We got Iraq right

Christopher Hitchens in Slate magazine has responded to an invitation to explain how he got his support for the Iraq war wrong. His thesis is simple: he didn't:

In every decision taken subsequent to [Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait], from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam's regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war." We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him. The president's speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.

That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups. Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had ever believed or than the Bush administration had ever suggested.

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale.

The main point here is that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was reached after a very long road had already been travelled: a decision had to be taken whether or not to continue tolerating the Saddam regime in power, with all that implied for regional and global stability, and for the welfare of the Iraqi people themselves. The fact that the invasion itself and the aftermath in particular were largely bungled, with considerably negative consequences for the Iraqi people in particular, does not alter this. Other outcomes were possible, however culpable the American and British governments may be for the failures of planning and execution.

That said, for all the trials and tribulations the Iraqis have suffered in the past five years, there have been considerable gains, as Hitchens points out:

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

The success of the surge strategy of the last year has brought about a significant turnaround in the fortunes of the Iraqi people. Too bad that this strategy was not followed through four years earlier. Nevertheless, the basis for the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam was a moral one: those who would claim otherwise must justify to themselves and to the Iraqi people why the brutal Baathist regime of Saddam should have been allowed to remain in power. We got Iraq right.