Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Monday, April 19, 2004
The roots of evil.
The Muslim clerics' council made what seemed to be great and good efforts to release some of the hostages who the thugs have kidnapped lately. So, should we be grateful for these clerics? doesn't that mean that we are grateful for the thugs themselves? But let’s, before answering this question, try to find out who these clerics are and what their relation with the kidnappers is.
Before the war there was no such council in Iraq. Unlike the Shea’at, the Sunnis had no organized council or religious authorities that represent the majority of them, and whom they can follow regarding religious affairs at least. All the Sunni clerics were graduates of the “Faqiuh and Sharea’a" college that teaches Islamic law and philosophy in the Sunni version of Islam. That’s why you couldn’t find a single Shea’at in this college. It was only for Sunni men, and the vast majority of those were not intelligent people, as this college had very easy standards to be met if one wants to join it. After finishing their study, the students would become mosque clerics who are responsible for holding prayers and taking care of the mosques. They were government employees who received a regular monthly salary in return for their services, as they were serving the government and not the people.
After the invasion of Kuwait back in 1990 it was very common to see these clerics driving cars that were ‘imported’ from Kuwait. They were not only good servants, but also the majority of them were partners in Saddam’s crimes. They didn’t only accept his gifts, but went as far as justifying Saddam’s terrible crimes.
After the war, and after a period of instability, the traditional Shea’at authorities regained their ‘normal’ role as representatives of the majority of Shea’at, while the poor Sunni clerics found themselves actually as unemployed. There was no one to pay them so how could they live? And not only they lost their benefactor, but they also lost their influence. I’ll not throw accusations without solid proofs, but the bottom line is that those clerics, feeling the great threat to their career and being short of money and neglected, did what was expected from them; they united and formed a council that represent them and announced themselves as the legal representatives of the Arab Sunni. And with some of the Arab Sunni -especially in the western part of Iraq where you can hardly find a single Shea’at and where people used to get obvious privileges, at least compared to the other minorities in Iraq- being afraid of the growing power of their eternal rivals, the Arab Shea’at, the new plan seemed to have a chance. They even managed to form a political party to represent them in the GC, "the Iraqi Islamic party" There remained one problem; finance.
Unlike the Shea’at, the Sunni do not have a commitment to their clerics regarding finance. This was not a problem in the past 14 hundred years as the successive governments in Iraq were almost entirely Sunni, but now and for the first time it’s different and the clerics had to find new sources. These guys are fighting for the lives of their families because they don’t have any qualifications and they know nothing else other than preaching.
Of course, there were many parts that are more than ready to take the part of the collapsed regime, starting from the remnants of that regime itself and passing through Saudi Arabia and Syria and, God knows who else.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and I find that they are far from convincing to explain history for a long period of time, but this doesn’t mean that there are no conspiracies at all. However these conspiracies tend to be short living and limited in their effects.
I believe that we have a conspiracy here. Hostages from different nationalities get kidnapped by the thugs, and after ‘great efforts’ from the 'peace loving and moderate' Muslim clerics' council, some of these get released by the same people who used to burn and mutilate the bodies of their enemies!! And the end result: the thugs are not thugs, they are Iraqi Muslim fighters struggling for their freedom and have morals, and the Muslim Sunni clerics are peace loving people who have great support and influence on the Iraqi people! Can they be this stupid? Or do they hope that they can deceive the whole world?
I think that one look at the nationalities of the hostages who were released and those who were killed can make the whole issue more clear, and if we ask ourselves how did those clerics with the help and support of the Iraqi Islamic party, manage to contact the ‘Islamic resistance’ and have such a great effect on them, we can conclude without great difficulty that we are dealing with one part rather than two or three, and what is worse is that these people are actually represented in the GC, a decision which seemed to have taken place to create a sort of a balance to the great Shea’at presence in the GC. These kind of terrorist acts remind us with the stupid plays Saddam's used to come up with every time he found himself surrounded by threats. Taking hostages, threatening to kill them and then release them for certain demands to show how merciful he was, and that he didn't do it unless he has a legitimate demands and a just cause!
