Friedman hits the nail on the head in today's NYT:
Mr. Blair knew the real and good reasons for ousting Saddam Hussein: First, he was a genocidal dictator, who aspired to acquire weapons of mass destruction — even if he did not have them yet. And second, removing Saddam and building a more decent Iraq would help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive political track and send a message to all the neighboring regimes that Western governments were not going to just sit back and let them incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians, whose fanaticism threatened all open societies. These were the good reasons for the war, and Mr. Blair voiced some of them aloud that day.[...]
So what Mr. Blair (and Mr. Bush) did was to make a war of choice — but a good choice — into a war of necessity. Because people in democracies don't like to fight wars of choice. To make it a war of necessity, they hyped the direct threat from Iraq and highlighted flimsy intelligence suggesting that Saddam was not just a potential problem, but an immediate, undeterrable threat to the British and American mainlands. This was so, they argued, because Saddam retained hidden stocks of W.M.D.'s, in violation of U.N. resolutions, which he could deploy at any minute.
Unless real W.M.D.'s are found in Iraq, Gulf War II will for now and for years to come be known as "the controversial Gulf War II" — and the hyped reasons for the war will obscure the still good ones. Only future historians will be able to sort out this war's ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.
It's too late, because no one will ever know what Saddam would've done had Messrs Blair and Bush not acted. And it's too early, because the good reasons for this war — to unleash a process of reform in the Arab-Muslim region that will help it embrace modernity and make it less angry and more at ease with the world — will take years to play out.
I still think that there is a legitimate threat argument to be made/that was made. However, I have been convinced from the beginning that a deposed Saddam and a democratized/modernized Iraq will have positive long-term affects in the region, and to our own national security.
I also know that as a primary argument, that wasn't going to fly. Indeed, the administration originally focused on "regime change" and later shifted its focus to regime change + WMDs.
Source: The War Over the War
Posted by Steven at August 3, 2024 07:27 AM | TrackBack