Tag Archives: Iraq War

A Ba’ath Party boast that the American forces are leaving Iraq “dragging tails of failure” recalls to mind Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf’s 2003 self-cancelling assertions “there are no American troops in Baghdad,” these same troops according to the regime’s Information Minister “committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates.” In all cases the claims are false, but it will be some years before the most recent receives the judgement of history, the only judgement which matters.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair together committed as a matter of principle to a divisive and unpopular plan. Tony Blair was undone by his leadership in arguing for the Iraq invasion, and in the years since his reputation has suffered greatly. Those who denounce the war occupy the secure and morally untouchable position of never having to face the consequences of non-intervention, which might, and probably would in my view, have been on a much greater and of a more alarming scale.

That future, which we will never see, could well have included (and only after another ten or twenty years of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror) the dissolution of Iraq and a power struggle leading to regional civil war. Instead, Iraq has been put on an alternative course and al-Qaeda has been denied a great leap forward in their pursuit of a Mesopotamia Caliphate. Along the way the invasion has produced otherwise unobtainable collateral intelligence on the nature and scope of cooperation between North Korea, Pakistan, China, and Iran in the area of chemical and nuclear weapons proliferation, at the centre of which have been A.Q. Khan and the Namchongang Trading Company. Scoff at this if you like, and by all means go on pretending that weapons of mass destruction are a neocon fetish, but this enlargement of our awareness is part of the war’s undeniable legacy.

Most of all however the resolve to undo Saddam Hussein restores some credibility to the otherwise farcical idea of the “International Community.” This esteemed collective has stood back on so many occassions, from Rwanda to Darfur, while the slaughter went ahead unimpeded. Don’t think the butchers fail to notice this, and act accordingly. Saddam Hussein gambled this way, and lost, and that ought to be recognized as a positive legacy of the invasion too.