We are dealing with a group of Islamo fascists, hypocrite opportunistic clerics, terrorists from outside Iraq, fanatic Iraqi Wahabis and remnants of the old regime who are united in an unholy alliance with different perspectives and goals but they all know that they have this frightening single enemy; democracy and freedom in Iraq.
A great proportion of these powers are now taking shelter in the west parts of Iraq and mainly in Fallujah, using it as a base and terrorizing the innocent people there to make it look that the whole city is supporting them, and in my opinion any attempt to solve this problem 'peacefully' through negotiations will have a disastrous outcome. It will give these people the legitimacy they are seeking as a 'resistance to the occupation’ and this will affect the way the rest of the Iraqi people look at the whole struggle. We should not fall into the trap the pacifist fell in and this applies to Al-Sadr and his group of followers too. These abscesses should be opened, it will be very hard, painful and it will stink, but it has to be done. I don't claim to know how this can be done, as it still a very hard task and requires a skilful aproach to minimize the dangerous expected side effects, but I have faith in the coalition forces and I have faith that the Iraqi people will soon identify these people as the evil and hypocrite they are.
-By Ali.
The roots of evil.
The Muslim clerics' council made what seemed to be great and good efforts to release some of the hostages who the thugs have kidnapped lately. So, should we be grateful for these clerics? doesn't that mean that we are grateful for the thugs themselves? But let’s, before answering this question, try to find out who these clerics are and what their relation with the kidnappers is.
Before the war there was no such council in Iraq. Unlike the Shea’at, the Sunnis had no organized council or religious authorities that represent the majority of them, and whom they can follow regarding religious affairs at least. All the Sunni clerics were graduates of the “Faqiuh and Sharea’a" college that teaches Islamic law and philosophy in the Sunni version of Islam. That’s why you couldn’t find a single Shea’at in this college. It was only for Sunni men, and the vast majority of those were not intelligent people, as this college had very easy standards to be met if one wants to join it. After finishing their study, the students would become mosque clerics who are responsible for holding prayers and taking care of the mosques. They were government employees who received a regular monthly salary in return for their services, as they were serving the government and not the people.
After the invasion of Kuwait back in 1990 it was very common to see these clerics driving cars that were ‘imported’ from Kuwait. They were not only good servants, but also the majority of them were partners in Saddam’s crimes. They didn’t only accept his gifts, but went as far as justifying Saddam’s terrible crimes.
After the war, and after a period of instability, the traditional Shea’at authorities regained their ‘normal’ role as representatives of the majority of Shea’at, while the poor Sunni clerics found themselves actually as unemployed. There was no one to pay them so how could they live? And not only they lost their benefactor, but they also lost their influence. I’ll not throw accusations without solid proofs, but the bottom line is that those clerics, feeling the great threat to their career and being short of money and neglected, did what was expected from them; they united and formed a council that represent them and announced themselves as the legal representatives of the Arab Sunni. And with some of the Arab Sunni -especially in the western part of Iraq where you can hardly find a single Shea’at and where people used to get obvious privileges, at least compared to the other minorities in Iraq- being afraid of the growing power of their eternal rivals, the Arab Shea’at, the new plan seemed to have a chance. They even managed to form a political party to represent them in the GC, "the Iraqi Islamic party" There remained one problem; finance.
Unlike the Shea’at, the Sunni do not have a commitment to their clerics regarding finance. This was not a problem in the past 14 hundred years as the successive governments in Iraq were almost entirely Sunni, but now and for the first time it’s different and the clerics had to find new sources. These guys are fighting for the lives of their families because they don’t have any qualifications and they know nothing else other than preaching.
Of course, there were many parts that are more than ready to take the part of the collapsed regime, starting from the remnants of that regime itself and passing through Saudi Arabia and Syria and, God knows who else.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and I find that they are far from convincing to explain history for a long period of time, but this doesn’t mean that there are no conspiracies at all. However these conspiracies tend to be short living and limited in their effects.
