Notes on the War in Iraq: Why We Invaded Iraq & Who Supported the Decision

This is the fourth in a series. The bulleted points below are culled from many sources. They are compiled to show how much information on an issue is available to those who are seeking it.

  • The premise of the Bush Administration has been validated by the course of events over the past several years. The claim that there was no realistic threat to the United States has been disproved as thousands of our enemies have stepped from the shadows to fight.
  • The game changed when the terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001, because a barrier collapsed. The “Death to America” crowd, which resides primarily in the Middle East, was inspired. They now had definitive proof that American soil was vulnerable – that it was now possible to deliver more than glancing blows.
  • The world has become miniaturized. No longer are we safe from an attack because of two nice big oceans. While many Americans choose to ignore the words of those who profess “death to America,” there is abundant evidence that their threats have to be taken seriously.
  • You cannot fight terrorism at the ports of Long Beach or Newark. You have to go get it. You have to disrupt terrorism at its sources. This is a gray area. It’s a shadow war. But it is not a war that we have any choice but to fight.
  • We are in Iraq now to help foster a constitutional government in the place of a genocidal regime that had:
    • Engaged in a de facto war with the United States since 1991; and
    • Harbored or subsidized terrorists like Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, at least one plotter of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida affiliates in Kurdistan, and suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank.
  • We invaded Iraq to break with the West’s previous practices, both liberal (appeasement of terrorists) and conservative (doing business with Saddam, selling arms to Iran, and overlooking the House of Saud’s funding of terrorists).
  • Saddam Hussein’s regime was a major threat to American interests and the region as a whole. The United States was not alone in believing Saddam Hussein had WMD. The U.N. Security Council had adopted over a dozen resolutions since 1990 to force his regime to disarm, to threaten it with “serious consequences” if it did not, and even to authorize U.N. member states “to use all necessary means” to compel Iraq to comply.
  • Removing Saddam was the right thing to do. The fact that the United Nations Security Council continues to authorize the U.S. military presence in Iraq signals that the international community still wants the U.S. there. America is far safer now, notwithstanding the present difficulties, because it is forever rid of the potential threat posed by Saddam’s WMD programs, which easily could have been reconstituted if his regime had survived.
  • The threat to the U.S. was not solely from WMD or missiles. The Iraq regime sought to assassinate former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait in 1993, supported a wide variety of terrorist groups against American allies, including Israel, and routinely fired on U.S. warplanes that were enforcing the U.N. no-fly zones. During his reign, Hussein invaded two countries, fired missiles at three other countries, used illegal chemical weapons against Iran and his own people, and left behind at least 300,000 victims in mass graves.
  • While WMD were not found, some may have been moved to Syria in the convoys of hundreds of trucks that crossed the border just before the U.S.-led intervention and during the first few weeks of fighting. Moreover, prohibited missiles were found inside Iraq, a clear violation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions and the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War.
  • Some believe Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction, and believe that even if he were working on acquiring such weapons, he would never have used them or shared them with Islamic terrorists (and thus he posed no threat to the United States). They believe this despite these facts:
    • Virtually every intelligence service believed that Saddam either had or was working on attaining WMD.
    • Saddam Hussein had already used biological weapons against his own people.
    • Saddam refused to allow UN inspectors unfettered access to Iraq, even when he had every reason to believe that America would attack him.
    • Saddam gave $25,000 to the families of Palestinian terrorists who blew up Israelis.
    • Saddam had already invaded two countries, attempting to eliminate one from the map (Kuwait) and killing a million in the other (Iran).
    • President Bush had very good reason to believe then, and we have very good reason to believe now, that Saddam was indeed seeking uranium from the African country of Niger.
  • Given these facts, George W. Bush believed that a pre-emptive strike was the moral thing to do, just as any moral person now understands it would have been moral to do against Hitler’s Germany in 1938.
  • The notion of preemptive war is not unique to Iraq. Oxford and Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson’s new book “The War of the World,” argues that the Western powers should have gone to war in 1938, which would most likely have avoided much of the horror of World War II.
  • Many critics of the war are as certain as human beings can be that the invasion of Iraq was wrong from the outset because no nation should ever engage in a pre-emptive war, since such wars, they contend, are inherently immoral, not to mention illegal.
  • It is overwhelmingly likely that even if we had found WMD in Iraq, The New York Times, Michael Moore and nearly all college professors would have still opposed the invasion. After all, they would have argued, it was still a pre-emptive war and therefore wrong by definition; and besides, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.
  • As the war in Iraq ground slowly on, many Bush supporters grew squishy. Those who have always opposed the war have enjoyed this immensely. The mentally feeble former supporters of the war give them hope that their “we can all get along” worldview will be vindicated. But the case for invading Iraq is as good today as it was in 2003.
  • Saddam Hussein was not contained within his “box,” as Clinton administration officials were fond of arguing. “Containment is not possible,” President Bush told West Point officers, “when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver these weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”
  • President Bush never claimed that the threat from Saddam was “imminent.” He expressly said the opposite: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long… The war on terror will not be won on the defensive.”
  • While the threat of WMD was over-emphasized by the Bush Administration, the fact is there were 23 writs that authorized the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein.
  • It was not our job to prove the negative. It was not up to the United States to prove that Iraq didn’t have WMD – it was up to Iraq to open their doors to full inspection according to the terms of the 1991 cease fire agreement.
  • Saddam was a serial violator of both United Nations and Gulf War agreements.
  • Nevada’s Sen. Harry Reid (yes, that Harry Reid) summed up best the feeling of Democrats that there were plenty of reasons to remove Saddam Hussein in a post-9/11 climate. He reminded his Senate colleagues that Saddam’s refusal to honor past agreements “constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”
  • Memories need to be refreshed: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The first President Bush marshaled a worldwide coalition to boot Iraq out of Kuwait in early 1991.
  • Among the terms for a succession of hostilities, Iraq was to submit to a series of demands that included opening its doors to weapons inspectors.
  • In the dozen years that followed, Iraq refused to keep the terms they had agreed to, and every time they fired on American military aircraft during the decade that followed it was an act of war.
  • Saddam Hussein made it appear to all the world’s major intelligence agencies that he retained dangerous stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
  • Iraq under Saddam Hussein violated sixteen United Nations Security Council Resolutions designed to ensure that Iraq does not pose a threat to international peace and security. While it is not the job of the United States to enforce United Nations resolutions, Iraq’s behavior in a post 9-11-01 world was no longer tolerable.
  • Had Saddam Hussein submitted to President Bush’s demands for full WMD inspections in the days leading up to war, war would’ve been averted. It was Iraq’s responsibility, in fulfillment of its cease fire terms, to open its doors to inspections.
  • In October 2002 a majority of Democratic Senators voted for the present war because:

1. They rightly concurred with the president’s post-9/11 conversion to the idea that removing a Middle Eastern mass-murdering regime and leaving a consensual government in its place could be a key component in winning the war against Islamic terrorism, and

2.  Their party had always believed that the United States can sometimes make things better abroad by stopping tyrants and dictators.

  • By the same token, why do many of these same initial supporters of the Iraq war four years later now promise either to withdraw troops or to cut off funds, and so often hedge on or renounce their past records?
  • Partisan advantage explains much of the present posturing against an opposition president. But mostly, the rising Democratic furor comes as a reflection of public anger at the costs of the war — and the sense that we are not winning.
  • So instead of self-serving attacks on the present administration, Democratic senators and candidates should simply confess that while most of the earlier reasons to remove Saddam remain valid, the largely unforeseen costs of stabilizing Iraq in their view have proved too high, and now outweigh the dangers of leaving.
  • Also, as a reminder, the Bush Administration enjoyed strong support when it made the decision to invade Iraq. Supporters of the war included…
  • Both houses of Congress voted for 23 writs authorizing the war with Iraq (this was a post-9/11 confirmation of the official policy of regime change in Iraq that President Clinton originated).
  • Seventy percent of the American public supported it in April 2003.
  • A majority of NATO members.
  • A coalition with more participants than the United Nations alliance had in the Korean War.
  • A host of politicians and pundits as diverse as Joe Biden, William F. Buckley, Wesley Clark, Hillary Clinton, Francis Fukuyama, Kenneth Pollack, Harry Reid, Andrew Sullivan, Thomas Friedman, and George Will.
  • Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion. The doctrine of preemption is based on the simple notion that since a first strike from a rogue nation could be catastrophic, and that you can’t deter a suicidal adversary.
  • We can’t be the policeman of the world. But if we don’t help train others to be policemen the enemies of the West will gain ground.