The Enemy At Home (34 page)

Contrary to popular perception, America never supported bin Laden. Yes, bin Laden was part of the Arab Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In order to maintain “deniability” in its diplomatic dealings with the Soviets, however, America’s aid was channeled through Pakistan. Author Steve Coll reports that never did America directly deal with or fund bin Laden.
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Bin Laden denies he received any U.S. aid, and clearly he didn’t need it. His faction never lacked for money, partly because of his own fortune and also because of the financial support that came from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Muslim countries. What about the charge that America created Saddam Hussein and sold him dangerous weapons? Pure fantasy. America sided with Hussein during the 1980s, but that was during the period of the Iran-Iraq war, when Hussein was battling the ayatollah Khomeini. In that contest, it was not unreasonable for America to tilt toward Hussein, at least to prevent an Iranian victory. Even so, at no time did America sell any weapons to Hussein.

Despite its fundamental flaws, the leftist view of the war has been taken up by leading Democrats. Former presidential candidate Al Gore now alleges that Bush’s Iraq invasion “was preordained and planned before 9/11.” Senator Kennedy claims that Bush concocted the scheme to invade Iraq and then “announced to the Republican leadership that the war was going to take place and was going to be good politically.”
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In the debate leading up to the invasion, however, this was not the view of most Democrats or even of most liberals. The liberal position was not opposed to force, it was opposed to force in the absence of collective action and the support of the United Nations. Leading critics like Senator Robert Byrd and former president Carter demanded that George W. Bush do what his father, George H. W. Bush, did in the Gulf War of 1991: assemble a broad international coalition of countries and then act with the authorization of a United Nations resolution. Ironically when George H. W. Bush did this—line up the U.N., bring in the Europeans, even win the support of many Muslim countries—a majority of liberal Democrats opposed his action to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In the House of Representatives only 86 Democrats supported the Gulf War, while 179 voted against it. In the Senate, 10 Democrats voted to liberate Kuwait by force, while 45 Democrats opposed the plan.

It is true, as liberals say, that multilateral action is usually preferable to unilateral action. But even collective action has its limitations. Many people today express regret that in the Gulf War of 1991 American troops didn’t go all the way to Baghdad. Certainly Operation Desert Storm could have been extended to overthrow Hussein, which would have saved America enormous expense, both in money and in lives. So why didn’t American troops, having ejected Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, pursue them as they retreated into Iraq? The reason is that America was part of a multilateral coalition. The coalition decided in advance that it would repel Hussein from Kuwait, and then stop. If America had gone further it would risk the shattering of the coalition and the opposition of its own allies. Therefore Hussein was permitted to stay in power.

Moreover, the question facing George W. Bush in 2002 was not whether to act with or without international backing. Germany and France were from the outset strongly opposed to U.S. military action. The United Nations was generally uncooperative. Bush had to decide whether to act without this support or not to act at all. Recognizing this, many Democrats insisted on Bush’s obtaining broad international support—support that they knew was not there—as a tactical device to constrain Bush’s options and prevent him from using force to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

So what about the United Nations? Liberal scholars fault Bush with foolishly ignoring the U.N. As a consequence of America’s disregard for international law, the United States has, in the words of political scientists Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, “assumed many of the features of the rogue nations against which it has done battle over the years.”
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Liberals like to refer problems to the United Nations because it carries the aura of legitimacy. But there is a problem, and it goes beyond the membership of the U.N.’s human rights committee or the corrupt windbags who make up the U.N.’s bureaucracy. Actually, the problem is with international law itself. The core principle of international law is sovereignty. Sovereignty means that the borders of a country are legally and morally inviolable. You cannot trespass across a nation’s boundaries or you will be violating its sovereignty.

Now consider the dictators that have inhabited the world over the past half century, from Pol Pot to Idi Amin to Mobutu to Bokassa to Kim Jong-Il to Saddam Hussein. Ask yourself: by what right do such men rule their countries? The obvious answer is none. So what is the moral objection to some other power stepping across the border and pushing the dictator out? None. Yet the hallowed principle of sovereignty says that this is prohibited. The conclusion is that international law, in its current form, gives legal and moral protection to many of the bad guys in the world, allowing them to oppress their people and preventing any outside force from displacing them. Thus for Bush to accede to his liberal critics and refer Iraq to the United Nations would have produced the same outcome as if Bush had adopted the left’s recommendation to leave Saddam Hussein alone. Either way, the murderous dictator would still be the sovereign head of Iraq.