I believe that we have a conspiracy here. Hostages from different nationalities get kidnapped by the thugs, and after ‘great efforts’ from the 'peace loving and moderate' Muslim clerics' council, some of these get released by the same people who used to burn and mutilate the bodies of their enemies!! And the end result: the thugs are not thugs, they are Iraqi Muslim fighters struggling for their freedom and have morals, and the Muslim Sunni clerics are peace loving people who have great support and influence on the Iraqi people! Can they be this stupid? Or do they hope that they can deceive the whole world?
I think that one look at the nationalities of the hostages who were released and those who were killed can make the whole issue more clear, and if we ask ourselves how did those clerics with the help and support of the Iraqi Islamic party, manage to contact the ‘Islamic resistance’ and have such a great effect on them, we can conclude without great difficulty that we are dealing with one part rather than two or three, and what is worse is that these people are actually represented in the GC, a decision which seemed to have taken place to create a sort of a balance to the great Shea’at presence in the GC. These kind of terrorist acts remind us with the stupid plays Saddam's used to come up with every time he found himself surrounded by threats. Taking hostages, threatening to kill them and then release them for certain demands to show how merciful he was, and that he didn't do it unless he has a legitimate demands and a just cause!
We are dealing with a group of Islamo fascists, hypocrite opportunistic clerics, terrorists from outside Iraq, fanatic Iraqi Wahabis and remnants of the old regime who are united in an unholy alliance with different perspectives and goals but they all know that they have this frightening single enemy; democracy and freedom in Iraq.
A great proportion of these powers are now taking shelter in the west parts of Iraq and mainly in Fallujah, using it as a base and terrorizing the innocent people there to make it look that the whole city is supporting them, and in my opinion any attempt to solve this problem 'peacefully' through negotiations will have a disastrous outcome. It will give these people the legitimacy they are seeking as a 'resistance to the occupation’ and this will affect the way the rest of the Iraqi people look at the whole struggle. We should not fall into the trap the pacifist fell in and this applies to Al-Sadr and his group of followers too. These abscesses should be opened, it will be very hard, painful and it will stink, but it has to be done. I don't claim to know how this can be done, as it still a very hard task and requires a skilful aproach to minimize the dangerous expected side effects, but I have faith in the coalition forces and I have faith that the Iraqi people will soon identify these people as the evil and hypocrite they are.
-By Ali.
Very Different Playbooks
Them vs. us.
By Michael Ledeen
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them."
The fascists believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust race (or nation), would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.
The terror masters have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.
In the past few days there has been a great to-do about a possible Iranian role in Iraq, mediating between us and Moqtada al Sadr. In the end, it came to nothing. Iran's deputy foreign minister was either unwilling or unable to deliver Moqtada, blamed us for the "failure," and went back to Tehran. But the point of the exercise was not to solve a problem for us — on the contrary, the Iranians intend to create ever greater problems on the ground — but to deliver a message to the restive Iranian people: "The Americans are so weak and impotent that they have to turn to us for help. So just forget about any American help to get rid of us."
If we can't manage Iraq without the mullahs, we certainly can't be strong enough to help the Iranian people get rid of the mullahcracy and achieve freedom.
It would have been embarrassing enough if this were the first time the Iranians had played such a game. But this was a humiliating replay of the "We've got al Qaeda guys for you" joke that they played on us at least twice in the last year. Remember when Deputy Secretary of State Armitage announced that his Iranian buddies were going to deliver al Qaeda terrorists in a matter of weeks? That never happened either, and again, the main point of the game was to demonstrate that the Bush administration was perfectly willing to negotiate with the mullahs. And therefore the United States wasn't going to remove them.
There is an additional stratagem involved in these little games: The mullahs figure that, if they can keep us engaged in the games, we won't crack down on their nuclear program. And the more time they can gain, the greater their chances of building an effective supply of atomic bombs. It's working.
