First let’s push to one side those who love to sound war whoops at every opportunity–and who probably think this would be a better world if we’d now steer our Abrams tanks east to the ancient Silk Route and invade Beijing.
Then let’s push to another side those so gripped by post-Vietnam defeatism–or by their visceral loathing of George W. Bush–that they would oppose virtually any military action initiated by the current American administration.
Holders of those polar positions judged the final outcome of the war with Iraq as a phenomenal success–or a misguided tragedy–long before it began. But for the majority of Americans whose views were never carved in marble, the measure of what this war has accomplished is now coming clear.
The outcome isn’t, and perhaps never will be, perfect. Weaving the fabric of a new Iraq from so many contentious strands will be difficult at best. The looting and violence of recent days are only the first and probably shortest-lived problems. Those who have viewed the war as a vast misadventure have seized–sometimes gleefully, sometimes as if grasping for redemption–on every early failing. For these harshest of critics, there’s no need to rush. In coming months and years they will have plenty of opportunities to declare themselves vindicated.
That said, the Iraq that emerges–even as it stumbles early and often on its path to self-governance–will be a nation free of one of the modern world’s more vicious despots. Iraq will be free, too, of the tactics by which Saddam Hussein maintained power–acts of savagery against his people from which the world consciously, and unforgivably, averted its eyes.
Those alone are remarkable accomplishments, which only months ago seemed unimaginable. Hussein, you’ll recall, was the ultimate survivor–of wars, of coup attempts and of widespread enmity in his own land and beyond.
Liberating Iraq gives its people the opportunity to build a representative government, to materially improve their lives, to have futures with more predictability than wondering whom Hussein’s thugs will take away next. Today’s Iraqis, with decades of pent-up frustration provoking irrational acts on city streets, voice wildly conflicting views about the American-led invasion. The next generation will not.
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The war also is unequivocal proof that those who encourage or harbor international terrorists do so at peril. The demolition of Hussein removes a head of state who lavished money on the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, who hosted terrorist training camps in Iraqi hinterlands, who shielded from capture the notorious Abu Abbas, convicted in absentia for the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro.
For decades many victim nations have held themselves hostage to that kind of terrorism, fearful that a bold response would make new enemies. The lesson in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, is that those who truck with terrorists risk the kind of military onslaught that topples devious governments and rewrites history books.
Still to be unraveled is the full picture of a regime that, during his presidency, President Bill Clinton called a “rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.” As Iraqi government and science officials become free to speak, the story of Hussein’s weapons programs eventually should emerge.
What already has emerged is a change of approach, if not of heart, in the two other nations Bush has identified as parts of an axis of evil. If you’re looking for shock and awe, try Iran and North Korea. In Tehran there is talk of a referendum on whether to begin reconciliation with the U.S. And in Pyongyang–a capital whose secret development of nuclear bombs explains why bellicose governments must be kept from acquiring them–officials are erratically rethinking the wisdom of their nuclear program.
Other ripples abound. In France, the stature of the most vocal opponent of the war has nose-dived even among his political allies. “Jacques Chirac has to acknowledge that the courage of the Americans and the British has brought to an end a dictatorship,” said Jacques Barrot, president of Chirac’s party in the French National Assembly and one of several French leaders quoted as suggesting Chirac overplayed his hand.
In Britain, Tony Blair has shown his critics that principle can trump politics. The U.S. ally who took the most risks to stand firm in insisting that Hussein respond to the world’s demands has largely silenced the timid members of Parliament who once again would have shied away from enforcing consequences against Iraq.
The Arab street, so vocal in the war’s early days, has quieted. Yes, there is still animosity about the U.S. invasion of an Arab country. But discussion there is sure to turn to what the presence of a free, even democratic Iraq will mean in a region where self-anointed potentates are the norm.
Here at home, Bush has flummoxed his critics at almost every turn. Last fall, he won overwhelming approval in Congress for a war resolution. He successfully urged the United Nations Security Council to unanimously adopt Resolution 1441, which ordered Iraq to fully and voluntarily disclose the status of its weapons programs. As the war progressed, he kept the unwavering support of the American people, who backed the conflict by a ratio of three-to-one.
Bush owes some of that last success to the prowess of his military commanders. Their relative restraint did not destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. Civilian casualties, always tragic, were low by the standards of war, and lower than what an Iraq ruled by Hussein regularly meted out. The death of any American soldier, even one, causes us to pause in sorrow and gratitude. In perspective, the total U.S. combat death toll in Iraq only slightly exceeds the number of traffic fatalities this nation suffers on an average day.
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The night this war commenced, Bush pledged it would not be fought in half-measures. He kept his word. His commanders’ swift execution pre-empted most of the jeremiads that preceded the war–fears of uprisings in Arab countries, of a military quagmire, of a refugee crisis, of oil fields set ablaze, of a northern war between Turks and Kurds, of a global economy hobbled, of rapid terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and so on.
The failure of those predictions to materialize ought not to be an I-told-you-so weapon for those who favored this war, suitable for confronting those who, in estimable conscience, opposed it. Their concerns were genuine, their patriotism never in doubt. They, too, want a safer world.
Similarly, it is premature for those who envision a broad failure of nation-building in Iraq to gloat over the Iraqi people’s dangerous and clumsy expression of anger or frustration. Declaring the war unnecessary because Hussein didn’t pose an immediate, provable threat to the U.S. itself has been cold comfort to our Israeli and Turkish allies–and, truth be told, to many of Iraq’s Arab neighbors who no longer need fear the threatening and loopy regime in Baghdad. In short, this war has never been all about us.
Beyond the war’s short-term effects that all of us are seeing now–many of them excellent, some of them hurtful–we should acknowledge long-term effects as well. Among these is the reaffirmation of two unfortunate truths: Some situations demand military force. And some tyrants and terrorists respect nothing less.
Searching history for the perfect war, the war of unassailable moral purity, is a fool’s errand. But eliminating Saddam Hussein, closing his haven for mischief and freeing the murderously abused people of Iraq mark this war a success.
