(That's a good word. Sorry I over-use it. ;-)
The Australian (from 2008):
Hitchens defending himself:
His heart was in the right place, but his refusal to accept that Bush's invasion made things much, much worse (not just a few unfortunate consequences in an on-the-whole noble adventure) - and his searching for flakes of gold in the mountain of destruction that Rumsfeld and Bush's people constructed - was and remains a severe blot on his legacy.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Australian (from 2008):
Hitchens defending himself:
[...]
We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war".
We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam or a decision to have done with him.
The President's speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.
That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups.
Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had believed or than the Bush administration had suggested.
This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself.
But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale.
A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.
The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.
A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.
The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.
Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.
Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Gaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much larger than anticipated) stock of WMD, if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship. None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty, and unintended consequences of their own.
I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.
Nonetheless, the thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadis), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?
The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur.
Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say attempt rather than do, which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice". But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited.
We were already deeply involved in the life and death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.
His heart was in the right place, but his refusal to accept that Bush's invasion made things much, much worse (not just a few unfortunate consequences in an on-the-whole noble adventure) - and his searching for flakes of gold in the mountain of destruction that Rumsfeld and Bush's people constructed - was and remains a severe blot on his legacy.
Cheers,
Scott.