As I have long argued, they may be crazy, but they are anything but stupid.
The "keep the Americans talking to us" game exploits one of our main weaknesses: the belief that when foreign leaders talk to our top officials, they will generally tell the truth. No doubt the secretary of State and our top diplomats know they have been lied to from time to time, but a more realistic team would have concluded long since that you can't trust anything that comes out of Tehran. It seems they haven't.
In like manner, the terrorists present the world with an endless supply of lies, which generally take the form of accusing us of what they do (and we don't). Many of their actions are staged precisely for the benefit of reporters (like the horror scene of the four dead American contractors a couple of weeks ago). They brought in the television cameras the other day to film the execution of an Italian hostage, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, but something went wrong. After forcing him to dig his own grave, they put a hood over his head and ordered him to kneel so he could be killed. He wouldn't go for it. He tried to remove the hood, and defiantly yelled at them "I will show you how an Italian dies." The scene was a propaganda disaster for them, and good old al Jazeera, the modern mother of lies, announced that they had the tape but wouldn't release it because it was too terrible to witness. It was terrible, but not in the way al Jazeera wanted us to think. It showed Western bravery, not Arab domination, so they couldn't show it.
Take the case of another hostage, the Canadian aid worker, Fadi Fadel. He was shown on Arab television, saying he was an Israeli and a spy. But after his release, Fadel said the audio portion of the videotape was doctored and that he never said anything of the sort, even when they stubbed their cigarettes onto the bare skin of his neck and back.
"I never said I was working with Israel," he said.
"It was dubbed."
He shouldn't have found it necessary to say it, because the "story" on Arab television was obviously a lie. His captors would never release an Israeli spy unless they got the release of one thousand terrorists in exchange.
But I didn't hear any American TV commentator make this obvious point, nor did I read it in any American newspaper, nor did I hear any Canadians say any such thing. I'll bet that lots of them thought it might have been true.
That's why they think we're suckers and losers.
Our other great weakness — remember we are looking at ourselves through the eyes of the terror masters, not passing judgment — is respect for individual human beings, and a great reluctance to take military action that will likely kill innocent civilians, especially women and children. A couple of weeks ago, an Italian general who commands the national peacekeeping force in Nassiriyah told journalists about the enemy's method of fighting. First they launch a surprise attack. The Italians take some initial casualties and fight back, gradually gaining the upper hand. At that point, small children start walking toward the Italian positions, followed by women draped in black. The Italians stop shooting. The terrorists regroup. The women and children go away. The terrorists start shooting again.
Marine sharpshooters are reporting that when enemy fighters move through the streets of Fallujah, they drag women and children in front of them, so that if the Marines shoot, they will likely kill the innocents.
This tactic goes back a long way. Once the terrorists realized that we (and the Israelis) would balk at attacking targets that contained innocent civilians, they took care to locate themselves in such areas. In the Eighties, for example, most every time Hezbollah attacked us, its leaders quickly repaired to villages and neighborhoods with lots of hospitals, churches, mosques, and schools. That was an effective deterrent. Both we and the Israelis made the painful decision to accept higher casualties on our side, in order to prevent killing women, children, nurses, priests, and other noncombatants.
The terrorists hate that, and they do everything in their power to make the world believe that we are like them, that we lie, that we kill indiscriminately, that we do not care about innocent lives. Thus, in recent weeks, reports attributed to sources in Fallujah hospitals have spoken of huge numbers of women and children shot in the head by U.S. Marines (one particularly imaginative version had it that Fallujah doctors were digging out bullets from the brains of the victims in order to prove our criminal acts. That one was racing around the web for a while, until some militarily unchallenged bloggers noted that our ammunition would go right through the heads, and wouldn't be stopped by brain tissue). And the BBC came up with some casualty figures showing that more than 90 percent of the dead in Fallujah were innocents. That too, was changed after a while. But the lies continue.
