Posted on 06/18/2014 7:15:10 PM PDT by VitacoreVision
Contrary to popular belief, there is no satisfaction in being able to say, “I told you so.” This is especially so with Iraq, where recent events are enough to sicken one’s stomach. Yet it still must be said: those who opposed the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 — not to mention his father’s war on Iraq in 1991 and the sanctions enforced through the administration of Bill Clinton — were right.
The noninterventionists predicted a violent unraveling of the country, and that’s what we’re witnessing. They agreed with Amr Moussa, chairman of the Arab League, who warned in September 2002 that the invasion would “open the gates of hell.” There was no ISIS or al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before the U.S. invasion.
Once again, the establishment news media have ill-served the American public. In the buildup to the 2003 bipartisan war on Iraq — which was justified through lies about weapons of mass destruction and complicity in the 9/11 attacks — little time and ink were devoted to the principled opponents of intervention.
Maybe war builds circulation, ratings, and advertising revenues. Or maybe corporate news outlets fear losing access to high-ranking government officials. Whatever the explanation, far more media resources went toward hyping the illegal aggressive war than to the case against it.
No one can grasp the complexity of one’s own society, we noninterventionists said, much less a society with Iraq’s unique religious, sectarian, and political culture and history. Intervention grows out of hubris. Nonintervention accepts the limits of any ruling cadre’s knowledge. The war planners had no clue how to reform Iraqi society. But there was one thing they did know: they would not suffer the consequences of their arrogance.
You’d think that with the noninterventionists proven right, the media would learn from their folly and turn to them to analyze the current turmoil in Iraq. But you’d be mistaken.
With few exceptions, the go-to “authorities” are the same people who got it wrong — not all of them neoconservatives, because interventionists come in different stripes. The discussion today is almost exclusively over how the Obama administration should intervene in Iraq, not if it should intervene. Even Paul Wolfowitz, one of the wizards of the original invasion, gets face time on major networks. He was part of the crowd which said that American invaders would be greeted with rose petals, that regime change in Iraq would spread liberal democracy throughout the Middle East, and that even peace between the Israelis and Palestinians would take place.
These “authorities” were wrong about everything — assuming they believed their own words — but that seems not to matter.
They have their own story, of course. It’s not the 2003 invasion that has brought Iraq to disintegration, they say. It is Barack Obama’s failure to leave U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011. This argument doesn’t work.
First, Obama (wrongly) asked Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow troops to remain beyond the deadline negotiated by Bush, but al-Maliki insisted that U.S. personnel who commit crimes be subject to Iraqi law, a reasonable demand. Obama would not accept that.
Second, why should we believe the advocates of the original invasion when they say a residual U.S. force could have prevented the offensive now conducted by ISIS, aka the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Levant)? It’s far more likely that if American troops were in Iraq today, they would be killing and dying.
Al-Maliki is everyone’s favorite scapegoat now, and the ruler known as the Shi’ite Saddam certainly is a villain. He has arrested respected Sunni figures and ordered troops to shoot peaceful Sunni demonstrators. But recriminations against the Sunnis, who were identified with Saddam’s secular Ba’athist party, started with the American administration of Iraq.
U.S. intervention now would be perceived as taking the Shi’ite side in the Iraqi sectarian war. (Obama is intervening, though on the opposite side, in Syria, which helped build ISIS.) The conflict is complicated — not all Sunnis and Shiites want sectarian violence — but that’s all the more reason to think that neither American troops nor diplomats can repair Iraq. The people themselves will have to work things out. As for terrorism, it is U.S. intervention that makes Americans targets.
Sheldon Richman is vice president and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va.
I graciously grant you that.
What do we do now?
Simple. Let them kill each other. ISIS is a group that arose in the Sunni-Shiite split in Syria. They're not about "Death to America" nearly as much as they're all about "Death to Shiites."
