Why The Anti-War Movement Doesn't Get Off So Lightly From the Disaster in Iraq

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 19, 2014

The symbolic fall of the Saddam Hussein regime on April 9, 2003

I like Twitter; it has helped me avoid wading through the news on what passes for British politics in order to find the interesting stuff—you follow the right people, and the news comes to you. But following last week’s meltdown in Iraq that powerful faction of deranged people who use the platform made themselves felt. Some were antisemitic but there was also all-purpose crackpottedness that included calling for my arrest for supporting terrorism. Among this garbage there was a serious point: the anti-war forces were feeling a moment of vindication. Now that the immediate crisis has passed, and, contrary to some extremely alarming reports a week ago, it does not look as if Baghdad will fall imminently, it seems like a good moment to revisit some of the questions that have dogged us since American-led troops crossed into Iraq in March 2003 to finally take the march into Baghdad they should have taken in 1991.

Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

Good question.

After the expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, with Coalition troops on Iraqi soil and the whole regime reeling from two rebellions we had incited and were then to betray, the Saddam regime agreed to a ceasefire under the auspices of the United Nations (Resolution 687). The troops were called off in exchange for, among other things, complete disarmament of all WMD, an end to missiles exceeding 150 km, and reparations to Kuwait (including disclosing the location of 600 missing POWs, which never did happen).

The regime lied at every stage. In its first declaration in April 1991, it flatly denied it had a nuclear program, only admitting to it in July 1991, after being caught red-handed and having fired shots at U.N. inspectors. Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, one of Saddam’s chief nuclear physicists, describes a scene from December 1991 at Rashdiya. Already the building had been “completely transformed” and cleaned for the inspections that June. But, evidently acting on intelligence, the inspectors were back and took a soil sample from around the facility. Here is what happened next:

I … ordered the former centrifuge laboratory stripped of its walls and roof, right down to its frame, as well as the excavation of a foot and a half of topsoil from underneath and around the building, extending a hundred feet on the downwind side where traces of uranium might have blown.

“Within a week,” I said … “we will fill in the hole with fresh soil and build an exact replica facility out of new materials.” …

[T]he order seemed impossible. But they quickly realized the only other option would be to take responsibility for breaching the concealment plan. The consequences for our lives and those of our families didn’t bear thinking about.

Here you get a glimpse of what totalitarianism looks like. Two weeks later, looking smug, the U.N. conducted another surprise inspection, evidently thinking they had caught the regime, and of course their results came back negative.

In February 1992, Obeidi was given the documentation and prototypes of the centrifuges by Qusay Hussein to hide in his own garden, which the inspectors never did find; we only know about them because Dr. Obeidi turned them over to the Americans after liberation. In 1995, the defection of a senior official disclosed a previously-unknown, advanced biological weapons program that four years of inspections had not found. Entire ministries of this most complete Police State were devoted to bamboozling inspectors, who were bribed, their ranks penetrated by the secret police, and Iraqi scientists were interviewed only under the watch of the regime. Right to the very end Saddam was trying for weapons that violated the U.N. rules.

Having at every stage underestimated the weapons threat, it is no surprise that the final U.N. resolution (1441) in November 2002, spoke in its pre-amble of “the threat Iraq’s non-compliance with Council resolutions and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles poses to international peace and security.” This was a 15-0 resolution including the votes of Russia, China, and Assad’s Syria. They presumably had their own reasons for believing Saddam had WMD.

The post-Saddam Duelfer report into the weaponry concluded that Saddam had kept together the scientists—his “nuclear mujahideen,” as State media referred to them—in their specialised teams for the nuclear weapons program, which was paused. The regime maintained the dual-use facilities and production capacity that had it three-to-five weeks from production of chemical and biological weapons—which is to say it had these weapons, which are not stored in stockpiles unless they are in use (e.g. during a war). With the nuclear program it had maintained the most important thing of all: intent. Whatever “box” Saddam was contained in during the 1990s—and it was not all that secure even then—it came from low oil prices. With the entry of China and India into the world oil markets in the last decade, and the French and Russians already pushing for the erosion of the sanctions, the containment regime was already on the verge of collapse in 2003. No serious person can believe that an unconstrained Saddam would not have completed the nuclear-weapons program.

As to where the stocks went, we found some of them: U.S. troops tracked down some of the mustard gas in 2004, a substance that was still turning up in 2007. There is significant evidence of a regime final sweep. In April 2004 members of Abu Musab az-Zarqawi‘s then-al-Qaeda network—in Iraq well before the invasion—were found in Jordan with VX and sarin nerve agents attempting a plot that could have killed tens of thousands of people, and a month after an IED laced with sarin hit U.S. troops. Perhaps Operation DESERT FOX was more effective than had been thought, and James Clapper said “that he believed that material from [Saddam’s] illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria”. There was certainly some heavy traffic into Syria during the invasion that took the regime’s senior men and State assets like passports that allowed Assad to help the Ba’ath-Salafist insurgency.

