…you and I are simply passing through history. This, this IS history…
-Emile Belloq, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Today marks the five-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Where were we all?
My wife and had just arrived in Moscow that day. It was the first of two trips in the process of adopting our daughter. (The invasion would end while we were there on our second trip. A few months back I mentioned we were in Russia on 9/11 while adopting our son. We made a vow to the world, no more adoptions. I don’t think the planet could take it.)
Going into Iraq was a spectacular kick-over-the-table move I supported at the time because it signaled an end to business as usual. No more playing the punching bag.
The Left looks back on that with their customary red-colored glasses and see mendacious cowboys. The other day Hillary gave a speech where she summed up Lefty thinking:
The mistakes in Iraq are not the responsibility of our men and women in uniform but of their Commander-in-Chief. From the decision to rush to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their work or waiting for diplomacy to run its course. To the failure to send enough troops and provide proper equipment for them. To the denial of the existence of a rising insurgency and the failure to adjust the military strategy. To the continued support for a government unwilling to make the necessary political compromises. The command decisions were rooted in politics and ideology, heedless of sound strategy and common sense.
I suppose if you consider that months-long shadow boxing dance with the United Nations a “rush” to war, then you aren’t going to be persuaded by the fact Hussein was in violation of sixteen United Nations Security Council Resolutions. I’m still a bit puzzled as to what magical “diplomacy” would’ve turned Hussein around.
Christopher Hitchens wrote the other day,
In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam’s regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, “lied into war.” We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him. The president’s speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.
Bush said in that speech,
Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.
In one place — in one regime — we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.
Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime’s forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped — by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.
To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq’s dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.
He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge — by his deceptions, and by his cruelties — Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.
….
Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We’ve tried sanctions. We’ve tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a — nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.
The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
Bush was laying out the case that diplomacy means nothing if it isn’t backed up with a stick. Tea and crumpets do not make thugs and terrorists shake in their boots.
Hillary and Barack and the craven party they represent want to go back to those days of feckless diplomacy where dictators quickly figure out that there are no real consequences for aggressive violence. This is really what we’re voting on in November. What are we going to tell the world? Will we say as a nation we still have the resolve to see this through, or we will signal retreat?
In the face of all that, other things that happened on this day in history seem a bit silly.
Cross-posted at Truth Vs. The Machine. Comments welcome.
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