We're not going to start the mass murder of Iraqi civilians, and we're not going to shoot at a jihadi who's holding a child in front of him, and that's going to cost American lives and limbs. We must explain all this to a world, and above all to an American public, that is inevitably swayed by the torrent of lies.
As in the war itself, we cannot win this thing by playing defense. We're not going to get help from the Iranians, who plan to be our gravediggers in Iraq, just as they were years ago in Lebanon. We have to expose the hollowness of the mullahcracy and support the Iranian people. And we have to answer Churchill's question, and show that our enemies are still wrong.
The president put it nicely the other day when someone asked him about our exit strategy. He said that the only acceptable exit strategy was to win.
Faster, please.
Them vs. us.
By Michael Ledeen
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them."
The fascists believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust race (or nation), would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.
The terror masters have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.
In the past few days there has been a great to-do about a possible Iranian role in Iraq, mediating between us and Moqtada al Sadr. In the end, it came to nothing. Iran's deputy foreign minister was either unwilling or unable to deliver Moqtada, blamed us for the "failure," and went back to Tehran. But the point of the exercise was not to solve a problem for us — on the contrary, the Iranians intend to create ever greater problems on the ground — but to deliver a message to the restive Iranian people: "The Americans are so weak and impotent that they have to turn to us for help. So just forget about any American help to get rid of us."
If we can't manage Iraq without the mullahs, we certainly can't be strong enough to help the Iranian people get rid of the mullahcracy and achieve freedom.
It would have been embarrassing enough if this were the first time the Iranians had played such a game. But this was a humiliating replay of the "We've got al Qaeda guys for you" joke that they played on us at least twice in the last year. Remember when Deputy Secretary of State Armitage announced that his Iranian buddies were going to deliver al Qaeda terrorists in a matter of weeks? That never happened either, and again, the main point of the game was to demonstrate that the Bush administration was perfectly willing to negotiate with the mullahs. And therefore the United States wasn't going to remove them.
There is an additional stratagem involved in these little games: The mullahs figure that, if they can keep us engaged in the games, we won't crack down on their nuclear program. And the more time they can gain, the greater their chances of building an effective supply of atomic bombs. It's working.
As I have long argued, they may be crazy, but they are anything but stupid.
The "keep the Americans talking to us" game exploits one of our main weaknesses: the belief that when foreign leaders talk to our top officials, they will generally tell the truth. No doubt the secretary of State and our top diplomats know they have been lied to from time to time, but a more realistic team would have concluded long since that you can't trust anything that comes out of Tehran. It seems they haven't.
In like manner, the terrorists present the world with an endless supply of lies, which generally take the form of accusing us of what they do (and we don't). Many of their actions are staged precisely for the benefit of reporters (like the horror scene of the four dead American contractors a couple of weeks ago). They brought in the television cameras the other day to film the execution of an Italian hostage, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, but something went wrong. After forcing him to dig his own grave, they put a hood over his head and ordered him to kneel so he could be killed. He wouldn't go for it. He tried to remove the hood, and defiantly yelled at them "I will show you how an Italian dies." The scene was a propaganda disaster for them, and good old al Jazeera, the modern mother of lies, announced that they had the tape but wouldn't release it because it was too terrible to witness. It was terrible, but not in the way al Jazeera wanted us to think. It showed Western bravery, not Arab domination, so they couldn't show it.
Take the case of another hostage, the Canadian aid worker, Fadi Fadel. He was shown on Arab television, saying he was an Israeli and a spy. But after his release, Fadel said the audio portion of the videotape was doctored and that he never said anything of the sort, even when they stubbed their cigarettes onto the bare skin of his neck and back.
"I never said I was working with Israel," he said.
"It was dubbed."
He shouldn't have found it necessary to say it, because the "story" on Arab television was obviously a lie. His captors would never release an Israeli spy unless they got the release of one thousand terrorists in exchange.
But I didn't hear any American TV commentator make this obvious point, nor did I read it in any American newspaper, nor did I hear any Canadians say any such thing. I'll bet that lots of them thought it might have been true.
That's why they think we're suckers and losers.
