http://slate.msn.com/id/2108636/
I know, Hitchens is an evil guy with a beard, but it’s a viewpoint worth looking at if only to hash out the issues it raises. (I am sure these issues have already been discussed so I expect the usual volley of “you fucking idiot” posts.)
One of my beefs with the Iraq war has always been that Bush surfed ambiguous anti-Arab sentiment after 9/11 in order to muster political will for this invasion, and allowed (still allows) confusion to reign over whether or not Saddam actually had anything to do with 9/11. Bush says that “after 9/11” he couldn’t let America stand by while a potential enemy exists, which always seems odd to me as the lesson might as well have been learned at Pearl Harbor or any number of other places – there are always dangerous nations and you evaluate them as the situation calls for it; this was the case in statecraft millennia before 9/11. 9/11 is not some magical watermark except with regard to what it tells us about Al Qaeda and other anti-American Islamist terrorist groups. (Pro-war response: we forget that lesson from time to time and 9/11 has jolted us out of our complacency.)
It seems the “primary” cause of the Iraq war as we were told at the time (the WMDs) has been more or less discredited. Other arguments always floated about (Wilsonian nation building exercise, Saddam shot at our planes, he violated UN resolutions, there is a humanitarian case) and all can be dissected seperately. (I guess I’d say #1 is dangerously overambitious, #2 is a fair point but not necessarily sufficient for an invasion – though it would be interesting to note the reaction if one of our planes had actually been shot down, #3 is something that is generally ignored or not ignored at our convenience, and #4 is worth considering but must be weighed against the humanitarian cost of the war itself and and also the unlikeliness of a relatively clean exit a la Kosovo.) There is also of course the separate question of how Bush sold the war to the American public – which reasons he chose to emphasize and how valid/invalid they were.
So here is Hitchens saying what others have said, which is that Iraq under Saddam did support Islamist terrorists & therefore falls under the larger mandate of the so called War on Terror – nations which support terrorism are our enemies and will be treated as such. I suppose there are any number of angles from which to chip away at this if you want. 1) Why aren’t we invading Northern Ireland or Iran. (Likely counters: the War on Terror applies primarily to “militant Islamist” terrorism, and invading Iraq was both more practicable than Iran and there were also more corroborating reasons to invade like the UN resolutions and humanitarian case and blah blah blah.) 2) Such a broad mandate for the War on Terror is impractical and dangerous. 3) Any number of nations can be construed to “support terrorism” if you slice it the right way and have already decided for other reasons that you want to invade them.
Anyway it’s a common anti-war sentiment to say “what the hell does Iraq have to do with 9/11?” and here is Hitchens’s answer to that, for whatever it is worth. Assuming Hitchens’s interpretation of the facts is accurate (which I suppose will be disputed itself), it does perhaps compel one to critique the Iraq war on a deeper level. That is, it becomes not sufficient to say that “Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror” but instead one must critique the “war on terror” itself as being too broad or too vague or too easily manipulated to whatever more immediate political ends are in view. If any nation that has harbored/helped or does harbor/help terrorism, in whatever degree, suddenly becomes a (potential) green light on the Invade Now! list, is this a proportionate and rational response to 9/11, or is it a sort of cheap & easy way to snooker an understandably scared and angry public into supporting dubious adventurist enterprises?