In my view this is hard to argue with especially in light of the fact that Republicans in Congress never engaged the public on the argument for the war so few Americans ever really understood it. The Bush Administration did a great deal to make the case through countless presidential speeches. But the president couldn’t do it alone. Now, with the Obama Administration aborting the effort we’ll never know if things would be better now in Iraq than they apparently are. From the Middle East Forum:
With the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaching, a predictable stream of commentary and events asking the familiar question of whether the war was ‘worth it’ is beginning to arise. This trend has so far included a planned debate at Goldsmiths, University of London featuring prominent pro and anti-war commentators like Mehdi Hasan and David Aaronovitch; a conference hosted by the anti-war activist group ‘Stop the War Coalition’; and a few articles in the Huffington Post and the Sunday Sun.
The main justification invoked for debating whether the war was ‘worth it’ is so that we might learn ‘lessons’ for the future. With the Iraq War, however, it is clear that the same old talking points are going to be brought up: ‘Saddam was a brutal dictator!’; ‘Look how much better off the Kurds are!’; ‘Iraq is a democracy today!’; ‘The war has killed up to a million people!’; ‘The war has only fostered more terrorism!’; ‘There were no WMDs!’; ‘It was all about oil!’. Is this familiar debate worth having at all? Not really.
First, the war came about in the very unique circumstances of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the idea that ‘pre-emptive’ military action – including full-scale invasions – against perceived rogue regimes was justified to stop them from allowing terrorists to acquire WMDs. Along with this doctrine came the notion that a war against Saddam would be a quick and easy job dealing with ‘unfinished business’ from the First Gulf War.
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Yet the Middle East in particular has changed considerably since the invasion of Iraq, and it is quite clear that none of the above concepts guides Western policy towards the region today. There are no situations at the present time- and for the foreseeable future- analogous to Iraq as regards policy debate. Fretting that any involvement in a conflict is going to be ‘another Iraq’ is simply a cliché. This was especially so when it came to the Libyan civil war.
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In truth, the question of whether the war was ‘worth it’ is something for Iraqis (including me) to decide among themselves. As for Western observers, real lessons from Iraq are not to be learned by debating this old question.
