June 26, 2004
Clinton tried Iraq regime change, too, sort of
In his June 22 BBC interview, former President Clinton reminds us that he, too, wanted regime change in Iraq, but he would have left it to the Iraqis.
CLINTON: “When President Bush asked for authority for the Senate to use force if Saddam didn’t cooperate with the U.N., I strongly supported that. My only difference and.. and.. I adopted, in ’98, after we kicked the inspectors out, a policy of regime change. I thought, well, we’re never going to be ever to do any consistent business with this guy. That’s different from invading him. You know, I said we ought to support the opposition elements and just keep working until we get a new leader.
“So, I didn’t have any profound difference with the policy until it was decided to invade Iraq before the U.N. Weapons Inspection process was finished…”
BBC: “So what you’re saying is you were opposed to the invasion of Iraq?”
CLINTON: “What I am saying is I believe that we should have led the - I would have supported the invasion of Iraq, whether or not we’d had U.N. opposition, if the U.N. inspectors had finished their job and Han Blix had said they won’t cooperate.”
U.N. weapons inspector Blix did say the Iraqis were not cooperating fully and immediately, violating U.N. orders. Blix said Saddam had not cooperated in providing an accurate accounting of what happened to his chemical and biological weapons. But of course, Blix, ever the diplomat, went for months avoiding straightforward words like, “They won’t cooperate.”
But that’s not the problem with Clinton’s alternative to a U.S.-led invasion.
The problem is that Clinton's approach to Iraqi fascism -- “support the opposition elements and just keep working until we get a new leader” -- was not likely to work for at least another 20 years, and it was likely to get hundreds of thousands more Iraqis killed.
The first President Bush called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam in 1991. That stirred the Shiites to resist the Baathists, who quickly discovered that Saddam’s multi-layered police state was unbreakable from within. Half of Saddam’s mass graves hold the bodies of those daring 1991 rebels.
About 200,000 were hauled off and slaughtered. If that was not proof that Arabs want to be free like everyone else, then nothing is. If that failed to convince you of Saddam’s totalitarian cruelty, then you deny the truth. If that was not justification for a rescue mission to liberate Iraq, then what could be?
And there being no statute of limitations on a regime’s crimes of such bloody magnitude, the liberation was justified at any time, the sooner the better.
Funding the Iraqi opposition was bound to be as ineffective as encouraging the French people to overthrow their French and German oppressors in World War II. To every act of resistance, the totalitarian forces responded by hanging Frenchmen from lampposts. The French weren’t freed until outside help arrived.
Clinton’s way had little chance for success in Iraq, and even he now seems to admit it. The forced removal of Saddam’s regime freed Iraq fairly quickly. And as difficult as the liberation has been, its human toll has been significantly smaller than what Saddam and sons had in store.
frankwarner.typepad.com |
