Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005
"You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.
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The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.
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But a positive accounting [of the war] could be offered without braggartry, and would include:
(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.
(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.
(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)
(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.
(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.
(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.
(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.
(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.
5 comments:
I thought this was an interesting article. As usual Hitchens is so convinced and strident in his opinions he makes you feel stupid for disagreeing. The Salon published an interesting point-by-point response to the Hitchen's piece, would be interested to get JP's take on it - http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/05/hitchens/
The Juan Cole article at the Salon has a mix of good and bad points, though overall I find him much less convincing than Hitchens. He claims to reduce Hitchens' 10 to a zero - I don't have time to go through every point here, but I reckon he reduces the 10 to more like a 6/7.
A bit of an analysis for now.
I AGREE WITH COLE
* In fact, the secular Arab nationalist Baath state had nothing whatsoever to do with any radical Islamist movements, including Talibanism. Talibanism is a variant of the Deobandi school of revivalist Sunnism deriving from British colonial India. The link Hitchens suggests is the Jordanian terrorist Ahmad Fadil al-Khala'ilah, known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who went off as a teenager in 1989 to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, but arrived only in time to wave goodbye to them. He later had a vigorous rivalry with Osama bin Laden and refused to share resources with him. It is not clear what his relationship was to "Talibanism"; he appears to be a radical "Salafi" in the Jordanian Sunni revivalist tradition.
JP: Having recently read Burke's book (http://impdec.blogspot.com/2005/07/al-qaeda-true-story-of-radical-islam.html) the distinction between Deobandiism and modern Islamism has some foundation, though bin Laden and the Taliban is a perfect example of cross-fertilisation. Zarqawi alone is a poor link between Saddam and the Taliban.
* The truth is, Bush squandered his victory over the Taliban by failing to follow through at the crucial moment, and by diverting needed military resources into a disastrous second front in Iraq.
JP: May well be some truth in this, though America also may well have had the resources (if not the planning and commitment) to do both properly.
* Hitchens then argues that the ability to certify Iraq as truly disarmed, rather than having to accept the representations of a "psychopathic autocrat" is a benefit of the Iraq war. Yet the American public spends over $30 billion a year on our intelligence agencies.
JP: recently read that a CIA guy admitted they do not have a single operative who could pretend to be a Taliban, and hang out for years in the mountains gathering intelligence.
* Hitchens' last points are the most gruesome and heinous. As number 9, he argues that "thousands" of "Bin Ladenist" infiltrators into Iraq have been killed. ... So Bush's Iraq is not a flytrap bringing in already-existing al-Qaida operatives. It is actively creating terrorists out of perfectly normal young men who otherwise would be leading a humdrum existence
JP: well, they're both right. Lots of the bastards are being killed, yet more are joining up.
I DISAGREE WITH COLE
* He mysteriously neglects to note that the Baath regime had in fact given up its weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s, in perhaps the most thorough-going and successful U.N.-led disarmament in modern history.
JP: I think this is bollocks. Saddam consistently refused to cooperate fully with the weapons inspectors, and the only thing that ever pushed him to concede an inch was real military threat. The discovery that Saddam was (suicidally) acting *as if* he still had WMD stocks whereas in fact he "only" had ongoing WMD programs ready for relaunch was not revealed by the inspectors nor predicted by the anti-war mob.
*Israel has launched several wars of aggression
JP: bollocks
*[Israel] thumbed its nose at the Non-Proliferation Treaty far more successfully than Saddam
JP: Israel is hardly a similar threat to the region
NB: Hitchens himself is pretty anti-Israel!
* Hitchens is, moreover, highly selective in his outrage. He is not disturbed by the brutal, scorched-earth tactics of the Russians in Chechnya or the heavy-handedness of India in Kashmir. The deaths of 3 million Congolese pass without mention. The terrorist threat posed by the Tamil Tigers and the weakened state in Sri Lanka does not attract his attention. Many more dangerous situations existed in the world than the one in Iraq, which turns out not to have been dangerous at all.
JP: I agree these are all serious issues, I have no idea what Hitchens says or does not say about them
* Hitchens castigates Iraq as having been both a rogue and a failed state, and offers this self-contradictory depiction as a legitimate cause for war.
