Someday, I will be one of the last six people on Earth who supports the liberation of Iraq – Yours truly, sometime in late 2003
The day I foresaw nearly twelve years ago has not yet arrived, but it’s coming closer with the news that most Republican candidates for president are playing the what-we-now-know card – hindsight being 20/20 and all. If anything though, the Republican retreat on the liberation of Iraq merely reveals that the only person who came close to actually understanding hindsight correctly was Steve Spurrier*.
For most Republicans, other Americans, and even British (for what it’s worth), the lack of post-1991 weapons of mass destruction is enough to collapse the entire case for liberation. As I never really considered the WMD issue to be so important, I had other reasons to support the liberation of Iraq – reasons that have far better withstood the test of time.
First, there was the Ba’athist regime – a brutal tyranny that reached its peak in bloodlust under Saddam Hussein. Hussein himself killed roughly 1 million of his fellow Iraqis through torture and two invasions. John Burns (New York Times) has an account from just before the liberation:
Iraq has its gulag of prisons, dungeons and torture chambers — some of them acknowledged, like Abu Ghraib, and as many more disguised as hotels, sports centers and other innocent-sounding places. It has its overlapping secret-police agencies, and its culture of betrayal, with family members denouncing each other, and offices and factories becoming hives of perfidy.
”Enemies of the state” are eliminated, and their spouses, adult children and even cousins are often tortured and killed along with them.
Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector identified as one of the dictator’s favorites: ”If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem.”
There are rituals to make the end as terrible as possible, not only for the victims but for those who survive. After seizing power in July 1979, Mr. Hussein handed weapons to surviving members of the ruling elite, then joined them in personally executing 22 comrades who had dared to oppose his ascent.
Whatever has befallen Iraq since the liberation – the repeated failures to account for Sunni fear of Iranian hegemony being the main cause of them – the idea that Iraq was a peaceful and serene place before 2003 is utterly and sickeningly ridiculous. To be fair, there are quite a few nasty regimes still in place, but the Iraqi Ba’athists gave other reasons for their dethronement.
Namely, their ties to terrorists. In the wake of the WMD issue crowding out everything else, we have forgotten how friendly the Ba’athists were to Sunni terrorists in the region. We shouldn’t. Jeffrey Goldberg’s New Yorker piece from 2002 provides harrowing detail about the regime’s ties to al Qaeda, including their partnership in support for Ansar al-Islam – a terrorist group in Iraqi Kurdistan. He subsidized Palestinian suicide bombers posthumously (ABC News). Even now, the remnants of the regime are one of the pillars (if you will) for ISIS/ISIL/Daesh (New York Post). Do we really think this regime would do less – and not more – to back Sunni terrorists if it were still in power today?
So we have a brutal regime that was sponsoring local terrorism wherever it could to act against its enemies. That isn’t all, however, because the regime was rebuilding its arsenal. We now know (to use the in-vogue phrase) that the regime paid $10 million to North Korea for a missile assembly line (New York Times). Thankfully, Pyongyang never delivered. Why was that? Because there was “too much American scrutiny” in the run-up to the liberation. To this day, we still don’t know what the regime order from CCP-owned Norenco (which was caught selling missile parts to Iran) with “oil-for-food” credits.
In short, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq was not a stable regime; it was a bloodthirsty one. It was not looking to survive; but to dominate the region. It was not a source of stability in the region; it was one of the region’s leading supporters of terrorism (and arguably the leading supporter of Sunni terrorism). It was Daesh with all the powers of a functioning police state, all of the pre-1991 chemical weapons, all of the veneer of a nation-state, and but for the decision to liberate and the attention it gathered, quite possibly their own missile program.
Not enough? Then consider these events, “given what we now know.”
Iran’s nuclear weapons program: We tend to forget this now, but it wasn’t the “West” that discovered Tehran’s plans for nuclear weapons. It was the National Council for Resistance in Iran – which at the time had backing from Ba’athist Iraq. It is likely that Saddam Hussein know of Iran’s nuclear ambitions before we did. Can anyone really think that Hussein would not have used this as an excuse to bring his own nuclear plan out of the deep freeze? Moreover American intelligence later noted that the mullahcracy put its own nuclear plans on hold…in 2003. If you want to believe that’s a coincidence, go ahead, but you can’t do that regarding…
Libya, which halted and handed over all of its WMD programs in the wake of the liberation. Consider all of that still in place, with Qaddafi in power. Consider all of it in place without him in power.
The mistake made in Iraq was not in liberating it, but in withdrawing from it too soon. Both Bush and Obama made that mistake, and both ended up reversing themselves (Bush more clearly with the 2007 surge than Obama with the air campaign against Daesh). I feel Obama’s greater mistake is viewing Iran as a potential partner rather than an opponent. Bush did not make that mistake, which not only put Shia politicians in Iraq on notice, but also reassured local Sunnis and helped encourage them to fight the terrorists in their midst.
It is highly unfortunate that all of the above has been crowded out by the WMD narrative. Too many Americans have forgotten just how brutal, ambitious, and anti-American the Ba’athist regime of Iraq was – and its remnant still is. It is far better for Iraq, the United States, and the rest of the world that the Iraqi Ba’athists are as weak as they are, instead of as strong as they were.
* – During his brief tenure as head coach of the Washington Redskins, Spurrier famously uttered, “Hindsight’s always 50/50.”
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