War in Iraq


My take on Bush's gamble
I just got an email from another libertarian who thought I couldn't be a "true" libertarian because I support the war in Iraq.

This is not a subject I've really discussed yet in this blog, so this seems like a good time. I do support the war in Iraq, it is one of the very few things that I agree with President Bush on.

Yes, I know that libertarians pride themselves on not initiating violence.

Let me go back to September 11, 2001. In my office I have my computer desk against the wall. On that wall, I have a mirror tilted to show the television on the opposite wall so I can scan the television while I am on the computer. I had just finished an IM conversation with a friend in London and was idly scanning the channels. I saw what I thought was a movie with an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center. "Pretty cool effects," I remember thinking to myself. "Hmm, that's odd, it's on the next channel too." And that is when I realized it was the news channels.

As I watched and I felt the horror sink in, I wanted to know why it happened.

Now I am a bit of a history buff. When I started digging into the history of the Middle East, I was appalled. I could blame Western civilization, but it was the things that the United States had done that had backfired, going back to the Wilson administration. But the pieces weren't put into play until after World War II had ended and the Cold War had begun.

The West needed a way to keep the Soviets from controlling the oil fields of the Middle East. The United States seeded the area with both official and unofficial advisors, some of whom just happened to be former Nazi officers. And we cut deals with despotic regimes to keep the oil flowing and the Soviets out.

I'm not saying it was a good choice. Like a lot of international diplomacy, I suspect it was the least bad choice at the time. But it turned the Middle East into a fertile place for radical Islam. And it showed that the United States was willing to overlook certain atrocities as long as our interests were protected.

Our first warning sign should have been in 1973, when Yassar Arafat gave the direct order to assassinate Ambassador Cleo A. Noel, Jr. and others. Combined with the later U.S. pull out from the Vietnam War, this served to convince the Islamic radicals that the United States was a paper tiger.

In my judgment, the 1973 assassination was the turning point. Can you imagine FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, or Johnson overlooking the murder of a serving ambassador?

Things only got worse afterwards. The U.S. Embassy in Iran. The Marine barracks in Lebanon. Not taking out Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. The USS Cole. Mogadushu. The World Trade Center bombing.

Meanwhile, while we were giving official notice and support to tyrannical governments, the State Department, the CIA, and other agencies were tiptoeing around promising aid and arms to various opposition groups. The United States was promising differing things to different groups in the same country. There is reason why some Muslims call the U.S. the Great Satan, after all he was the Father of Lies.

In other words, the United States may not have stirred the pot or added the ingredients, but we kept more than enough fuel on the fire to maintain a boil.

The result was the Islamist. That is a term I borrowed from Daniel Pipes. An Islamist believes in a militant Islamic utopian vision to subdue the entire world under Islam, or at least the radical version of Islam that the Islamist subscribes to.

In order to deal with the Islamist, we need to understand that for him, the only "true humans" are the ones who follow the exact same version of the Muslim faith that he himself does. Since the rules of civilization only apply to humans, an Islamist doesn't have to follow his culture's rules of behavior when dealing with "subhuman scum" like the rest of us.

And that was when I began to understand that the rules of civilization only apply when all sides agree to respect those rules. "Don't initiate force" works great on a theoretical level, but when someone crashes an airliner into a building, all rules are off. It's no longer a question of "how do I keep from interfering in another's rights?" but "how the blazes do I keep them from doing it again?"

I didn't know for example that speeches made by leading Islamist figures regularly have two versions, one for release to the Western media and the other in the native language of the region. The "native" one usually exhorted increased violence against the U.S. and it's allies.

It was no longer a matter of doing no harm. People were going to get hurt no matter what we did. People were going to die no matter what we did. It came down to how do we minimize any harm.

I tried to read sources from both the right and the left in my research, but sources from the left often repudiated themselves.

By the first part of December 2001, I was beginning to understand the choices that George W. Bush faced and the reasons behind them. Removing the Taliban from Afghanistan, that was a given. It had to happen. But Afghanistan wasn't an important enough Muslim nation by itself to let democracy take root in the Middle East.

That is what HAD to happen you see. Economics does more to unleash freedom than religion. As nearly as I could tell, a free market was the only real hope for both peace in the Middle East and an end to Islamist groups. It was the only honorable choice left us.

Bush couldn't just declare war on another Islamic nation, that would trigger a mass jihad. No, he needed a nation that was breaking international law and was harboring terror, or at least encouraging it.

Enter Iraq.

Almost from the very first, Iraq had violated it's surrender agreement from the Gulf War. It violated more than a dozen UNSC resolutions since the end of the Gulf War. In 1998, the United States Congress had authorized the President to seek any and all means to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Iraq was the best place to plant a democracy.

Before the invasion, I estimated no more than even odds for success. But almost anything else I could see would lead to a running war fought within the United States for at least the next forty years. Even at this point, with all that has happened, I still see the odds as barely 57% in favor of success.

I agree that war is a terrible thing to be avoided whenever possible. But if you have to go to war, you don't stop until the enemy is dead and scattered on the winds.

With all that being said, this is shaping up to be the most humane war in history. It has to be, because the real struggle isn't measured in causalities or territory. The real fight is in people's minds. For democracy to really take root, people have to choose it. They have to believe in it. And yes, they have to be willing to die for it.

The only real business that we have in Iraq is making sure that people have the chance to choose, and that nobody unmakes that choice for them.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - July 19, 2005 at 05:56 AM  Tag


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