Our other great weakness — remember we are looking at ourselves through the eyes of the terror masters, not passing judgment — is respect for individual human beings, and a great reluctance to take military action that will likely kill innocent civilians, especially women and children. A couple of weeks ago, an Italian general who commands the national peacekeeping force in Nassiriyah told journalists about the enemy's method of fighting. First they launch a surprise attack. The Italians take some initial casualties and fight back, gradually gaining the upper hand. At that point, small children start walking toward the Italian positions, followed by women draped in black. The Italians stop shooting. The terrorists regroup. The women and children go away. The terrorists start shooting again.
Marine sharpshooters are reporting that when enemy fighters move through the streets of Fallujah, they drag women and children in front of them, so that if the Marines shoot, they will likely kill the innocents.
This tactic goes back a long way. Once the terrorists realized that we (and the Israelis) would balk at attacking targets that contained innocent civilians, they took care to locate themselves in such areas. In the Eighties, for example, most every time Hezbollah attacked us, its leaders quickly repaired to villages and neighborhoods with lots of hospitals, churches, mosques, and schools. That was an effective deterrent. Both we and the Israelis made the painful decision to accept higher casualties on our side, in order to prevent killing women, children, nurses, priests, and other noncombatants.
The terrorists hate that, and they do everything in their power to make the world believe that we are like them, that we lie, that we kill indiscriminately, that we do not care about innocent lives. Thus, in recent weeks, reports attributed to sources in Fallujah hospitals have spoken of huge numbers of women and children shot in the head by U.S. Marines (one particularly imaginative version had it that Fallujah doctors were digging out bullets from the brains of the victims in order to prove our criminal acts. That one was racing around the web for a while, until some militarily unchallenged bloggers noted that our ammunition would go right through the heads, and wouldn't be stopped by brain tissue). And the BBC came up with some casualty figures showing that more than 90 percent of the dead in Fallujah were innocents. That too, was changed after a while. But the lies continue.
We're not going to start the mass murder of Iraqi civilians, and we're not going to shoot at a jihadi who's holding a child in front of him, and that's going to cost American lives and limbs. We must explain all this to a world, and above all to an American public, that is inevitably swayed by the torrent of lies.
As in the war itself, we cannot win this thing by playing defense. We're not going to get help from the Iranians, who plan to be our gravediggers in Iraq, just as they were years ago in Lebanon. We have to expose the hollowness of the mullahcracy and support the Iranian people. And we have to answer Churchill's question, and show that our enemies are still wrong.
The president put it nicely the other day when someone asked him about our exit strategy. He said that the only acceptable exit strategy was to win.
Faster, please.
fighting words
Second Thinking
What I got wrong about Iraq.
By Christopher Hitchens
At least there's no question about the flavor of the week. It's a scoop of regime-change second-thoughts, with a dash of "who lost Iraq by gaining it?" Colin Powell, who has never been wise before any event (he was for letting Bosnia slide and didn't want even to move an aircraft carrier on the warning—which he didn't believe—that Saddam was about to invade Kuwait), always has Bob Woodward at his elbow when he wants to be wise afterwards. Richard Clarke has never been asked any questions about his insistence that the United States stay away from Rwanda. Many of those who were opposed to any military intervention now tell us that they always thought it should have been at least twice as big.
To give an example of the latter school: E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post has just instructed his readers that Fallujah and the Sunni triangle would more likely have been under control the first time around, except that we refused the offer of help from the Turks. Dionne, whose politics are an etiolated version of the Dorothy Day/Michael Harrington Catholic-pacifist school, is the soft-Left's William Safire in this thirst for Turkish power. At the time, I thought it was impressive that the United States refused Turkey's arrogant pre-condition, which was a demand that Turkish troops be allowed into Iraqi Kurdistan. Apart from the fact that there was and is no threat from that quarter, such a concession would have negated our "regime change" claims.
