Some more thoughts on Iraq

Christopher Hitchens asks us to keep some perspective about the situation in Iraq:

. . . [T]hree years ago, the leader of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia wrote to his guru Osama Bin Laden, saying that there was a real danger of the electoral process succeeding in Iraq and of "suffocating" the true Islamist cause. The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized that it combined extreme radical evil with a high degree of intelligence. . .

If there is a sectarian war in Iraq today, or perhaps several sectarian wars, we have to understand that this was latent in the country, and in the state, and in the society all along. It was not the only possible outcome, because it had to be willed and organized, but it was certainly high on the list of probabilities. (The Saddam Hussein regime, which thrived on the worst form of "divide and rule," certainly represented a standing invitation to run this risk.)

In other words, those who now deplore and decry the "civil war" (or the "civil wars") must, in order to be serious, admit that they would have deplored such an outcome just as much if it had not happened on America's watch or had (like Rwanda) been something that we could have pretended to watch as disinterested or—even worse—uninterested spectators.

The habit of viewing Iraq as a crisis that only began in 2003—a lazy habit that is conditioned by the needs of the impending 2008 election—is an obstacle to understanding. Everybody has their own favorite alternative scenario of how things might have evolved differently or better. In some weak moments, I can picture taking the alternative advice from the European Union and the United Nations in 2003—let's just see how Iraq develops if left alone as a private fiefdom of the Saddam Hussein dynasty—and only then deciding that things have deteriorated to the point where an international intervention is necessitated. That would have been much less upsetting and demanding than the direct assumption of responsibility, and could have been triggered by the more familiar images of unbearable suffering and carnage, and could have summoned the Darfur-like emotions of guilt and shame, but it would perforce have been begun very much later—and perhaps too late altogether.

Iraq was in our future. The specter, not just of a failed state, but of a failed society, was already before us in what we saw from the consequences of sanctions and the consequences of aggressive Sunni fascism at the center of the state. Nobody has ever even tried to make a case for doing nothing about Iraq: Even those who foresaw sectarian strife were going by a road map that was already valid and had been traveled before. Thus it seems to me quite futile to be arguing about whether to blame the Iraqis—or indeed whether to blame the coalition. Until recently, no Iraqi was allowed to have any opinion about the future of his or her country. How long did we imagine that such a status quo would have remained "stable"?

All true.

It has become fashionable to speak of the mess we've made in Iraq, but what of the mess that Saddam Hussein made of Iraq? If the sectarian and ethnic hatred had not been festering below the surface for generations it could not have exploded with such force upon the nation's liberation.

The leftists who lament that the Iraqis were "better off" under Saddam miss the fact that the longer a volcano sits dormant and builds up subterranean pressure the more destructive the eventual eruption will be.

In other words Iraq was doomed to experience upheavals after the chains were taken off and the only way to delay (not prevent) the conflagration would have been to impose a new regime as oppressive (if not more so) than Saddam's. But the outworking of long repressed hostility does not have to drag the nation down into chaos.

With the US and its partners on scene those who will not live in peace under any circumstances can be killed or driven away and Iraq can be guided into the 21st century. It will not be easy or quick, but it can be done.