Was getting rid of him worth it?
Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the
costs of the war are quite familiar. But in focusing on what was lost, we often
lose sight of what was won.
To start with the obvious, Saddam Hussein is gone.
That’s no small thing. It’s not just that Saddam was one of the most vicious
mass murderers of his era — though it’s important to remember that he was, and
that the horror of the past decade in Iraq still hasn't matched his
totalitarian regime’s body count — it’s that his unpredictability made him
especially dangerous. That’s the flip side to the intelligence failures in the
run-up to the war: If it was so hard to tell that Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction program was moribund, it would have been just as hard to predict
his behavior had he been left in power for the past decade, enriched by the
failure of the sanctions regime (remember the bad joke that was Oil-for-Food?)
and rising oil prices driven by Chinese and Indian demand. Restarting his WMD
program, funding international terrorism, further military adventurism — one
could never tell with Saddam.
Some see Saddam Hussein’s loss as Iran’s gain. Yes,
the current Iraqi government’s policies tend to be more congenial to the
Islamic Republic than Saddam’s were, but the picture is more complicated than
that. A murderous anti-American loose cannon like Saddam was never an ideal
ingredient for a stable balance of power. And because the current government of
Iraq isn’t an international pariah, oil production is higher now than it has
been since before the first Gulf War; with less Iraqi oil on the market,
sanctions on Iran would be a much tougher sell in Europe.
Iraq is still a violent place; the Iraqi government
is dysfunctional and has grown less genuinely democratic. Elections in Iraq
did, as President Bush envisioned, change the politics of the region, but the
illiberalism of the people who’ve thrived at the ballot box has created new
challenges. But none of this should make anyone nostalgic for Saddam Hussein.
But the war wasn’t just about Saddam Hussein. Iraq
became the central front in the war against al Qaeda, and it was the ideal
place to open that front. Iraq loomed large in Osama bin Laden’s 1998
declaration of war. His first grievance was that “the United States is
occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia” — that
is, he objected to the Saudis hosting U.S. troops, the linchpin of the policy
of containment toward Saddam. Bin Laden’s second grievance was that the U.S.
had gone to war with Iraq and might do so again. It was natural that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi’s branch of al Qaeda would meet the U.S. on the battlefield in Iraq.
As with the other factions that emerged after the invasion, American
policymakers weren’t really prepared for this, but, with the course correction
that was the surge, eventually managed to deal with it.
Thousands of young men came to Iraq to join
Zarqawi’s jihad, and died there. If there were no occupation of Iraq, how many
would nonetheless have had an enthusiasm for killing Americans? [And been able to take a bus to the battlefield.] It’s likely a
nontrivial number who, absent the invasion of Iraq, would have made prime
recruits for al Qaeda attacks elsewhere — perhaps on U.S. assets abroad (like
the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania or the USS Cole), and perhaps
on America itself.
There have been numerous foiled terror plots since
9/11, but the successful major attack that most of us were expecting never
came; credit a mixture of good counter-terrorism and good luck, but also credit
the men and women who lost friends, limbs, and lives taking the fight against
al Qaeda to Iraq for making the pool of terrorist recruits smaller and a
successful attack less likely. In other words: Yes, the Iraq War made us safer.
The cost in blood, treasure, and U.S. credibility
was greater than anyone anticipated. The mistakes along the way were nearly
catastrophic. The Iraq War was, no doubt, a Pyrrhic victory. But it was a
victory nonetheless.
About the Author
John Tabin is
a frequent contributor to The American Spectator online.
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