Whether we will ever know the answer is doubtful—though opening the archives of the Assad regime might be helpful—but those who say there were “no WMDs” in Iraq are wrong twice: they refuse to acknowledge what actually was found and show a distinct lack of interest about what wasn’t.

The monetary cost of the Iraq War has been damaging

In 2008, it was considered damning enough to claim that it cost three trillion dollars; by last year it was only exciting enough if it could be claimed as six trillion. The great problem with this is that it is subjective to an astonishing degree. Veterans’ benefits, say, obviously should be factored in, but pensions would have been paid anyway and—you won’t believe this but—an army engages in activities hazardous to the health as a matter of routine; there would have been medical costs without an Iraq invasion.

In the Iraq case specifically there is also the matter that the war had been going on since 1990: What was the cost of continuing the no-fly zones? What would have been the cost of another Saddamist attack on a neighbouring State? What was the cost—financial and in terms of propaganda—of keeping the troops in Saudi Arabia to monitor Saddam? And how are we to measure the cost in lives to the Iraqis of continuing with dictatorship? What price is affixed to introducing even the idea, and some of the practice, of constitutional government—whose ripple effects disarmed Libya, recovered the autonomy of Lebanon, and sparked hopeful changes on the Gulf?

The short answer to this is that defence gets paid first: everything else comes after that. If people are really concerned about U.S. Government costs, the spiralling cost of healthcare should be their focus—something now hollowing out the defence budget too—but in reality the U.S. does not have a debt problem; she has an economic growth problem (and no, reducing the former does not directly help the latter).

The war plunged Iraq into chaos

This takes as a starting-point a shocking piece of ignorance: namely that Iraq before 2003 was not a shattered, ruined society. It simply isn’t true. Saddam’s was “the first totalitarian state to regularly use rape as a means of political control.” Genocide had been committed against the Kurds, Iran had been invaded, Kuwait had been annexed, missiles had been fired at Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, two rebellions had been mercilessly put down, and all the time the constant repression within the big prison the Ba’athists had formed in Iraq went on with more than two million casualties. If this was peace and stability, it really was time to give war a chance.

The primary thing this misses is that we will never know what was behind the door we did not take. Moral seriousness demands the acceptance of the fact that it was not a choice of invade Iraq or it stays stable: this already broken country was melting down and in Algeria and Syria are the premonitions of what could have happened without U.S. forces to hold the line. Bad as things were, they could have been worse. With U.S. forces in the country casualties fell to their lowest level in 2008; since the departure the casualties have increased. If the U.S. were the cause—if the violence came from a “resistance” rather than theocratic imperialists—then this should not have been the case.

This view also denies the Iraqis their agency. The main cause of the failed transition in Iraq is the Shi’a political class. The old regime’s having wrecked inter-confessional relations and opened the country up to Salafi-jihadists does not escape blame, nor the Sunni Arabs’ sense of supremacy, or the meddling from Iraq’s neighbours who above all did not want to see a Shi’a-led democracy (and not just the Sunni Arabs). The truth is, “No one forced the Iraqis to destroy themselves.” The inter-Iraqi feuds, and those imported from outside, lay bare a malady at the heart of Arab politics that was there long before America stepped into that world, and which—as people appear to have forgotten—was not contained to that world.

We did not deliver the Iraqis into darkness; we delivered them from a long night of despotism into a “savage and uncertain dawn.” Some of them made the best of it.

Iraq used to be secular

Not so. In the 1970s, the Ba’athist dictatorship had staked a vague claim to modernity, especially on women’s rights. But to the extent it was true that patriarchal control had been broken it was only so the regime could exert direct control over Iraq’s female citizens. During the war he started with Iran, Saddam had adopted an increasingly Islamist tone. His regime took in “[m]any of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama” in 1982, at a time when the Ikhwans were the equivalent of al-Qaeda. “In the final years of the regime … [it] reinvented itself as a conservative Islamic state.” Allahu Akbar (god is great) had been added to the flag. Compulsory religious education was introduced into Iraqi schools. Nightclubs accused of harbouring prostitutes were closed, and prostitutes were beheaded in the street by the Fedayeen Saddam, a force run by one of Saddam’s sons and staffed by local and international jihadists functioning as a mutaween (religious police). Alcohol was banned. The death penalty was introduced as punishment for homosexuals.

