Here's a brief rebuttal to show why Hitchens is, was, and will always be wrong about Iraq:
> If flouting UN resolutions is a reason to go to war, let's attack Israel and Turkey, who have been flouting more them for more years. The key question regarding Iraq always was: Did it pose an imminent threat to the U.S. or to other countries in the region? After Iraq War I, with daily flyovers by U.S. forces in the North and South of Iraq, and U.S. forces stationed in the Gulf, the answer was clearly: No.
> Again, even if Saddam did have some chemical or biological weapons remaining from the 1980s and early 1990s, could they have been weaponized and used on the U.S., or our allies? Western intelligence could and did answer that question in 2002: No. Thus, Iraq did not present a clear and present danger to America.
> As for inspection, ask the inspectors themselves if they thought their efforts were working (Yes), and if Saddam had large amounts of WMD stashed away (No).
> Yes, Colin Powell's performance at the UN was a disgrace, but it's too convenient to lay all the blame on him – or on George Tenet, whom Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom after no WMD turned up in Iraq. Iraq has always been Bush's show. By all accounts, Powell didn't want to go before the UN, but in the end he decided to "Tom" it up, with his artist's renderings of Iraqi mobile weapons labs and aerial drones and all. Pathetic.
> Yes, even Hitchens admits that Bush exaggerated the al Qaeda-Iraq connection. To this day, Bush hardly misses and opportunity to say "al Qaeda" "9/11" and "Saddam Hussein" in the same breath. Is it really any surprise, then, that somehow, in September 2003, 70% of Americans believed – incorrectly – that Saddam was involved in 9/11; and in September 2006, a shocking 45% of Americans still believed Saddam was "personally involved" in the 9/11, even after Bush publicly denied it in September 2003!? Are Americans just plain stupid? Did they concoct this bogus idea all by themselves? Did the "liberal media" for its own inscrutable, diabolical reasons, plant this thought (which would only serve to help Bush!) in the Americans' brains? Or were Americans perhaps listening too closely and trustingly to what their President was saying "between the lines"?
> I've already chopped up Hitchen's argument that a civil war in Iraq was inevitable, even if Saddam had remained in power. It's pure speculation, totally unproveable or unrefuteable. It's a throwaway line of argument.
> Strikingly, what Hitchens ignores in all of this is what IRAQIS think. He doesn't care at all. Hitchens doesn't care that Iraqis want us to leave. He doesn't care that they hate being occupied by a foreign nation. And of course he doesn't care that Iraqis are living with fewer basic services like electricity, water, hospitals, and schools. Or that they have less security, or a chance to find a job. Or that nearly 2 million Iraqis (8% of the pre-war population) have fled the country. Or that at least 24,000 Iraqis , and perhaps as many as 100,000, have been violently killed since the U.S. invasion.
To Hitchens – and to Bush and his cronies – Iraq is just another chessboard for Western power plays. Its people are disposable pawns. What matters are OUR wishes, and OUR security. For Hitchens and his ilk, it is a given that America retains the absolute right to attack whomever it wants, on the slimmest of pretexts, in order to prevent another terrorist attack, and damn the consequences for the rest of the world's poor innocents.
And naturally, all of our "honest" mistakes are excusable, because our intentions are pure, and good, and noble, unlike all those other countries.
What a bunch of craven, arrogant $&#@*s !
So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?
Hard questions, four years later.
By Christopher Hitchens
March 19, 2007 | Slate
Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.
What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train? The question isn't as easy to answer as some people would have you believe. Suppose we run through the actual timeline:
Was the president right or wrong to go to the United Nations in September 2002 and to say that body could no longer tolerate Saddam Hussein's open flouting of its every significant resolution, from weaponry to human rights to terrorism?
A majority of the member states thought he was right and had to admit that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake. It was scandalous that such a regime could for more than a decade have violated the spirit and the letter of the resolutions that had allowed a cease-fire after the liberation of Kuwait. The Security Council, including Syria, voted by nine votes to zero that Iraq must come into full compliance or face serious consequences.
Was it then correct to send military forces to the Gulf, in case Saddam continued his long policy of defiance, concealment, and expulsion or obstruction of U.N. inspectors?
If you understand the history of the inspection process at all, you must concede that Saddam would never have agreed to readmit the inspectors if coalition forces had not made their appearance on his borders and in the waters of the Gulf. It was never a choice between inspection and intervention: It was only the believable threat of an intervention that enabled even limited inspections to resume.
Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?
The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for materiel that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?
Could Iraq have been believably "inspected" while the Baath Party remained in power?
No. The word inspector is misleading here. The small number of U.N. personnel were not supposed to comb the countryside. They were supposed to monitor the handover of the items on Iraq's list, to check them, and then to supervise their destruction. (If Iraq disposed of the items in any other way—by burying or destroying or neutralizing them, as now seems possible—that would have been an additional grave breach of the resolutions.) To call for serious and unimpeachable inspections was to call, in effect, for a change of regime in Iraq. Thus, we can now say that Iraq is in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty. Moreover, the subsequent hasty compliance of Col. Muammar Qaddafi's Libya and the examination of his WMD stockpile (which proved to be much larger and more sophisticated than had been thought) allowed us to trace the origin of much materiel to Pakistan and thus belatedly to shut down the A.Q. Khan secret black market.
Wasn't Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations a bit of a disgrace?
Yes, it was, as was the supporting role played by George Tenet and the CIA (which has been reliably wrong on Iraq since 1963). Some good legal experts—Ruth Wedgwood most notably—have argued that the previous resolutions were self-enforcing and that there was no need for a second resolution or for Powell's dog-and-pony show. Some say that the whole thing was done in order to save Tony Blair's political skin. A few points of interest did emerge from Powell's presentation: The Iraqi authorities were caught on air trying to mislead U.N inspectors (nothing new there), and the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a very dangerous al-Qaida refugee from newly liberated Afghanistan, was established. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on.
Was the terror connection not exaggerated?
Not by much. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.
Was a civil war not predictable?
Only to the extent that there was pre-existing unease and mistrust between the different population groups in Iraq. Since it was the policy of Saddam Hussein to govern by divide-and-rule and precisely to exacerbate these differences, it is unlikely that civil peace would have been the result of prolonging his regime. Indeed, so ghastly was his system in this respect that one-fifth of Iraq's inhabitants—the Kurds—had already left Iraq and were living under Western protection.
So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?
That's exactly what I mean to say.
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