Now we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on? This point extends to Paul Bremer's decision to dissolve the Baathist armed forces. That could perhaps have been carried out with more tact, and in easier stages. But it was surely right to say that a) Iraq was the victim of a huge and parasitic military, which invaded externally and repressed internally; and b) that young Iraqi men need no longer waste years of their lives on nasty and stultifying conscription. Moreover, by making it impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup, the United States also signaled that it would not wish to rule through military proxies (incidentally, this is yet another gross failure of any analogy to Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, and all the rest of it).
In parallel with this kind of retrospective brilliance, we continue to hear from those whose heroic job it is to keep on exposing the open secret. Fresh bulletins continue to appear from the faction that knows the awful truth: Saddam's Iraq was considered a threat by some people even before Osama Bin Laden became famous. I still recommend Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm as the best general volume here. Published well before the war and by a member of the Clinton NSC whose pre-Kuwait warnings had been overruled by the first Bush administration, it openly said that continuing coexistence with Saddam Hussein had become impossible and that the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, made it thinkable at last to persuade public opinion that this was so. More than any other presentation, this prepared the ground for the intervention. I remember it being rather openly on sale and being considered the argument that you had to beat.
Pollack rested more of his case than he now finds comfortable on the threat from Iraqi WMD. That these used to be a threat is no more to be denied than the cheerful fact that we can now be sure that they no longer are. (And being sure is worth something, by the way, unless you would have preferred to take Saddam's word for it.) So, should it now be my own turn? What did I most get wrong? Hell, I'm not feeling masochistic today. But come on, Hitchens, the right-thinking now insist that you concede at least something.
The thing that I most underestimated is the thing that least undermines the case. And it's not something that I overlooked, either. But the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends (call them Shiite and Sunni if you want a euphemism that insults the majority), was worse than I had guessed.
And this is also why I partly think that Colin Powell, as reported by Woodward, was right. He apparently asked the president if he was willing to assume, or to accept, responsibility for the Iraqi state and society. The only possible answer, morally and politically, would have been "yes." The United States had already made itself co-responsible for Iraqi life, first by imposing the sanctions, second by imposing the no-fly zones, and third by co-existing with the regime. (Three more factors, by the way, that make the Vietnam comparison utterly meaningless.) This half-slave/half-free compromise could not long have endured.
The antiwar Left used to demand the lifting of sanctions without conditions, which would only have gratified Saddam Hussein and his sons and allowed them to rearm. The supposed neutrals, such as Russia and France and the United Nations, were acting as knowing profiteers in a disgusting oil-for-bribes program that has now been widely exposed. The regime-change forces said, in effect: Lift the sanctions and remove the regime. But in the wasted decade of sanctions-plus-Saddam, a whole paranoid and wretched fundamentalist underclass was created and exploited by the increasingly Islamist propaganda of the Baath Party. This also helps explain the many overlooked convergences between the supposedly "secular" Baathists and the forces of jihad.
When fools say that the occupation has "united" Sunni and Shiite, they flatter the alliance between the proxies of the Iranian mullahs and the Saudi princes. And they ignore the many pleas from disputed and distraught towns, from Iraqis who beg not to be abandoned to these sadistic and corrupt riffraff. One might have seen this coming with greater prescience. But it would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions. There was no way around our adoption of Iraq, as there still is not. It's only a pity that the decision to intervene was left until so many years had been consumed by the locust.
Christopher Hitchens
Second Thinking
What I got wrong about Iraq.
By Christopher Hitchens
At least there's no question about the flavor of the week. It's a scoop of regime-change second-thoughts, with a dash of "who lost Iraq by gaining it?" Colin Powell, who has never been wise before any event (he was for letting Bosnia slide and didn't want even to move an aircraft carrier on the warning—which he didn't believe—that Saddam was about to invade Kuwait), always has Bob Woodward at his elbow when he wants to be wise afterwards. Richard Clarke has never been asked any questions about his insistence that the United States stay away from Rwanda. Many of those who were opposed to any military intervention now tell us that they always thought it should have been at least twice as big.
