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August 6, 2008
Angry Reader
Private Papers
Victor,
The ostensible cassi belli for attacking Iraq were to destroy Saddam's WMD (nonexistent), stop his nuclear bomb development program (nonexistent), and eliminate his ties to al Qaeda (nonexistent). We can't "win" the Iraqi war because its illusory objectives were never possible of attainment.
Over 4,000 brave Americans are dead, another 30,000+ wounded and maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, millions wounded, millions displaced, and for what? The hope that Iraq will become a Jeffersonian democracy? Oh, yes: over a trillion dollars of America's treasure will have been flushed before we are quit of the hell hole that is Iraq.
We had Saddam boxed in and could have tightened the screws to our heart's content without putting a single boot on the ground. Why don't you admit to yourself and the world that the only "failure" in this war would be if Halliburton — which has already screwed America out of $billions — were denied the opportunity to plunder Iraq's oil fields.
The straw men that you have set up to knock down are all hypothetical and unrealistic.
In sum, you're an apologist and shill for the avaricious oilmen who are America's President and Vice President.
Be a man and fess up.
Howard T. Goodman
hgoodman@pacbell.net
* * * * *
The Paranoid Style
Howard...
Calm down Mr. Goodman, and employ logic rather than the same old, same old Bush/Cheney/oil conspiracy vocabulary.
The reasons for going into Iraq (did you intend casus belli? rather than your nonsensical cassi belli ("absences of war" ?) were spelled out by the Senate and House that passed the authorizations for invasion on October 11-12, 2002.
I suggest you reread them. Yes, the Congress, like the administration, included WMD, but also Saddam's subsidies for terrorists, the presence of variously named terrorists in Baghdad, violations on the U.N. and armistice accords, violation of oil for food, past histories of attacking four neighbors, genocide, attempts to assassinate a former President, and on and on. They are all there.
True, there turned out not to be stockpiles of WMD of the sort that was given up shortly after Saddam's capture by Libya, but the recent discovery of 1 million pounds of yellow-cake in storage in Iraq is significant. The administration erred in showcasing WMD, inasmuch as the Congress in more sober fashion had provided a far more sweeping case to remove Saddam (I suggest you review the moving and powerful speeches of Sens. Clinton, Kerry, Harry Reid (especially), etc. on the need to remove the Husseins).
No one spoke of Iraq as a Jefferson democracy; that is your caricature. But it is presently the only freely voting constitutional government in the region. Why would you not seek to support it rather than in puerile fashion ridicule it?
And Iraq is not, as in its prior 20-year history, attacking either its neighbors or exporting terror abroad. In a post-911 landscape that is why we removed Saddam, and why 75% of the American people supported the invasion — until the costs mounted at which time a majority gradually abandoned their prior solidarity for the effort.
Saddam's Iraq was practicing genocide for years, and killing hundreds of thousands of its own and others across its borders; the transition from that nightmare to the growing quiet we see today does not arrive naturally or without costs. But for the first time in two decades there is hope that Iraqis won't be slaughtered by their own government or be used to do the same to others.
Saddam was not to be boxed in, and that's why the official policy of regime change was passed in the Clinton administration (that bombed Saddam, and, as in the case of the Balkans, did so without either going to the Congress or the U.N.). Our allies either had abandoned, or were going to abandon, the 12-year-old, no-fly zone effort. The Oil-for-Food disaster had both led to starvation and to $50 billion in extortion on the part of the Husseins and corrupt U.N. officials. Given the oil price hikes caused by soaring world demand, we can imagine what Saddam would have done with $130-a-barrel oil — cf. his corrupt sweetheart oil deals with France and Russia as a model to come.
No one is plundering Iraq's oil fields. Such rhetoric is boilerplate, but intellectually misinformed: for the first time in history, Iraqi oil concessions are put out to bid, transparent, critiqued in a free Iraqi press, and the revenues under the auspices of a constitutional government. Would you prefer the old system of Saddam's to the present one?
I have criticized numerous times in print our energy policy, and especially the radical environmentalist agenda that assumes our critical elites, like the rest of us, will consume energy at present voracious levels (cf. the personal consumption habits of critics as diverse as Al Gore, John Edwards, and the Hollywood elite), while demanding that others in more fragile eco-systems from Siberia to the Persian Gulf increase production while we pontificate about "green" energy. In truth, the same emotional and juvenile rants about the war characterize the present debate over Americans evolving to alternate fuels-impossible without a bridge of a decade or so of more oil, coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro, etc. to ensure that we don't go broke in the process of transformation.
In lieu of an argument, there is always the ad hominem tactic, as you employ like clockwork in your conclusion. Very sad, but very predictable.
VDH
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson