I really hate having to do this. This is supposed to be my day off. But I feel like I need to respond to the argument going on in the community over the war in Iraq.
In order to talk about the war in Iraq, we need to talk about the Persian Gulf War. I opposed that war at the time for a very specific reason. I felt it would bring terrorism to our own shores. Yet, I was not opposed to the war in principle. I felt that Kuwait was a member of the United Nations in good standing, and that part of the purpose of the United Nations was to assure the sovereignty of its member states.
When a member of the United Nations (in good standing) is attacked it is the job of the Security Council to defend their sovereignty. This was done in 1950, when North Korea attacked South Korea.
So, I was torn over the decision to liberate Kuwait. My decision to oppose the war was probably influenced by the offensive and misleading propaganda the first Bush administration used to justify the war. I also was concerned that Saddam had been misled into thinking we would tolerate his invasion. It was a difficult decision, but I opposed the war.
In spite of this, I was impressed with the coalition that Poppy put together and I was encouraged that it led to progress on the Israel/Palestine controversy, leading directly to the Oslo Accords.
At the end of the war, when Saddam did not fall as anticipated, we were stuck with an intractable problem. Initially, the French, British, and Americans took joint responsibility for manning the no-fly zones and maintaining a very harsh embargo. This protected the Shi’a and Kurds from genocidal attacks, but it also created a grave humanitarian crisis, and it failed to weaken Saddam’s grip on power.
Before long the world was blaming us for causing the suffering and death of tens of thousands of Iraqis. Then the French bowed out of their responsibilities for keeping up the no-fly zones and became vocal critics of the sanctions. Thanks very much.
Now, let’s take a step back and ask what right America had to intervene in Kuwait and then to apply sanctions on Iraq?
The most obvious answer is that the UN agreed to authorize these actions, and therefore they were legal under international law. And the underlying presupposition of such authorization is that the United States, and other members of the Security Council, have some responsibility for being an enforcement arm of UN resolutions.
The Security Council members are exceptional in the sense that they are the only powers strong and affluent enough to put teeth into the UN. If the UN wants to be able to make members abide by its rules, America’s military is an indispensable tool in a way that, say, Ghana’s military is not.
Does this mean that America has the right to invade other countries’ sovereignty in a way that Iran does not? Yes and no. We have no more right than any other country to invade the sovereignty of another nation, unless we receive UN authority to do so. But Iraq was a special case. We had been given authorization, and were operating with that authorization, to permanently violate Iraq’s sovereignty. Even the UN was violating their sovereignty by, for example, running the oil-for-food program.
Yet, we were abandoned in the task of containing Saddam by the other Security Council members. France backed out of the no-fly zones, and then Russian, France, and China signed contracts to develop Iraq’s oil fields contingent on a lifting of the sanctions. They then joined the chorus of critics of the sanctions, blaming the US and Britain for causing unnecessary suffering.
And, the fact of the matter is that the sanctions were not working. They had the effect of increasing Saddam’s control over the people, as they became dependent on him for their ration cards. He used the suffering of his people as an effective propaganda tool against us, as did al-Qaeda, even while he wasted his country’s resources on a massive palace building program. Containing Saddam was not making us safer, and it was doing nothing to ease the plight of the Iraqi people. It was hurting the economies of our allies in Turkey and Jordan, and of the whole region generally.
It is within this context that the decision was made to invade Iraq. Yes, I believe the decision pre-dated 9/11, and the 9/11 merely provided an irresistible pretext for the invasion.
I’ve written all of this by way of a prelude. And I just want to reiterate the situation as it stood in early 2001. Our policy vis-a-vis Iraq was a failure. After ten years Saddam had a tighter grip on power than ever before. Our air bases in Saudi Arabia (needed to patrol the southern no-fly zone) had led to retaliatory strikes at Khobar Towers, our embassies in Africa, and against the USS Cole. Colin Powell had made a failed tour of the region to gather support for a smart-sanctions regime. We faced the choice of lifting the sanctions, ending the no-fly zones, and allowing Saddam to re-exert control over all of Iraq (and eventually re-arming), or of continuing a failed policy in perpetuity in the face of increasing criticism and resistance from the international community, and an increasing threat of terrorism.
It is not clear to me what other options were available to us. But the one the neo-cons seized on was to overthrow Saddam’s government and start over from scratch. Now, I think it might have been possible to make a case for such a drastic strategy if we had been willing to make the case honestly and had been willing to share the contracts for rebuilding Iraq.
In short, we could have said that we were no longer willing to suffer the costs in money and blowback that containing Saddam required, and that we were also unwilling to allow him to reconquer Kurdistan and southern Iraq, and to rebuild his armed forces with all the money he would get once the sanctions were lifted. We would have told the other security council members that they had left us holding the bag, and we expected them to bail us out. In return, we could have paid whatever cost that was required to gain their support.
With a unified approach and UN approval, a full-out invasion may not have been required, as Saddam would have seen the writing on the wall, and so too, would his generals and colonels. A coup or voluntary exile would have been more likely. And if an invasion became necessary, it would have had the legal cover of a UN resolution and a coalition similar to the one that waged the Persian Gulf War.
For whatever reasons, the Bush administration did not attempt to make these arguments or to make the compromises and concessions that might have made them work.
They chose instead to make a false argument about weapons of mass destruction. They chose to rip up the contracts of the French, Russians, and Chinese, at the same time they were asking for their votes in Security Council. As a result, the war was illegal under international law, our troops had no legitimacy when they arrived, and we didn’t have enough troops to protect the infrastructure and to maintain order.
I could go on at great length about the other mistakes made by the Bush administration. But my point in saying all this, is that our Iraq policy was a real problem that did contribute to the rise of al-Qaeda, that did have a direct effect on our security, and that something had to change.
If I had it my way, Kuwait would be part of Iraq and Iraq would be a bulwark against Iran, and we would just tolerate Saddam as we tolerate Qaddafi and Mugabe. But history didn’t turn out that way.
The United States is exceptional because we were indispensable in liberating Kuwait, and we are indispensable in enforcing UN resolutions. We didn’t deserve the abandonment we received in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. And we had a right to do something about it.
Unfortunately, what Bush decided to do about it had the effect of destroying our credibility, of destroying the UN construct that gave us legitimacy to act in the first place. But the complexity and nuances of the situation are such that I feel it is incorrect to view all our soldiers as criminals just because the war is technically illegal. The true crime isn’t that we invaded Iraq’s sovereignty, but that we did so in a totally irresponsible way, and made matter worse for everyone involved. There were many options we could have and should pursued before we launched an invasion, based on lies, with no international support, and with a totally inadequate plan.
It is my true hope that we learn the lessons of this war. And there are many. The most important lesson is the importance of approaching our international problems in a multilateral way, even if it involves painful concessions. The second most important lesson is that we need to become less reliant on Middle Eastern energy sources. And the third, is that we strip the executive of some of its war powers, and learn to distrust our own media and exert more independent thinking.
