The American effort in Iraq is a moral mission, a practical
mission, a necessary mission and an achievable mission.
That should be, and is likely to be, the message from House
Republicans and conservative Democrats in a debate on Iraq
scheduled for the House floor on Thursday.*
Specifically, the debate will be on a resolution declaring,
among a number of “whereas” clauses, that the “criminal, Ba’athist
regime in Iraq…had supported terrorists [and] constituted a
threat against global peace and security,” and that the fight in
Iraq is the terrorists’ self-declared “central front.” Its text
therefore resolves (among other things) “that the United States is
committed to the completion of the mission to create a sovereign,
free, secure, and united Iraq” without a premature withdrawal of
American troops.
Even before last week’s necessary and tremendously important
killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, this was a debate that President
George W. Bush’s supporters ought to win, because the President’s
overall goals and strategy are right. We are in Iraq both in the
U.S. national interest and for idealistic, even noble, reasons. Our
cause is just, and it is humanitarian. As President Bush said to
our troops on Tuesday during his dramatic, surprise visit to Iraq,
“America is safer [and] the world is better off… because Saddam
Hussein is no longer in power.”
And the work our troops and civilians in Iraq are doing is, Bush
said correctly, “an incredibly important moment in the history of
freedom and peace.” It is important because there can be no doubt
that, first, Saddam Hussein and, later, al-Zarqawi were using Iraq
as a staging ground and as a launching pad for terrorist activity
that directly affected the United States and, more broadly, the
free world.
Al-Zarqawi was in Iraq in the first place because Saddam’s
regime deliberately harbored him. And he was there because Osama
bin Laden wanted him there. Meanwhile, Saddam’s henchmen trained
terrorists at the Salman Pak facility — complete with a commercial
airliner shell for practice — not far from Baghdad, and Saddam
paid hefty rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide
bombers.
All the while, of course, Saddam’s torture chambers at Abu
Ghraib — real torture, not the merely puerile sexual and
cultural embarrassments meted out by a few rogue American soldiers
— were among the locations where the dictator’s regime tortured
children in front of their parents, burned people with hot irons,
cut out their tongues, gouged out their eyes, and mutilated
prisoners with electric drills. So far coalition forces have found
mass graves containing a reported 400,000-plus bodies.
Also, according to two consecutive heads of the U.N.-sponsored
Iraqi Survey Group sent in after Saddam was ousted from power,
Saddam continued activities aimed at securing and using weapons of
mass destruction. Said the first head, David Kay, “We have
discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities” included in
“deliberate concealment efforts.” Said his replacement, Charles
Duelfer, “Evidence suggests that, as resources became available and
the constraints of sanctions decayed, there was a direct expansion
of activity that would have the effect of supporting future WMD
reconstitution.”
Foreign intelligence sources, especially Israeli ones, continue
to insist that Saddam spirited a host of weaponry to Syria in the
few months immediately preceding the war. And both the Senate
Intelligence Committee and the independent Silberman-Robb
Commission found not a single instance that Bush officials (to
quote the Senate committee) “attempted to coerce, influence or
pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction capabilities.” Furthermore, both the
French and the Germans also believed Saddam had WMDs.
Especially in light of all these considerations, what’s most
upside-down about much of the media-driven current “wisdom” about
the Iraqi effort is that the more salient criticism of Bush is not
that he was too cynical. (E.g., he “lied” to get us into war; why,
pray tell, would he do that? What good would it do him or have done
him?) The more reasonable criticism is that he was too idealistic,
too Wilsonian, too enamored of the idea that a nominal democracy in
Iraq alone could somehow transform the world or at least the
troubled Middle East. In this view, Bush’s grand adventure in armed
diplomacy in Iraq violated the Kissingerian/Scowcroftian, even
Buckleyite “realism” that should be the central concern of American
foreign and military policy.
EVEN IN THIS REALM, THOUGH, the ledger shows a number of credits on
Bush’s side.
First among these must be the elimination of Libya’s nuclear
program, far more well developed than was previously understood,
specifically because Muammar Qaddafi himself said he was frightened
by seeing the fate of Saddam Hussein. This was a triumph of the
first magnitude, but one for which Bush has received far too little
credit.
It also should be obvious that the ouster of Saddam played at
least a substantial role, even if indirect, in encouraging the
various peaceful “revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon and
elsewhere — the so-called Rose, Orange, Cedar (and, in Iraq,
Purple) Revolutions that overthrow old, brutal regimes. Even Egypt
and Saudi Arabia have seen some slight movement (sometimes on a
purely local level) toward elective governance. Meanwhile, Pakistan
has gone from being a staunch supporter of the Taliban to being at
least partially an ally against terrorists (even as our ties with
India have strengthened, not weakened). Saudi Arabia, home of most
of the 9/11 hijackers, is now cracking down considerably on
terrorists. Formerly hostile (or at least semi-hostile) Yemen and
Indonesia have done likewise. Qatar’s assistance reportedly has
been superb. Jordan has been helpful.
And the dictatorship in Syria is increasingly isolated and, by
some reports, running scared.
To review the relevant scorecard, then, Americans should note
that Saddam is on trial and despised, his two sons are dead,
al-Zarqawi is dead, Osama bin Laden is holed up in a cave while his
top deputy begs for money from Iraqi terrorists, Qaddafi
is now docile (at least externally; within his own country he is
still a brute), Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (mastermind of 9/11) is in
captivity, and Mohammed Ataf (al-Qaeda’s senior field commander)
has been killed along with dozens upon dozens of other top al-Qaeda
and Iraqi terrorist leaders. And more than a dozen known major
terrorist plots have been foiled throughout the world.
So as the debate begins in Congress, Iraq’s duly elected unity
government has just become operational, coalition forces act in
dozens of raids based on a treasure trove of information captured
from al-Zarqawi’s former hideout, Bush has rallied the troops and
met with Iraq’s new prime minister, and definitive victory seems
again well within the realm of reason. Some critics may
legitimately advocate different tactics from those favored by the
Bush/Rumsfeld team. (Frederick Kagan in the Weekly
Standard makes terrific sense to me in advocating
more troops and more aggressive action than Bush
has been willing to use.) Those differences in tactics may indeed
make the ultimate difference between success and failure of Bush’s
entire grand vision. But that doesn’t mean that Bush’s overall
goals aren’t worthy ones, that his basic strategy is fundamentally
flawed, that his aims are hopeless, or that the fight was
unnecessary much less counterproductive.
Flawed as he is on some matters, indeed as every leader is,
President George W. Bush has been remarkably courageous, steadfast,
and far-seeing in his conduct of the war against radical Muslim
terrorists worldwide. The resolution before the House on Thursday
gives well-deserved support for his efforts and aims. For
all the right reasons, not just the politically right
ones, this war is not just Bush’s war but all of ours, and it is a
war where the stakes are among the highest the world has ever known
— and Bush and his supporters are on the correct side of it. The
moral side. The side that, in the House and in this nation and in
the world at large, absolutely must prevail.
————-
*For a supportive, moderate Democrat’s view concerning Iraq, see my
blog
post from Tuesday evening.
————-
Quin Hillyer is executive editor of The
American Spectator. He can be reached at hillyerq@spectator.org.
