Yes, WildMonk, we know that’s the justification, but it’s a phony justification. Al Quaeda wasn’t active in Iraq until after we invaded it. Only about 7 percent of the fighters in Iraq now are from al Qaeda or affiliates; the rest are insurgents and, increasingly, Shiaa militia trying to kill off Sunnis.

There’s a whole lot about what went on in Iraq that, obviously, you don’t know, and I don’t have the energy or inclination to educate you except to repeat my invitation to read the Maha archives on Iraq.

Perhaps someone will be inspired to answer your comment here, but your monkey minutes are now officially up. So goodbye.

Thanks again for writing back.

I have one central point that I hope that you’ll consider and then everything else is kind of secondary.

Ian makes a comment that just absolutely stopped me in my tracks. He asks “What fountainhead of Islamic terrorism are we talking about here?” Well, Ian, this is *the* central justification for pressing for Democratic reform in Iraq and elsewhere in the region!! I don’t expect you to know this but it is a point that I hammered home for over a year in my blog. In the failed states of the Middle East, genuine political discourse and debate have been crushed under decades of thuggish rule. The only political expression in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Saudi Arabia that was *not* crushed mercilessly were the calls of the radical Islamists and this was only under the condition that they be directed at Israel and the West (Egypt, Algeria and Khaddafi’s Libya took a much harder line on the Islamists – the Jordanians are a unique case). In essence, the police states not only produced the pressure of discontent, they also consciously funnelled it into anti-Americanism of a particularly virulent and, yes, Islamist bent. In Afghanistan and Iran, they took it to the point of outright material support for terrorists. Iraq was not immune to this either: there is quite a bit of philosophical overlap between the Islamism of, say, Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood and Saddam’s Baathist party. I am always amazed by those who claim that Saddam would never have anything to do with the Islamists – it simply isn’t true. Why do you think he felt the need to change the Iraqi flag to read “There is no God but Allah” in his own personal script? More importantly, the philosophical overlap is obvious: Islamism isn’t a purely Muslim expression; it’s development was strongly influenced by the radical European socialists of the time. It is right there in the founding documents of the Muslim brotherhood! And the Baathists are – say it together – Socialists with a strong Islamic bent.

The Saudis are simply corrupt. They are, on the ideological front, the worst offenders. However, we simply have no pretext for forcing change there and little ability to do so even if we wanted to. The demographics of its people and the popularity of Wahhabism make Saudi Arabia a total mess.

Ok – that is all background. The theory is that, by opening up the political process – by removing the pressure exerted by failed political systems – the entire system would grow far less supportive of the radical Islam. Could it work? There are reasons for doubt as I wrote above but you have to admit that it is an audacious plan: it is a direct, ideological assault on the roots of radical Islamism. It is an assertion that freedom is fundamentally preferable to oppression – even oppression justified by appeals to the Islamic faith. More importantly, after a century of “realpolitik” – of attempting to manipulate the region with cynical disregard for our own founding beliefs – it is extraordinarily bold and idealistic. Wise and effective? Maybe not. Bold? Absolutely.

By your own statement it appears that you aren’t even aware of any of this! No wonder you are left with only the most cynical of explanations. I would strongly suggest that you learn more about the entire history of the region and the nature of the ideological battle before you go calling everyone else stupid.

Ok – well, the rest of this is kind of minor compared to that…just details.

My point regarding context is very simple: WMDs were an important but not the sole rationale for the invasion. Ian, you say that you “lived through” the run-up to the war and that all the rationales that you saw were based on WMD. I blogged the entire run-up so I believe otherwise. Ok – we don’t agree. So my suggestion is that you look at the Congressional Record from the debates through the authorization. Go ahead – it is a matter of public record. Remember, the important thing is not what the Press said or what you think you remember. What you’ll find is that the record affirms my point completely. You can remember differently but you simply cannot rewrite the document, my friends.

On my own blog (now defunct) I pressed the humanitarian case and quoted Bush (as well as several Democrats) at some length to make my case. I also strongly believed (still do) that the danger wasn’t the specific stockpiles already in place but the fact that we couldn’t let a man of this nature remain in power having thumbed his nose at the U.N.’s mandate after the end of Gulf War I. Doing so would, in essence, say that “we don’t really know if you have WMDs or plans to use them against us but we’re just too weak, corrupt and distracted to do anything about it.” What kind of precedent does that set amongst people who brag about glorying in their own deaths if they can just take a few of us down with them?

I guess we all see what we want to.

I also find another of Ian’s statements very revealing. With respect to Saddam gassing the Kurds he takes it as self-evident that Republicans – or the Reagan administration in particular – would support the wholesale slaughter of the Kurds (“of course he did, don’t be foolish”). This is madness. Reagan (and America generally) did NOT want Iran rising to a position of dominance in the Gulf region (they were *the* dominant Islamist challenge at the time) so we did certainly provide some help to him in that war. This is a far cry from directly helping him gas his own people. It is amazing to me that people like Ian blame America when Russia and France provided far, far more in the way of material support to Iraq. Our total contribution of hardward was valued at less than 2% of the total help offered Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war and consisted almost entirely of dual use stuff. And yet, somehow, the Kurds’ blood is on our hands? Seriously, shouldn’t you at least note the corrupt hands of the old European elite before you begin blaming America? When the right decries the “America-hating Left” this is exactly the kind of thing they are talking about.