To give an example of the latter school: E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post has just instructed his readers that Fallujah and the Sunni triangle would more likely have been under control the first time around, except that we refused the offer of help from the Turks. Dionne, whose politics are an etiolated version of the Dorothy Day/Michael Harrington Catholic-pacifist school, is the soft-Left's William Safire in this thirst for Turkish power. At the time, I thought it was impressive that the United States refused Turkey's arrogant pre-condition, which was a demand that Turkish troops be allowed into Iraqi Kurdistan. Apart from the fact that there was and is no threat from that quarter, such a concession would have negated our "regime change" claims.
Now we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on? This point extends to Paul Bremer's decision to dissolve the Baathist armed forces. That could perhaps have been carried out with more tact, and in easier stages. But it was surely right to say that a) Iraq was the victim of a huge and parasitic military, which invaded externally and repressed internally; and b) that young Iraqi men need no longer waste years of their lives on nasty and stultifying conscription. Moreover, by making it impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup, the United States also signaled that it would not wish to rule through military proxies (incidentally, this is yet another gross failure of any analogy to Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, and all the rest of it).
In parallel with this kind of retrospective brilliance, we continue to hear from those whose heroic job it is to keep on exposing the open secret. Fresh bulletins continue to appear from the faction that knows the awful truth: Saddam's Iraq was considered a threat by some people even before Osama Bin Laden became famous. I still recommend Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm as the best general volume here. Published well before the war and by a member of the Clinton NSC whose pre-Kuwait warnings had been overruled by the first Bush administration, it openly said that continuing coexistence with Saddam Hussein had become impossible and that the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, made it thinkable at last to persuade public opinion that this was so. More than any other presentation, this prepared the ground for the intervention. I remember it being rather openly on sale and being considered the argument that you had to beat.
Pollack rested more of his case than he now finds comfortable on the threat from Iraqi WMD. That these used to be a threat is no more to be denied than the cheerful fact that we can now be sure that they no longer are. (And being sure is worth something, by the way, unless you would have preferred to take Saddam's word for it.) So, should it now be my own turn? What did I most get wrong? Hell, I'm not feeling masochistic today. But come on, Hitchens, the right-thinking now insist that you concede at least something.
The thing that I most underestimated is the thing that least undermines the case. And it's not something that I overlooked, either. But the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends (call them Shiite and Sunni if you want a euphemism that insults the majority), was worse than I had guessed.
And this is also why I partly think that Colin Powell, as reported by Woodward, was right. He apparently asked the president if he was willing to assume, or to accept, responsibility for the Iraqi state and society. The only possible answer, morally and politically, would have been "yes." The United States had already made itself co-responsible for Iraqi life, first by imposing the sanctions, second by imposing the no-fly zones, and third by co-existing with the regime. (Three more factors, by the way, that make the Vietnam comparison utterly meaningless.) This half-slave/half-free compromise could not long have endured.
The antiwar Left used to demand the lifting of sanctions without conditions, which would only have gratified Saddam Hussein and his sons and allowed them to rearm. The supposed neutrals, such as Russia and France and the United Nations, were acting as knowing profiteers in a disgusting oil-for-bribes program that has now been widely exposed. The regime-change forces said, in effect: Lift the sanctions and remove the regime. But in the wasted decade of sanctions-plus-Saddam, a whole paranoid and wretched fundamentalist underclass was created and exploited by the increasingly Islamist propaganda of the Baath Party. This also helps explain the many overlooked convergences between the supposedly "secular" Baathists and the forces of jihad.
When fools say that the occupation has "united" Sunni and Shiite, they flatter the alliance between the proxies of the Iranian mullahs and the Saudi princes. And they ignore the many pleas from disputed and distraught towns, from Iraqis who beg not to be abandoned to these sadistic and corrupt riffraff. One might have seen this coming with greater prescience. But it would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions. There was no way around our adoption of Iraq, as there still is not. It's only a pity that the decision to intervene was left until so many years had been consumed by the locust.
Christopher Hitchens