Rushing to judgment on Iraq

The Australian: Paul Gray: Apologise to Latham [March 21, 2006]

The Australia today runs the above article in which the (apparently) essentially conservative Paul Gray gets all hot under the collar about Iraq being a total failure:

The principal error of Bush's policy is that it was a betrayal of the authentic conservative cause. Conservatives, in my lifetime at least, have always opposed the international spread of totalitarianism, whether it is state totalitarianism (communism) or terrorism. Through his Iraq war misadventure, Bush has sponsored the spread of totalitarianism.

Does this really make sense? There is no doubt that a totalitarian regime has been removed. The current issue is what type of regime will replace it in the long term. No doubt in the short term, at least, there is likely to be a democratic government. In the long term, who knows, but large voter turnout in past elections give strong reason to doubt that any large number of Iraqis want to return to totalitarianism.

Which countries around Iraq have now become more totalitarian due to the US invasion? (Hamas was elected for Palestine, sure, but have they said they are now the permanent government?) Although Al Qaeda may be operating in Iraq now, some people feel that their role in attempting to ferment the downfall of democracy will backfire in the long run, if it isn't happening already. So what makes Gray so confident that all is lost already? (He might have said that the cost has already been too high, which is a matter for individual judgment, but that does not seem to be the core of his argument.)

Furthermore, he writes:

So, after just three years, the most serious Western conservative political enterprise of the century so far has been officially consigned to the pages of history as a joke. This is Bush's doing.

It doesn't matter how many conservative commentators have also joined Gray in getting cold feet (he lists them all;) those who are calling this an abject failure are just guessing at the moment. While some predict the breakup of the nation, even at the worst case, are any of those regions likely to be as totalitarian as Saddam's regime? I have my doubts, but of course may be proved wrong.

To say things have not gone according to the pre-war optimists plans is a big understatement; on the other hand, to call it a massive failure at this point of time is gross overstatement (unless of course you were a pacificist or isolationist who never wanted to go there in the first place. However, Gray appears not to fall into those categories.)

Gray then finishes on a very bizarre note:

As Latham faces court tomorrow over assault, theft and malicious damage, someone should apologise to him.

What? This is somehow going to be relevant to the court charge? Or does he just mean, "Latham's having a tough time, let's just make him feel better by agreeing he was right about Iraq." What rubbish.

UPDATE: by another happy co-incidence, Christopher Hitchens has an article about the Iraqi problems over at Opinion Journal. Here's how he starts (excuse the length):

In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention ("to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates" and "accelerate the emergence of the Messiah"), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq's largest confessional group that: "These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger."

Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. "Civil war" has replaced "the insurgency" as the proof that the war is "unwinnable." But in plain truth, the "civil war" is and always was the chief tactic of the "insurgency."


The rest of the article is important too. Interestingly, at the very time that the US public is losing resolve over Iraq, there appears to be increasing evidence (via the Iraqi documents only now being slowly released) to support Hitchen's view that Saddam was dangerous through his discrete assistance to al Qaeda and that the war in Iraq was relevant to the war on al Qaeda. (The recent claim that Saddam was helping encourage his own generals to believe there were WMD also seems highly relevant to the issue of the how excuseable the apparent intelligence failures were, but I don't see many anti-war writers mentioning this.)

Hitchens still writes convincingly and with what seems to be a significantly greater depth of background knowledge of the region than any other journalist.