Christopher Hitchens from Slate.com is proud that his support of the Iraq War has never wavered. In this piece, he does a pretty good job of explaining why we should support the war. It’s so good, that the White House should hire him. But, he is still wrong.
He thinks it was scandalous that Iraq defied UN resolutions for 10 years and that the UN’s credibility was at stake. Not true. First of all, many nations defy UN resolutions – Israel, Syria, North Korea, etc – and that doesn’t reduce the UN Security Council’s (“UNSC”) credibility. Most of the time, the UNSC is good because they do nothing. With Rwanda and Darfur, it is terrible that nothing is happening, because many people are dying at sanctions will not help. But, Iraq was contained and violence was not necessary in March 2003. The best thing for the UNSC to do was to make a lot of noise and do nothing.
” The Security Council, including Syria, voted by nine votes to zero that Iraq must come into full compliance or face serious consequences.” There are 15 members on the UNSC. The other 6 votes were abstentions. So, instead of voting against the resolution, they abstained to save face. “Serious consequences” didn’t mean war – we know that because the UNSC didn’t vote for war.
I agree with him that sending troops to the region was a good way to force the inspection process. The inspection process started up, but we invaded anyway. That means the next time we try to use this trick – “let us inspect or we will invade” – the country will not believe us. They will believe we will invade, but they will not believe that allowing inspections will stop the invasion. If you are about to fight a war, you should not let the enemy come in and do inspections!
All western intelligence agencies thought he had WMD. So what? Lots of countries have them. If we had allowed the inspections to continue, we might have discovered that he didn’t have them. Ignorance is not a justification for war. And neither is universal ignorance.
“Was the terror connection not exaggerated? Not by much.” So? How did the war stop or reduce terrorism? It didn’t. There was no reason to think it would. There were lots of reasons to think that war would increase terrorism. The real terror “link” here is that American belligerence promotes terrorism.
“So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003? That’s exactly what I mean to say.”
Let’s pretend that Qaddafi has become more peaceful because of the Iraq war. The rest of the world is still more dangerous. We didn’t invade North Korea because they had a nuke. Every other country now knows that to prevent an American invasion, they need to actually have WMD (like NK), not just pretend to have WMD (like Iraq). That is why Iran really wants a bomb.
The world is less safe mostly because other countries think we might attack them. Sad.
