sure Bush didn't invade Iraq to atone for the sins of his father. But his actions had that effect nonetheless.
So I've given up my antiwar sentiments and decided that I'm an anti-fascist before I'm anti-imperialist.
I do hope though, that Bush gets defeated this fall. His administration has bungled the post war reconstruction. See Fallows' "I told you so" essay, Blind into Bagdad. Bush should have responded with alacrity to Sistani's call for early elections and submitted the provisional constitution to a popular vote. Instead the plan seems to have been to deliberately provoke the extremists among both the Shia and the Sunni to armed insurrection.
And of course Bush should also be held accountable for misleading the American electorate. The explanation which the President gave for going to war was incomplete and deceptive. He presented a worst case scenario on weapons of mass destruction that has come back to haunt him.
Posted: Wed - April 7, 2004 at 01:13 PM
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Published On: Sep 12, 2007 03:13 PM
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Published On: Sep 12, 2007 03:13 PM