It's really made to order for us. Let the Sunnis fight the Shias and bleed each other dry. We can clean up selling weapons and materiel to both sides. We might have to do a few surgical strikes here and there to keep the war going for a couple of decades until Islam is spent as a force, at least for a very long time.
If they attack us, kill them all. Otherwise, make as much money as possible.
It's really a no-brainer, once one gets beyond the whole Cowboy in White Hat paradigm.
war on Iraq — which was justified through lies about weapons of mass destruction and complicity in the 9/11 attacks
the illegal aggressive war
My recollection is that it was justified by the continual
and aggressive breaking of the ceasefire conditions by Saddam.
He does not give support for his claim that it was an 'illegal' war
and is only repeating propagandist drivel.
Kinda. But a Sunni - Shia war is really a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That can turn bad quick.
I am not sure what you mean by "inner Texans" but if you are criticizing nation building, I have been an opponent of that from the beginning. You can't build a democratic society in a country like Iraq. We should have put a strong man in control, one whose goal wasn't to nuke the US, and then got the hell out.
I don't buy that Bush didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Where do you get that from? Maybe not in 2001, but in 2003, he most definitely did.
We will have to disagree on Iraq, though. Saddam did have WMDs, hate to break it to you, and he would have eventually found a way to make a devastating attack on the US. He knew about 9/11 in advance, allowed jihadis to train in their little terror facility, and if he wasn't working on nukes in 2003, he would have resumed soon enough. One does not give up one that, especially when one is next door to Iran and they are developing nukes.
Iraq was a good followup to Afghanistan, poorly executed, and without a vision of what to do after.
It kills me that Saddam is now looked at as someone with some sense of stability. The guy only had a 10 year war with Iran, invaded Kuwait, and gassed the Kurds, not to mention all the torture that went on there and mass graves. Some stability!
If anything, one could say nothing has changed. But really, can you argue that it’s actually worse?
ping
Our ONLY interest there is oil.
So, build Keystone, drill baby drill, frack the bejessus out of the Marcellus, rape the Alaskan North Slope, open up the Santa Barbara Coast, etc. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia disappearing in a radioactive flash doesn't seem so bad.
Do you see?
It required some ass kicking, some economic coercion, some persuasion of the intellectual kind, a decades long effort similar to the cold war to isolate the Muslims and bring them out of the middle ages. No one in the administration, with the possible exception of Rumsfeld, had that kind of perspective.
And we needed a strategic vision for dealing with the home front. Newt had a great article on that around 2005 or so. We needed someone who would call out the traitors, explain the course of action, give the press a hard time when it tried to propagandize the American people, and use the bully pulpit. Bush acted as if convincing people and defending his actions was beneath him. He let himself be dragged down lower and lower in the public's eyes until it became possible that people would actually look at a Muslim commie traitor like Obama and say "give him a try".
I’m just curious what the “I told you so” crowd would have done after 9-11, more specifically the Democrats.
I seem to remember the “I told you so” Democrats that I know vociferously pounding the notion we should have finished off Saddam Hussien the first time, and blah blah. Of course that changed to whatever the media was spoon feeding them that week.
The next tactic on the plate was to say that Bush/Cheney planted WMD. I heard that from a lot of Dems too, probably got that s#$% from NPR that week.
I agree with that. In all reality the entire region needed to be dealt with but it's easy for me to say from the keyboard...
That is the delusion. Right there.
You could only say that if you have no real grasp on what Islam is. The Mullahs or some form of Islamic tyranny is inevitable there. Islam has controlled the area for 1500 years. Islam is like the Borg on Star Trek. Once you're in that world, there's no coming out.
There are no competing systems of thought allowed in the Middle East. Haven't been for 15 centuries. And you suppose that the American Cowboy in the White Hat - let's call him "Sugar Foot" just for argument's sake - is going to set all that right in a few years?
To say that is to overestimate our power on a scale rivaled only by the Hot Air Cult, who seriously think that mankind is important enough to change the Earth's climate. The sun, an unimaginably large ball of nuclear plasma that is the source of all of our energy? Not a big deal to them, apparently. Yuppies driving around in SUVs? Very, very big deal.
