How short is our memory.

For the last few years I've been keeping a list of what I feel are pithy quotes. Here I present the first one as an example;

 “Would it be easier, for the Government to dissolve the people and elect another?”                                                                                                                    ---Berthold Brecht after the East German uprising of 1953.

Sort of gets to the point of Communist governance, doesn’t it. No matter what, the Vanguard is always right.

Recently I came across a quote from Christopher Hitchens from 2007:

 Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.

What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train? The question isn’t as easy to answer as some people would have you believe…

The small number of U.N. personnel were not supposed to comb the countryside. They were supposed to monitor the handover of the items on Iraq’s list, to check them, and then to supervise their destruction. (If Iraq disposed of the items in any other way—by burying or destroying or neutralizing them, as now seems possible—that would have been an additional grave breach of the resolutions.) To call for serious and unimpeachable inspections was to call, in effect, for a change of regime in Iraq. --- Christopher Hitchens in 2007

As a recipient of those pitying looks from 2004 on it’s nice to remember what the conditions of the Iraq sanctions regime was; the war that started them, and the cat and mouse games that went on for some twelve years after.

At the end of the Gulf War, when Hussein’s forces had been pushed back into Iraq, the uncovering of stockpiles of chemical and biological WMDs, along with his crushing of risings in the Shia and Kurdish areas led the Americans and British to call for intrusive sanctions and “no fly” zones, boxing Saddam in Baghdad. For the years that followed he pushed at the limits of that box. First flying his MIGs to the limits of the zones, then pushing his forces to the Kuwaiti border in 1994, he finally settled down to painting with radar the fighters on patrol, only to have his radar sites destroyed by anti-radiation missiles. That was the bombing that Ron Paul feels so righteously guilty about now.

But Saddam never allowed his government to open up to the sanctions regime. As far as he was concerned he had not lost the Gulf War and he was the shield of the Palestinians, the chief warrior of the Sunna. He designated sites that the UN needed to search as Presidential sites, and therefore off limits, mosques were also off limits, and the game of UN investigators going in the front door as trucks were loading up at the back door made a joke of the sanction regime by the later 90’s.

By 1998 President Clinton had had enough, signing the Iraqi Freedom Act and instituting Operation Desert Fox.

Both these actions were on the tentative side, with the Iraqi Freedom Act calling for no U.S. “boots on the ground” and Operation Desert Fox not even attempting to fully degrade Iraq’s WMD arsenal, as Henry Kissinger said “I would be amazed if a three day campaign made a decisive difference.”

What it did achieve was to break up any consensus of UN members continuing to support the No-Fly Zones or the sanctions regime. Russia and China, as could be expected, covering Hussein’s back as he made the Oil for Food program his personal source of international bribes, paying of those who aided him with as many barrels of oil as they could carry. Starving children be damned.

So for those that feel that this was a war of choice they should have made their positions known in 1998. By 2003 few believed that Saddam was clean, which is why the congressional resolutions passed with such majorities. Except for the professional Left most cheered as the Army and Marines slashed their way to Baghdad, laughing at the cluelessness of Baghdad Bob. But as soon as the insurgency gained ground, and the masses of WMD didn’t show up everyone knew that this was “the wrong war in the wrong place”, in some cases turning on a dime. (“I voted for the 85 billion before I voted against it.”)

In war no plan survives contact with the enemy, and this one was the perfect example. But in this one we didn’t define the enemy. We still haven’t.