>
> >http://www.slate.com/id/2137134/
> >
>
> Recent events in Iraq *strengthen* the neo-cons
> case? What's Hitch
> mixing with his scotch?
>
> Doug
It's not so much that Hitch himself is worth answering as an individual, but this comments show the kind of knots that defenders of the war have tied themselves into.
> It wasn't that the Middle East "lacked democracy" so
much that one of its keystone states was dominated by
an unstable and destabilizing dictatorship led by a
psychopath.
On the contrary, Saddam, though cruel and brutal, was a rational and calculating actor in foreign affairs and even in his repression at home. The case for his madness in foreign affairs, I guess, is (a) that he got involved in a terribly destructive war with Iran in the 1980s, and (b) he invaded Kuwait in 1990.
However, in both cases, he acted with what he understood top be the express or implicit sanction of the US, which he was careful to seek out. In the Iran-Iraq war, the US supported Iraq (and Saddam) as our qually (quasi-ally, a word word I just made up) against our perceived "real" enemy, revolutionary Iran. We armed Saddam and encouraged his prosecution of the war. Of course we hoped that each side would seriously damage the other (as they did), but Saddam was our guy in the war, and while the conduct of the war was unnecessarily vicious and incompetent, this hardly shows that Saddam was mad.
In the case of (b), the attack on Kuwait, Saddam was careful to get what he interpreted, not unreasonably, as a go-ahead from US State Dept officials (in think in Egypt), indicating that they didn't really care what he did. This may have been a set up, a trap Saddam fell into, or just a disconnect between State and the White House, bur either way, it's not evidence of madness.
And Iraq dictatorship was not unstable; if we had left Saddam alone, there;s no reason to think he wouldn't have died of old age in power, and passed on the dynasty to one of his sons or other family members. Nor was it particularly destabilizing in the region, at least (Kuwait aside) in ways that would bother the West. If Iraq had been able to defeat Iran, we would have been delighted. The stalemate the war ended in essentially changed nothing except creating lots of new widows and orphans.
Saddam was a cruel tyrant at home, but that didn't distinguish him from lots of our friends, including many in the Middle East, e.g., the dictatorships in Pakistan, Syria (also a former friend), and the nominal democracy in Egypt.
I pass over mention of a certain semi-democratic apartheid state which is and was both cruel and tyrannical to its subject population and genuinely destabilizing, but unequivocally supported by the US.
So H's fundamental premises, shared by the war party, are false, and obviously false. If the war party were not so self-deluded one would be tempted to say that they knew they were false.
Hitch says
>The three questions that anyone developing second
thoughts about the Iraq conflict must answer are
these: Was the George H.W. Bush administration right
to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction
from Kuwait in 1991?
Given the predictable bloody and probably irrecoverable mess we've created, clearly GHWB and Colin Powell were right not to try to overthrow Suddam in 1991 -- and they foresaw it at the time.
> Is it right to say that we had acquired a
responsibility for Iraq, given past mistaken
interventions and given the great moral question
raised by the imposition of sanctions?
Love that "we." And what past mistaken interventions does H have in mind? 1991, because we didn't overthrow Saddam (with no more idea of what to do after then we had in 2002)? Or is this an implicit admission that 2002 was a mistake because it was so half-assed? The "great moral question posed by the imposition of sanctions" is what? That they ruined the country and killed over a hundred thousand innocent people? And these mistakes and questions create a responsibility to invade and/or occupy the country, brutalizing the population as it spirals into civil war?
> And is it the case that another confrontation with
Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus
being implicitly right in saying that we, not he,
should choose the timing of it?
And it was inevitable because? I guess the idea was, First Kuwait, tomorrow the world? Or Saudi, maybe? )As if Saddam would have attacked Saudi or anyone else without getting our OK, or what he thought was our OK.) And the choice of timing in this case was so great because we had such a good idea of how to turn Iraq into a stable constitutional democracy?
H attacks Fukayama for going all Kissinger and wishing for a normalized balance of politics on the realist model. But insofar as that has been outmoded, it has been two things that have done it, neither connected with Iraq. One is the collapse of the USSR and the creation of the US as a monopolar hyperpower. The other is the advent of a decentralized international terrorism that can strike at US targets (the British, Spanish, Israelis, Egyptians, etc. had been dealing with localized retail terrorism for years without going too bananas about it.)
The force of both of these has been diminished. Iraq has re-established, as Vietnam did, the limits of overwhelming military force -- the US can overthrow any government, but cannot create viable societies and regimes to its liking. And to the extend that there is a new kind of stateless international terrorism, beyond the fact that the US has now been shown to be vulnerable to its reach, it's more than evident than the kind of military power the US can deploy cannot deal with the problem. The long and short of it is that Fukayam is right, absent revolutionary internationalism (which does not seem to have much presence these days), realism is probably a good idea. Maybe an inevitable one.
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