So too interventionists think that we can ride into town like Sugar Foot and change the thinking of a billion-plus people ingrained over 15 centuries in a few years.
Baseball, Coca-Cola, rock 'n roll! It's gotta work!
Sugar Foot, Sugar Foot, never underestimate him, Sugar Foot . . .
Good heavens, man. The utter lack of perspective is nothing short of astonishing.
We’re not far apart. Most of the 9-11 hijackers were from Saudi and Iran is going nuclear. So I don’t think this is a local Mideast issue. My goal is to destroy all enemies of America, or let them destroy themself.
I have always loved Pat and I love him more all the time —an amazing historian, orator, and fervent Patriot.
I always marvel that he has lived in DC his whole life, yet retains all his wholesome American-ness.
Pat Buchanan..!
Exactly. If the enemy is shelling its own positions the last thing you do is try to stop them. Sit back. Microwave up some nachos. Enjoy the unfolding.
What are your thoughts about this 2004 FR thread, Pat Buchanan: The New Michael Moore? The very best of the FReepers don't seem to share your admiration of Pat Buchanan.
The keywords on that thread are quite telling: andyrooneylite; bushbasher; crankyoldman; hasbeen; judas; oldnutcake; patbuchanan; rightwentwrong;
That’s a particularly vile article that you referenced. Care to explain how it was that Ronald Reagan selected this ‘vicious anti-Semite’ as his White House Communications Director? But then I recall how some of the Buchanan haters also smeared Ronald Reagan. Letters to Commentary magazine after his Bitburg trip were full of hate for Reagan.
The original hit piece on Buchanan was written for Commentary by Joshua Muravchik, former president of the Young People’s Socialist League, and his smear has been treated as gospel ever since. I can understand its appeal to leftists but I figured conservatives would be acute enough to see through its distortions. Not so.
When the Israelis bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in June 1981 the Reagan administration condemned the attack. Buchanan, who held the conservative seat on Crossfire, supported Israel. Funny how Buchanan haters rarely mention facts that don’t fit their character assassination.
I’m a major fan of Buchanan. You must mean the other guy.
No, I don't agree with Pat Buchanan. I don't see a death of Western Civilization now or anytime in our future. To the contrary, I see an awakening of the rest of the world. More and more nations and societies are becoming free or freer. The former USSR, Afghanistan and Iraq are just recent examples of expanding freedom. With expanding freedom comes freedom of speech and freedom of religion and that will eventually bring a revival of spirituality.
I think Pat has forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan. Ignore the gloom and doomers, naysayers, and messengers from the darkside. Keep the light of freedom shining brightly for all to see. Welcome the former subjects of tyranny to the brave new world of freedom and help them find their way. Their struggles will be many. Never, ever surrender to the enemies of freedom. Do not throw up additional barriers to people yearning to be free. Their burdens are already much too heavy to bear. Do not preach the message of doom. Preach the message of light. On this Independence Day, remember the shining optimism of Ronald Reagan and his visions of freedom for all.
Ultimately, the Lord is going to have to be called into the picture to make it so. Politicians can’t do this, not even a second incarnation of Ronald Reagan could. Evangelists and responsive audiences must.
” Perhaps Saddam would have unleashed hell on the region and/or world. Perhaps not.”
The world? The region? Please, Saddam couldn’t even defeat Iran. His only conquest was tiny Kuwait.
To his north was Turkey which would have chewed up Iraq for drill. To his west was Syria, a Baathist ally, and Jordan which Iraq might have been able to roll. South is Saudi Arabia but that meant taking on the United States. The only other border country was Kuwait.
Iraq didn’t have a blue water navy, a strategic air force or ballistic missiles. Even if they had managed to get a nuclear bomb they couldn’t have delivered it very far. Iraq was at most a problem for its smaller neighbors, and Saddam was more of an admirer of Joe Stalin than of Mohammed.
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