Each and every life lost is painful to witness, however, we can take some solace in the fact that every soldier who has died on the battlefield died as a *volunteer*.
I take no solace in that fact. And certainly most of the Iraqis who have died or been wounded in this didn't "volunteer" for it.
With Saddam pouring billions into the back pockets of U.N. members such as France and Russia, it isn't likely they would ever have agreed to an invasion. If someone in Afghanistan, representing the Taliban, had billions to bribe U.N. members with, they would never have supported our invasion there as well. Lack of support demonstrated the degree of corruption, which exists in international politics. If America depended on corrupt governments in order to move the world toward a freer and more just planet, most of the world would be locked in tyranny.
While I know you, Nadine and others with climb all over me for this, I question this premise. I don't know what the scale of corruption was. I await Paul Volker's report. Yes, it would be very disappointing to me if the UN especially was involved in large scale corruption. But we both know that where is a lot of money, there is a lot of corruption. That said, it still would have been a lot cheaper in lives and in money to have allowed the UN inspections to continue, even if it had to continue for another year or more. There were reports last summer that Saddam had tried to make a deal with the Bush admin to end the standoff--but of course, the Bush admin wanted him to step down and that was one item that was non-negotiable for him. It would have been far better though less popular in this country to have done something with that.
How many mass graves do we need to upturn in order for the nuanced among America's intellectual elites to realize Iraq is a whole heck of a lot better of today then it was just over a year ago?
Most of the mass graves were from the wars that Saddam fought--one of which I'm sure you've been reminded many times that the US supported him in (and supported his enemy as well, in a move that was considered very clever at the time, in the hope that they would clobber each other silly in a Mexican standoff). Which isn't to say that Saddam was OK. It is only to say that we had more important things to do in 2002 and 2003 than to plan and wage a war against the guy.
In a strange way we should be grateful our nation is willing to face this enemy now before they had acquired nuclear or mass quantities of chemical weapons. Imagine Hammas, or the Bathist with a nuclear device; imagine what the world would look like today had Osama had access to a stockpile of chemical weapons?
I don't disagree with this, but--the real question remains, was this Iraq thing the best way to go about facing the Islamist extremist enemy? Bush supporters continue confuse the war in Iraq with the war against Osama and his followers. They are separate things. Or at least were separate things until the 2003 invasion. The Bush drummed up support for the Iraq war by associating them. We would have been far better off if we had focused on eliminating Osama in 2002, while maintaining our vigilance against Iraq. We still could have threatened him, we were bombing the country almost daily, certainly weekly, it was in tatters.
Whether the country in fact better off today than it was a year ago is unclear to me. Especially unclear is whether it will be better in 2, 4, or 6 years. I don't know the answer to that, nor does anyone else right now. I do know that the so called "War on Terror" has not been helped by this, though. Even if Osama is caught over the summer, it will not have been helped. We have given our enemies time to regroup, diversify and decentralize. Our many statements that we have killed or captured "two thirds" of their leadership is nonsense rhetoric designed to be a morale booster--we have no real idea of how many people or leaders there are in Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda groups. And judging from the polls on how Arabs see the US vs. how they saw us prior to the invasion, it is a fair bet that their ranks have grown over the past year. Both inside and outside of Iraq. And Pakistan. And Egypt. And other countries. |
