Anybody interested in Iraq should read this article in Commentary. Amir Taheri is one of the most knowledgeable people around regarding the actual situation on the ground in Iraq and one of the few who can make an educated comparison of whether or not the country has improved. His conclusion:
Instead of railing against the Bush administration, America’s elites would do better, and incidentally display greater self-respect, to direct their wrath where it properly belongs: at those violent and unrestrained enemies of democracy in Iraq who are, in truth, the enemies of democracy in America as well, and of everything America has ever stood for.
Is Iraq a quagmire, a disaster, a failure? Certainly not; none of the above. Of all the adjectives used by skeptics and critics to describe todays Iraq, the only one that has a ring of truth is messy. Yes, the situation in Iraq today is messy. Births always are. Since when is that a reason to declare a baby unworthy of life?
I would ask anybody who posts on this subject to please read the entire article before commenting. I am not interested in the usual rantings against President Bush and pointed questions regarding WMDs. I actually think the WMD issue is relevant, but not to this particular post. Instead, I’d like us to look at an entirely different issue: when is military intervention appropriate for humanitarian reasons? I also happen to believe that these kinds of questions are more appropriate for true followers of Christ.
The attached article makes a case that Iraq is clearly better off by all objective standards than it was pre-invasion. The economy has nearly doubled in size, unemployment has fallen, businesses are starting, there is more political freedom and freedom of movement, and refugees have stopped pouring out of Iraq, as they often did during Saddam’s reign.
I have mentioned this before, but it is worth discussing it again: the Left in the 1980s to which I belonged constantly wrote and spoke about the necessity of humanitarian military intervention. The big enemy in those days was Realpolitik thinking left over from the bad days of Nixon and Kissinger, and the (sometimes valid) criticism of the Reagan administration was that it didn’t do more to promote a human-rights based foreign policy. Those of us on the Left often said in those days that military intervention against regimes like Iraq and Syria and North Korea would be valid if the goal were to liberate the oppressed. We often held up the successful examples of liberated Japan and Germany and South Korea as evidence.
Well, low and behold, 20 years later the kind of intervention the Left supported in the 1980s somehow became a mistake simply because a Republican president supported it. Which begs the question: what interventions are valid? Are there any times the world’s one superpower should engage itself in military matters on behalf of the downtrodden? And, if you still oppose the Iraq invasion, how do you get over the fact that the country is significantly better off today than it was four years ago?
Once again, if you are going to post, please read the attached article first and stick to the subject of this post. Thanks.