As to whether the Right or Left does more hating, I guess that one is all a matter of perception. It certainly floored me to see the crap thrown at Clinton during the 90’s and I think a lot of this is a matter of payback. But still, I’d just like to see a lot less of it everywhere.

Second,

“But there were also perfectly reasonable arguments to be made – in 2003 – for why military action to remove Saddam was the only way to create a revolution in consciousness among the Arabic peoples that would undercut the fountainhead of Islamic terrorism and to secure the region from Saddam’s future ambitions.”

Um … what? What fountainhead of Islamic terrorism are we talking about here?

Third,
if you really think that *this* is as vitriolic as the kind of thing you see on most rightie sites, you’re blind. Maha isn’t usually even this vitriolic, I think she’s just astounded that many righties seem to be falling for this. As for DU, well, I kinda think of them like the left mirror image of Little Green Footballs. The two kinda cancel each other out. And dkos, it’s my impression that the actual bloggers are not all that vitriolic, but the commenters can be at times. I don’t think you can really count that… But the right has us beat even there. The right has us beat in every way when it comes to hatred, ugliness, and vitriol, by a long country mile.

Fourth,

“Do you really believe that the Reagan administration gave Saddam all the tools to gas the Kurds knowing that they would do so?”

Of COURSE he did, don’t be foolish. That was not, of course, the PURPOSE of giving him the stuff … we didn’t want Iran to win the Iran-Iraq war, it looked for a time like they would, so we did everything we could think of to help Iraq short of actually invading then. That included the gas. Now, we knew even then that the guy was a brutal dictator, we knew even then that he was liable to commit any and every atrocity to further his own power. We just didn’t like Islamic Iran more than we didn’t like brutal but secular Iraq. And, (and this is the important bit), the Kurds had actually revolted, had thrown their lot in with Iran, had given Iran help in the war. Given what we already knew about Saddam, what happened to the Kurds following the war was depressingly inevitable. We could have, and should have tried to prevent Saddam from taking revenge on the Kurds, but we didn’t.Saddam was our buddy at the time, so we helped cover up what was going on at the time. Really, the Shi’a who rebelled following the Gulf war should have seen how we didn’t help the Kurds, should have guessed we wouldn’t help them either.

-me

The first dated item on Kevin’s timeline is clearly a statement of fact. Saddam Hussein *did* allow weapons inspectors in, and according to Hans Blix’s report to the UN, they found “nothing significant.” And the old cannisters listed on Santorum’s document don’t change that.

When you use a word like “innocent” without qualifying what an individual is innocent of, you’ll excuse me if if I assume you mean “innocent of being a badass in general.” But in fact Saddam Hussein did allow weapons inspectors back into Iraq late in 2002, even though to this day Bush says he had to order the invasion because Saddam Hussein did not allow weapons inspectors in Iraq.

Worse, the entire worldview I see expressed here depends on very selective use of context: it was the consensus opinion of all major intel organizations that Saddam had these weapons.

You’re the one who’s being selective, dear. Although there was consensus going back to the late 1990s that Saddam Hussein *probably* had chemical and biological weapons (but not nukes), nobody knew for sure, and the UN inspectors were being allowed into everyplace they wanted to inspect and were not finding anything. So before the invasion the consensus was already beginning to waver.

Instead of dealing with that fact, you appear to be deconstructing the entire situation in 2003 so it revolves *entirely* around the inspector’s opinions that they should keep looking.

Hindsight shows us that would have been the right decision, and it would have been the decision supported by most of the nations of the world at the time. A whole lot of poeple around the globe believed Bush was jumping the gun, and now we know he was.

In your rush to cast the administration as evil and its supporters as stupid, however, you gloss over a mass of facts and context that you simply don’t want to deal with.

No, that’s what you do, as I believe I’ve amply demonstrated in this and the other posts I’ve written about the Iraq War since 2003.

Can you find anywhere that I’ve been rude to you or your compatriots?

You’re the one who snarked at my for snarking at righties in the original post, and I’m saying I’m not apologizing for that until all the righties who have smeared lefties over the years apologize for it.

Now, please note that The Mahablog motto is, “I ain’t your monkey.” That means that, although I may choose to answer rightie comments up to a point, I refuse to be made to write paragraph after paragraph in a comments thread when I have a large body of work on this topic already. And you’ve gone over your monkey minutes.

If you actually care what I think (and I seriously doubt you do), you are welcome to google the following:

site:www.mahablog.com Iraq

and read what I’ve already written.

Do you really believe that the Reagan administration gave Saddam all the tools to gas the Kurds knowing that they would do so? This is an extremely serious charge. It is also, quite simply, false.

Are we supposed to stop providing agricultural products to all the world because some sicko might somehow use them for evil? Jeez, cut off all agricultural exports and we’d be pilloried for starving the world. Permit them and be pilloried when something is misused to evil effect. Kind of a convenient, all purpose rationale for hating people, no? More to the point, we did *not* provide the chemical weaponry that Saddam used when he gassed the Kurds – he manufactured that himself after having received help and knowhow of the Soviets during the Iran/Iraq war.

Truly, you should stop seeking our the political porn that stokes your hatreds.