JP: this is not self-contradictory and may well be a legit cause for war
* unilateral action to punish them, outside any framework of international legality. The U.N. Security Council declined to authorize a war against Iraq.
JP: what does this guy think about Kosovo I wonder?
* Hitchens offers no proof whatsoever that Libya's overture had anything at all to do with the Iraq war. Rather, it is quite clear that Libya is a case where the European and U.S. economic sanctions placed on the country to punish it for its terrorist activities actually worked as designed.
JP: Don't make me laugh.
* He then goes on to suggest that the Iraq war had caused President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany to admit that nothing will alter their "neutralism."
JP: I think Hitchens is basically right
* We did not need a war to discover whether Iraq was truly disarmed.
JP: Incorrect. And without hundreds of thousands of US troops on the border the inspectors wouldn't even have been allowed in.
* Hitchens then rehearses the argument, loudly made in conservative circles a few months ago, that the Iraq war encouraged democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.
JP: I think there is definitely some level of connection here - though remember that democracy without liberalism is not necessarily a good thing.
FINAL COMMENT
Have just finished Ferguson's Colossus, and am intending to scan some stuff in from it. A great read, v.interesting on Iraq, and very relevant to this discussion. Vaguely summarising Ferguson's position: right thing to do / French position untenable and immoral, many terrible cock-ups in the implementation of the war.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141017007/qid=1126087172/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/202-5497568-2755823
Hitchen's may well have 6/7 out of 10 but I think JP gets 10 out 10. Outstanding analysis.
A short article balancing the gains against the losses of Saddam's overthrow.
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2923
What If the United States Had Not Invaded Iraq
by Daniel Pipes
Philadelphia Inquirer
September 11, 2005
This could almost have been a new post, or been posted on several other threads but I put it here as it seems the most fitting. Johann Hari has recanted his support for the war in Iraq:
After three years, after 150,000 dead, why I was wrong about Iraq
A melancholic mea culpa
A few weeks ago, a small moment – a little line of text – underlined for me how far life in Iraq has slumped. As I was reading a story, the ticker-tape on the BBC News website casually stated: ‘Car bomb in Baghdad; 50 dead.’ There were no accompanying details. When these Iraqi suicide-massacres started to happen in Iraq, I would nervously call my friends out in Baghdad and Basra and Hilla to make sure they were okay. But I soon realised this was antagonising them, driving every bomb further into their skulls – should they store a standard text ‘No, not killed in suicide bomb today’ message and send it out three times a day? So I swallowed hard, waited, and the next day, I looked through all the newspapers for details. Nobody mentioned it. Suicide-slaughters the size of 7/7 are now so common they don’t even bleed into News in Brief.
So after three years and at least 150,000 Iraqi corpses, can those of us who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis’ sake still claim it was worth it? (I am assuming the people who bought the obviously fictitious arguments about WMD are already hanging their heads in shame). George Packer, a recalcitrant Iraq-based journalist who tentatively supported the invasion, summarises the situation in the country today: “Most people aren’t free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group, wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their lives.” In many regions – including the British controlled South – power has been effectively ceded to fascist militias who “take over schools and hospitals, intimidate the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issue death sentences, repeatedly try to seize control of the holy shrines, run criminal gangs, firebomb liquor stores, and are often drunk themselves. Their tactics are those of fascist bullies.”
So when people ask if I think I was wrong, I think about the Iraqi friend – hiding, terrified, in his own house – who said to me this week, “Every day you delete another name from your mobile, because they’ve been killed. By the Americans or the jihadists or the militias – usually you never find out which.” I think of the people trapped in the siege of a civilian city, Fallujah, where amidst homes and schools the Americans indiscriminately used a banned chemical weapon – white phosphorous – that burns through skin and bone. (The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city, so anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi – an evacuation procedure so successful they later used it in New Orleans.). I think of the raw numbers: on the largest estimate – from the Human Rights Centre in Khadimiya – Saddam was killing 70,000 people a year. The occupation and the jihadists have topped that, and the violence is getting worse. And I think – yes, I was wrong. Terribly wrong.
Article in full.
It's worth noting that by adding a comment that he received criticising his new position, Johann may still have mixed feelings. (You can see the comment at the end of the article.)
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