Why Iraq?
I’ve heard and read a lot of articles with bullshit reasons why we invaded Iraq.
You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? Here it is.
I will agree that Bush made the colossal mistake that all politicians make. He assumed that the American people were not intelligent enough or sophisticated enough to understand a long-winded reason for going to war. Ever notice that no politician ever expresses a belief that takes more than 30 seconds to state?
Anyhow - the United States has been dealing with fanatical Islamic terrorists (referred to as Islamists for the remainder of this post) since the mid 1970s.
We’ve had attacks against Americans and American interests throughout the years, but no attacks by Islamists on American soil until 1993 — the first World Trade Center bombing. Throughout this entire time, we treated every terrorist act as an individual event, and handed it off to law enforcement to deal with. This was a tragic mistake.
The Islamist problem for the US culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Remember, the Islamists had declared war on us, and reminded us of it repeatedly since the mid 1970s. We chose to ignore them. We got 9/11 for our trouble.
Faced with the prospect of living like Northern Ireland (an acceptable level of violence), or Israel (checkpoints, soldiers everywhere, carbombs, children being eviscerated on schoolbuses), or preventing any future attacks, President Bush chose the radical option of prevention.
How do you prevent a terrorist attack? The easiest way is to kill as many terrorists as possible, and take out the countries that harbor or sponsor them. Coincidentally, those countries happen to be in the Middle East.
After dealing with the immediate issue of the Taliban, who sponsored the man that organized the attacks on 9/11, we are then left with the choices of sitting back and waiting for the next attack, or cleaning out the Islamist cesspool in the Middle East. Bush took the Wilsonian option (which torqued off the Libertarians to no end) and decided on pre-emption.
So, the only question left is “who do we take out first?”
- Saudi Arabia - bad idea. They produce too much oil, and if that stops flowing, the entire world comes to a grinding halt. So, even though most of the destructive Islamist beliefs (Wahhabi is the official state religion of the Kingdom) come from Saudi Arabia, we really can’t touch them directly.
- Jordan - They are a nominal ally. Jordan has been helpful in dealing with the Palestinian issue, even though the Palestinians themselves haven’t been.
- Syria - Sure, we could take them out, but they are a pissant nation that nobody cares about. Add Libya, Lebanon, UEA, Yemen, Qatar to that list.
- Kuwait - nobody cares about them, and they are semi-friendly after we got their country back from Uncle Saddam in 1991.
- Iran - Well, they are the major player in the terror biz, they are working towards nukes and WMDs, they are virulently hostile to pretty much everyone, including all their neighbors (they’d especially like a piece of Iraq’s ass for the 8 year war in which they got hammered), and they sponsor, harbor, and export terrorists. We also have no way of getting to them.
- Egypt, Turkey - nominally neutral countries. They would prefer that we didn’t touch their part of the world. They are likely doing things we wouldn’t approve of, but since they aren’t doing them to us or our friends (yet) we don’t much care.
- Iraq - Their military is in a shambles, nobody likes the leadership, an already-existing state of war exists between them and us (Iraq violated the 1991 cease-fire almost immediately), and the U.N. is pissed at them besides. We have an easy route to them, and their neighbors think it’s really keen for us to take them out. Finally, they have (along with Iran) the most well educated and sophisticated general populace in the region, making them ripe for representative self-government.
Realizing that the only way to get rid of the terrorist problem in anything approaching a permanent fashion is to create open societies in the Middle East, the choice becomes clear: take down a dictator and replace him with a representative government. The hope is that the idea will spread, or at least further marginalize the remaining dictators and make it harder for them to continue to sponsor terrorists.
Hence Iraq.
If you’ve read this far, answer me this: would anyone have listened to this if Bush put it in the State of the Union speech?