There is massive evidence that Saddam’s regime had a long-standing connection with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the organisation headed by Ayman az-Zawahiri, the current emir of al-Qaeda, who joined EIJ to al-Qaeda “central” in 1998. The 9/11 Commission says Zawahiri had “ties of his own” to the Saddam regime. Zawahiri is believed to have visited Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. The evidence of Saddam sending a mukhabarat agent to Taliban Afghanistan in 1998 is quite firm. And the record of terror training camps, payment for suicide-killers, and diplomatic passports for wanted international terrorists is knowable to anyone who cared to notice.

The belief that the Saddam Hussein regime was either internally or in its statecraft secular, or that it had no connection to terrorism, is one that can only be held by those who are untroubled by evidence. A reactionary Islamic regime was the final form the Saddam despotism took and we found that that fabled secular Iraqi middle-class had given way: “Iraqi Arabs … were no different from the other increasingly religious denizens of the region”.

Anyone who supported the invasion should have fought it themselves

This has all the moral force of somebody saying that if they want a crime solved they had better become a policeman. We all have different roles in society: any army that accepts, say, me as a member is hardly going to be able to certify itself as combat-ready. This is also an instance of the anti-warriors believing that any stick will do and in their haste selecting a boomerang. If the logic of this is followed, pacifists, by definition, will be disqualified from commenting. So would the disabled, the elderly, and until-recently women and homosexuals. There is also a serious question of the principle of civilian control of the military: if only warriors can decide on wars then presumably only soldiers can be heads of State. This seems a dangerously undemocratic position.

Supporters of the Iraq invasion want to invade everywhere

This is the silliest straw man—in the same league as President Obama’s saying he resisted calls to put “boots on the ground” in Syria. Military interventions took place before 2003 and have taken place since (see Libya): to call for a military intervention in Syria is not to call for an invasion.

The demand that only those who favour action have supernatural prescience of the effects repeats the lack of moral seriousness mentioned above: you are not exculpated by refusing to act because refusing to act is itself a choice. Edward Miliband’s choice to block even limited strikes against the Bashar regime for gassing 1,400 people to death in a morning means he bears a degree of moral responsibility for every death since then. Who thinks Bill Clinton has no responsibility for Rwanda because American troops were not involved?

If I had the record of the “peace” movement—abandoning Afghanistan after the Soviets were out, opposing getting Saddam out of Kuwait, watching the Rwandan genocide, letting 100,000 people die in Bosnia when three weeks of air strikes could have ended the slaughter three years before, wanting to allow Slobodan Milosevic to empty Kosovo of its inhabitants, and letting the Sudanese dictatorship conduct a war in Darfur that has killed several hundred thousand people—I think I might be a bit more modest.

Why overthrow Saddam and not others?

This has no force of any kind as an argument. Why not Zimbabwe or North Korea? Well, two dictatorships is better than three. This is such a mindless objection however that it can only mean that its proponents were either content with, or oblivious to, the state of affairs in Iraq until George Bush brought it up. To say Saddam’s Iraq was just one among many rogues is to evince complete ignorance of that regime. The case for finishing the regime was complete in 1990; in the shadow of 9/11 it became even more compelling. The strategic imperative for a response in the Arab world was clear: it was the Arab world, not Afghanistan, that sustained the culture of the jihadists and from where the 9/11 death pilots actually came. But Saddam’s Iraq made a case all its own—strategically and morally. After 12 years of warfare—legal, moral, political, and kinetic—Iraq can only have come as a surprise in 2002-03 to those who had never cared about her before that time: not the people who should be dictating American foreign policy.

Conclusion

There were many good arguments against the Iraq invasion, but the abandonment of Iraq in 2011 should be a cause of great shame to anyone who cares about Iraqi human rights. Care for human life should have dictated a commitment to the success of the American-led project once it was begun: the U.S. was not “imposing” democracy—a flat-out contradiction in terms—but releasing democracy, and stayed to protect the polling stations from totalitarians using mass-violence against civilians. Anti-warriors would have sacrificed no principle to work in the country to help with women’s rights or repairing the water system or helping the Shi’a and the Kurds dig up the mass-graves.

That decidedly is not what happened. The NGO community was thin on the ground and some opponents of the invasion gave the very definite impression that they got happier as the news got worse. The casualty figures were brought up only to throw in George Bush’s face. This political purism is part of what led to the dogmatic pursuit of withdrawal despite the dangers it posed for Iraq. Little surprise, then, that what we got as Iraq circled the drain last week was ideological self-congratulation from the Leftist and paleoconservative forces, who entirely failed to notice that their “anti-war” stance on Syria is what had allowed this catastrophe in Iraq to come to pass. The self-centredness of those who would never have worried about Iraq collapsing and sending its miseries our way unless George Bush brought it up evidently knows no bounds.