Iraq War – Should we have gone? Part II
While many reasons could be, and have been given for why we should have gone to war in Iraq, the three that were always the strongest for me were, WMD, humanitarian, and strategic. While the subsequent failure to find large stockpiles of WMDs has cast some doubt on the first reason (as was discussed last time), subsequent discoveries of mass graves, and the records of Saddam’s evil have more than confirmed the second reason. One of the problems when confronting evil as tremendous as Saddam’s is that it is so disturbing there is a tendency to avert our eyes and ignore it. Any student of history knows that there are few limits on man’s inhumanity to man. I still remember reading in Will and Arial Durant’s 11 volume The Story of Civilization the description of a particular means of killing prisoners that still unsettles me whenever it think of it. When it comes to inhumanity, Saddam and his sons are right there with history’s worst. Reading accounts of what Saddam and his son’s did only took what would have been best left as unthinkable into new areas.
Now I admit there is some room for legitimate disagreement on this point. Some think that however horrible the atrocity, US forces should only be used for US interests. I disagree. At some point the atrocities in a country become so horrific that the world can no longer sit by, but has an obligation to put a stop to it. Most see the holocaust and say “never again.” But sadly, it does happen, and ‘never again’ becomes empty rhetoric, as we saw with Cambodia, and more recently with Rwanda and now Darfur. Granted, we don’t want to be the world’s policemen for every grievance, and we do need to take into account a number of factors such as feasibility, but when we can do something, do we really want to stand by while hundreds of thousands of people are not just killed but brutally tortured and do nothing other than say “that’s terrible” or, if we are really outraged, pass some meaningless UN resolutions?
Yet what is so ironic about the current situation, is that many of the same people who are so critical of the Iraq war, were very supportive a war based solely on humanitarian reasons in Bosnia, and currently argue for sending troops into Darfur. Given their support for these actions, and the opposition to the Iraq war, it would seem that for many critics, humanitarian reasons are valid only if there is no national interest stake. If there is an national interest at sake, then humanitarian reasons are to be ignored, and the war opposed.
Before moving on to what I have always believed was and is the most important reason, there are the secondary costs to the world community for failing to act. Whether it was the result of Saddam’s bribing key countries with oil for food money, an attitude of appeasement, self-interest, pacifism, or whatever, the failure of the UN to doing anything other than pass resolution after resolution after resolution shows that it resolutions are meaningless and can be ignored. The last resolution was put forward as a last chance, and even then Iraq did not comply. As Hans Blix, hardly a supporter of the war, report to the security council when the deadline passed, “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance – not even today – of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”
As a result of this, and numerous previous examples of inaction, the UN had proven itself to be worst than inactive. With their flat out refusal to take any action combined with their willingness to condemn any who do, they have placed themselves into the role of defenders of dictators. Dictators know that UN resolutions are ultimately not worth the paper they are printed on. Thus the UN is far more effective at protecting those who commit atrocities than stopping atrocities. Is it any surprise then, that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded to the UN threat of passing resolutions condemning its nuclear program by saying “Iran does not give a damn about such resolutions.”
I believe that one of the reasons for the war in Iraq, was Saddam’s miscalculation that the UN and his allies such as France and Russia, would be able to keep the US from attacking, or force them to withdrawal quickly if they did. He falsely believed “time was on his side and that the Coalition would never be allowed to attack” and so could continue flaunting the UN resolution. Theodore Roosevelt taught that we should speak softly, but carry a big stick. The UN seems to be speak loudly, but do nothing to back it up. If the UN had clearly supported strong action in Iraq, there is at least a chance that the Iraq war would never have happened, and Iran would not now be threatening the world with its nuclear program. But they didn’t, and it was thus left to the US and its allies to act.
