Three years on almost to the day since the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK, and amidst daily reports of continuing insurgency and turmoil there, plus increasing belligerence on the part of Iraq’s noisy next door neighbour Iran, it is a timely moment to reflect on the merits of the invasion, and, more generally, of President Bush's recent reaffirmation of his doctrine of pre-emption that lay behind it.
There was much initial support in the US and UK for the invasion of Iraq because of the general acceptance in these two countries of their respective government's claims that Saddam posed a severe and real threat to their national security by possessing WMD and having links with Al Qaeda.
When, after the invasion, no such weapons or any hard evidence of such links were discovered among the debris, support for the invasion rapidly fell away in the US and UK and has continued to fall there, as the number of returning body-bags and of Iraqi civilian fatalities continues to mount, and as stories in the western media continue to circulate as to what a legacy of chaos the invasion of Iraq has left in its wake since Saddam’s removal.
Meanwhile, the increased power that regime change in Iraq has given Shiites in that part of the world seems to have emboldened Iran to step up its nuclear programme in what looks like a clear bid on its part to become a regional super-power in the Middle East.
So, has all the blood-shed and other costs of war been worth it, or should the West have taken Saddam at his word that he had long since disposed of any stocks of WMD he had ever accumulated and that he had never forged any links with Osama bin Laden?
And even if Saddam had accumulated such weapons or had those links with Al Qaeda, has his forcible removal from power truly made the world any safer for democracy, to coin a phrase, given how unstable and perilous the situation has become in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular since the invasion?
Few political questions are currently nearly as important or more pressing than these, for upon the correct answer to them turns the question of which course of British and US foreign policy in that region is now best for them.
A week on from when I last blogged in support of the US add UK military action in Iraq, my confidence that Bush and Blair made the correct decision by invading, as well as in the general soundness of their doctrine of pre-emption that led them to do so, has increased as a result of having come across the following three postings on the internet that have appeared in the course of the last week.
The first, which appeared only yesterday on the website of free-republic, is an English translation of a letter written in Arabic only released for the first time to the public yesterday by the Pentagon by its posting it on its web-site along with several other pre-war documents.
The letter was dated as having been written just two days after the attack on the Trade Towers by a member of Saddam’s Intelligence apparatus to someone higher up its echelons. The letter reports a conversation that took place between an Iraqi intelligence source and a Taliban Afghani Consul in which the latter referred to a relationship between Iraq and Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11 and warned that the US would be liable to attack Iraq were it to become satisfied there had been such a link.
This document supplements the case in support of the US invasion of Iraq that was provided by the recent testimony, that I reported in my blog last week, of former senior Iraqi military personnel that Saddam did have stockpiles of WMD shortly before the invasion which he had managed to remove to Syria just in time to escape their being detected by the Americans after it.
The second document I have come across in the last week that further strengthens my support for the invasion of Iraq and for the continuing presence of our troops there is a recent report about what life is actually like there that was posted on an internet website three days ago. It was written by a retired US army officer who recently returned from a visit to that country. (Hat-tip, as we bloggers like to say, to Melanie Phillips for having drawn attention and for having provided a link to this report in her own blog yesterday.)
The picture of that country painted by this report is of a place far more settled and secure than any portrait of it you will be liable to come across in the MSM (mainstream media). The report begins: ‘ During a recent visit to Baghdad, … the reality on the streets [I saw] bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.’
It goes on to explain that part of the reason there has been such an endless stream of negative reports coming out of that country since the invasion, especially of late, has been western media’s reliance on local stringers of whom ‘some have their own political agendas’ and who have ‘long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news…. The result is that we’re being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what’s actually happening.. The result is a distorted, unfair and disheartening picture of a country struggling to rise above its miserable history.’
The third and final document I have come across recently that reinforces the case for re-emption is not about Iraq, but its neighbour Iran. It is an article that first appeared in last Sunday's Boston Globe. The article is entitled ‘The nightmare this time: A nuclear showdown with Iran could be this generation’s Cuban missile crisis. Here are the reasons we must not let it come to that’. It was written by Graham Allison, a founding dean of Harvard's John F.Kennedy School of Government, director of its Centre for Science and International Affairs, and author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.
The article explains that the real danger posed to the US, and by extension to the UK, by Iran being allowed to acquire nuclear capability stems not from its being likely to use of these weapons itself directly against either country or even against Israel. The real risk is rather that it might be willing to outsource the job to Al Qaeda, or else that Al Qaeada might simply steal some of Iran’s nuclear weapons to use for its own nefarious purposes.
The clouds created by Operation Desert Storm might well have started to settle, but turbulence in that part of the world looks far from ending soon. Let us hope and pray that it will pass without it having generated any clouds of the mushroom-shaped variety.