LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence
that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty
of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved
markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in
Baghdad."
I could undertake to defend that
statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty
International, and I know in advance that none of them could
challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was
an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and
not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee
imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably,
the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the
advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in
this manner? And where should one begin?
I once tried to calculate how long
the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had actually lasted. Whether you
chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of
the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the
referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the
publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history"
and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an
epoch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of
1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was
attempting to erase
The identity and the existence
of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the
reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian
ideology. Proving the same point in another way, and within
approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had
publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for the
suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the génocidaire
faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably
get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into
operation.
One is not mentioning these
apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted
list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the
humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign
with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss,
of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very
same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and
perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism
into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the
aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or
just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of
the United States.
The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if
it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation
with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush
administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein
in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker
correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United
States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic
cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton
administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its
opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive
strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?
I know hardly
anybody who comes out of this examination with complete credit.
There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who
couldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992.
There were leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie
and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps because of a
bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't face a confrontation with
Saddam Hussein even when he annexed a neighbor state that was a full
member of the Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit
that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But there were
consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly
hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent
troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the
hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for
any reason, of American military force.
The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from
that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in
Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic
after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any
self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation
that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American
"poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had
in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the
importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist
governor of Texas.
Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one
still cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without
the feeling that one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist
relative in a neglected home. I am one of those who believe,
uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war
a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American
homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical
mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and
nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to
recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so
casually overlooked.)
The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in
Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin
Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last
attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see,
there was only one other state that combined the latent and the
blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This
state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also
met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have
sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had
invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored
and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every
provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in
this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and
its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based
mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been
going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as
chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every
species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under
Saddam's crumbling roof.
One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision
to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be
hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N.
resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and
inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not
the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in
Europe and America, that the whole operation for the
demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized
society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked
aggression. How can this possibly be?
THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic
literalism. In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the
naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in
his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults
who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:
"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my
bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he
repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does
not intend to shift from favorable ground.
Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this
wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups
and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite
another thing, and considerably less charming. "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.
I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent
and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest
thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity,
I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother
to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I
actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat,
of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the
spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the
deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily
unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at
this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't
told us?"
I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter
is the split within official Washington, most especially between the
Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former
has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being
those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice
not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam
Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich
bit--a rational and calculating one.)
There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic
chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current
fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to
give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism
"over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a
standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in
London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist
opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the
grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American
civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.
It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister
tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But
in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to
localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere
they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in
practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably
the next target of the jihadists. 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.
Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every time an
antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse mythology has been
permitted to take hold in the present case, where bad news is deemed
to be bad news only for regime-change. Anyone with the smallest
knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and
institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three
decades of war and fascism (and the "divide-and-rule" tactics by
which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni
minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore
compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable
state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.
At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been
infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as
well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi
Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional
clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and
bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on
even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and
Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point
in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken
Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility
(somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person
could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.
Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who go out on
the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The first is contingent:
There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to
phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other
side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than
Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim
Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles
that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these
characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and
some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So
that's easy enough.
The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge
number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad
news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick
out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I
surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out
of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we
should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten,
murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they
hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been
created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines
that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism. The
more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark Danner and Harold
Meyerson, like to employ the term "a war of choice." One should have
no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not
deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no
matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place
have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I
may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to
Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .
DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of
fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not
argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes,
because these in some ways argue themselves. But a positive
accounting 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.
It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such
a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies
adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other
words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within
Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no
circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.
The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted
the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist,
theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One
should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such
coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake
Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or
be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in
reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have
the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word
or deed that contributed to a defeat.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most
recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. A recent
essay of his appears in the collection A Matter of Principle:
Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, newly published by the
University of California Press.
www.hitchensweb.com
