• A war to be proud of

Christopher Hitchens, "A War to be proud of", asks why is the Bush administration behaving defensively with regard to the Iraq war and goes on to present the benefits that have accrued so far:

... a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

8   The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

Read the whole thing for the historical context he presents ("that low, dishonest decade", referring to the 1990s) and his analysis of the split "... within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA ..."

note: I have just  fixed the previously broken link in this message  to Hitchens' much earlier article Machiavelli in Mesopotamia.

I liked Hitchens’ article up to a point but I think he falls partly into the very same trap that he accuses GWB of  falling into – the trap  of describing US policy in  quite a narrow way, rather than emphaising the deep global ramifications.

 I say this because  in this  article Hitchens seems to concur with GWB's description of the war as   “a war on terror” rather than as a war arising from  the new US policy of draining the swamps.   He criticises Bush for  being defensive and faling back on "platitude and hollowness"  (instead of continuing to talk in terms of  democratic revolution?)  but  goes on to characterise the war quite narrowly as a  military onslaught against  terrorists. eg:

The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.

 

However terrorism is isn’t something that can be defeated militarily and I'm sure Hitchens knows this.  The terorists aren't going to  "surrender" as a result of combat.  They can only be defeated by getting rid of the swamp that breeds them.  That’s been the whole point of the war in Iraq – the aim is to create a strong and viable bourgeois democracy in Iraq which will kick start the transformation of the entire Middle East in that direction (and this has already started happening).   

 

Back in November 2002, in his article Machiavelli in Mesopotamia    Hitchens analysis was a lot clearer. Here’s a quote (but it’s worth reading the entire article)

 

From conversations I have had on this subject in Washington, I would say that the most fascinating and suggestive conclusion is this: After Sept. 11, several conservative policy-makers decided in effect that there were "root causes" behind the murder-attacks. These "root causes" lay in the political slum that the United States has been running in the region, and in the rotten nexus of client-states from Riyadh to Islamabad. Such causes cannot be publicly admitted, nor can they be addressed all at once. But a slum-clearance program is beginning to form in the political mind.
 

Iraq is, for fairly obvious reasons, the keystone state here, and it is already at critical mass. Thus it seems to me idle to argue that a proactive policy is necessarily doomed to make more enemies. I have always disliked this argument viscerally, since it suggests that I should meekly avoid the further disapproval of those who hate me quite enough to begin with. Given some intelligence and foresight, however, I believe that an armed assistance to the imminent Iraqi and Kurdish revolutions can not only make some durable friends, it can also give the theocrats and their despotic patrons something to really hate us for.

I don’t see why he now bothers to try to defend (a version of) the WMD justification for war.

 

Eg he says in his current article:

 

It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

 

Why not just admit that all the talk of  the  purpose of  the war being to disarm Saddam was a smokescreen  used by the neocons because they did not feel strong enough to talk openly about regime change?   Perhaps the US did expect to find some WMD when they invaded Iraq, I don’t know. However even if they had been lucky enough to find some, this would not change the fact that the war was not about WMD or militarily defeating terrorism.
 

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(Here's a link to some LastSuperpower material on the US policy of draining the swamps - the correspondence between Noam Chomsky and Albert Langer provides a very clear exposition of the policy.  I'm puttng the link here because that forum thread has now moved to page  4 of the forum  and my not be seen by newcomers.