[donaldscrankshaw] Donald: Iraq War

[Email subscription to blog articles]

Posted by Donald:
Iraq War
http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1212633648.shtml


   There's a [1]good article on the Iraq war at the Wall Street Journal.
   Fouad Ajami begins with a simple proposition:

     Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq,
     nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our
     ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: "In
     the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more
     important than how we came."

   He spends most of the article addressing the debate about how the war
   began:

     In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr.
     Bush's war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this
     war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional
     authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the
     sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq's
     disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of
     Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the
     burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war.
     By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a
     vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he
     would have stood up to the wind.
     With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the
     arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is
     odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass
     destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good
     faith.
     It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort
     made to "sell" the war. Wars can't be waged in stealth, and making
     the moral case for them is an obligation incumbent on the leaders
     who launch them. If anything, there were stretches of time, and
     critical turning points, when the administration abdicated the
     fight for public opinion.
     Nor is there anything unprecedented, or particularly dishonest,
     about the way the rationale for the war shifted when the hunt for
     weapons of mass destruction had run aground. True, the goal of a
     democratic Iraq â and the broader agenda of the war as a spearhead
     of "reform" in Arab and Muslim lands â emerged a year or so after
     the onset of the war. But the aims of practically every war always
     shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances.
     Need we recall that the abolition of slavery had not been an
     "original" war aim, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was, by
     Lincoln's own admission, a product of circumstances? A war for the
     Union had become a victory for abolitionism.
     America had not been prepared for nation-building in Iraq; we had
     not known Iraq and Iraqis or understood the depth of Iraq's
     breakdown. But there was nothing so startling or unusual about the
     connection George W. Bush made between American security and the
     "reform" of the Arab condition. As America's pact with the Arab
     autocrats had hatched a monster, it was logical and prudent to look
     for a new way.

   It's worth reading.

References

   1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121253706422142819.html