BY ITSELF, AMERICA’S
military operation against Iraq was a magnificent success. One of the largest land armies in the world was defeated in a matter of days. American casualties were minimal. Saddam Hussein went into hiding. America’s victory, however, brought a strange reaction from some in the leftist camp. “Our government has declared a military victory,” columnist Howard Zinn wrote following the fall of Baghdad. “As a patriot, I will not celebrate.” In a later column, Zinn went on to challenge the “unexamined premise that military victory would constitute success.” Clearly he was hoping for a different outcome, and so were others on the left. “It’s scary for Democrats, I have to say,” former Clinton official Nancy Soderberg said on Jon Stewart’s
Daily Show.
“There’s always hope that this might not work.” Equally revealing was Gary Kamiya’s comment on salon.com. “I have a confession,” he wrote. “I have at times secretly wished for things to go wrong, wished for the Iraqis to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage.”
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America’s victory, however, brought two unexpected outcomes. The first was a deadly and resourceful insurgency against American occupation. The resistance was largely made up of former Hussein loyalists who were used to running the country but now found themselves rudely ejected from power. The insurgents were supported in their efforts by Islamic radicals, some of them Iraqi, some from other countries. As is now widely recognized, the Bush administration blundered in failing to anticipate this resistance. Bush’s dismay, however, was not shared on the American left. On the contrary, leftists welcomed the insurgency as the legitimate voice of the people of Iraq. We can see this by consulting our two bin Laden Book Club authors. According to William Blum, “The resistance is composed of Iraqi citizens who are simply demonstrating their resentment about being bombed, invaded, occupied, tortured, slain, and subjected to daily humiliations.” Robert Fisk exulted, “America’s war of ‘liberation’ is over. Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin.”
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From the outset, the left sought to portray America’s military campaign against the insurgency as barbaric and immoral, while ignoring the barbarity and immorality of the insurgents’ actions. Since the left had to be careful about praising men who chop off the heads of innocent civilians and exhibit their handiwork on the Internet, the focus of the left’s outrage was on innocent Iraqi civilians who were killed in America’s military campaigns. Arundhati Roy terms America’s civilian casualties “the new genocide.” George Soros argued that “the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than have the attacks on the World Trade Center.”
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Of course, the left is entirely aware that unlike the 9/11 assassins and the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, American troops do not target civilians for attack. With rare exceptions, they have been careful to minimize civilian casualties.

Even so, the left points to civilian casualties as evidence of American immorality. A favorite figure is 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. This figure was published in the British journal
Lancet.
It turns out to be highly exaggerated. The journal conducted a very small survey, and then extrapolated its results to cover the whole country. It did not actually count bodies. Iraq Body Count has produced more reliable estimates, which are in the range of 30,000.
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This is still a high number. But it pales before the 300,000 people whom Saddam Hussein deposited in his mass graves. Hussein’s bloody rampage was halted by the dictator’s overthrow. The 30,000 figure also pales before the 500,000 Iraqi children who reportedly died as a result of United Nations–imposed economic sanctions against Iraq. The effect of Bush’s invasion of Iraq was to end the cruel and ineffective sanctions policy and thus prevent more Iraqi deaths from malnutrition and starvation. In view of these preceding conditions, it seems obvious that America’s war in Iraq has ended up
saving
innumerable Iraqi lives that would otherwise have been lost.

For the left, however, the purpose of emphasizing civilian casualties was candidly given by former CNN reporter Peter Arnett. Speaking on Iraqi state television in the early days of the Iraq invasion, Arnett said, “It is clear that within the United States there is a growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war. So our reports of civilian casualties here are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.”
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Arnett was fired for those remarks, although his expulsion may have been based less on the fear that political bias would infect his reporting and more on his candor in revealing his motives.

Following the capture of Baghdad, a further surprise awaited the Bush administration: no weapons of mass destruction! Immediately the left seized on this fact as a stunning confirmation of its long-standing charge that there was no justification for the war, Bush had acted on false premises, and therefore America should cut its losses and get out of Iraq. Bush responded with a bold and surprising rationale for why America should stay—to bring democracy to Iraq and to the Middle East. From the outset, leading liberals expressed skepticism and even ridicule. Gary Hart expressed the common view among Democrats that democracy cannot be imposed “at the point of a bayonet.” George Soros wrote that “with all the experience I have gained…I would consider Iraq the last place to choose for a demonstration project” in democracy.
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These objections were premature. With due respect to Soros’s experience, it seems odd to suggest that countries should postpone their bid for democracy until he considers them eligible. We know that after World War II the United States did impose democracy at the point of a bayonet in Germany and Japan, with excellent results. The deeper point being made by some of the critics seemed to be that it was somehow wrong to use force to establish freedom. How can coercion be used to create liberty? This argument seems plausible, until we realize from history that where freedom has come to a country, it has usually come by force. America got its freedom as a result of a Revolutionary War. How did African Americans get freedom? It took the invasion of a Northern army to secure for the slaves a liberty that they were in no position to secure for themselves. Regrettably, force is often required to establish freedom because tyrants rarely relinquish power voluntarily.

Even so, liberal critics ridiculed the idea that Bush was really sincere about implementing democracy in Iraq. Applying her characteristic sarcasm, columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “In Bushworld, we can create an exciting Iraqi democracy as long as it doesn’t control its own military, pass any laws, or have any power.” Writing in
Foreign Affairs,
political scientist Tony Smith claimed that “the call for democratic change was an integral part of a power play by Washington to control the entire Middle East.”
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These are good examples of how mainstream liberals routinely endorse the leftist view that Bush’s democratic rhetoric conceals a naked imperial ambition.

Bush has proved this criticism wrong, however, by allowing democracy to take its course in Iraq. The Bush administration had its own schedule for elections, but the Iraqis pushed for elections to be held sooner, and they were. The Bush team wanted the secular liberal fellow, Iyad Allawi, who had been appointed interim prime minister, to win the election. The Iraqis chose religious figures, first Ibrahim al-Jaafari and then Nouri al-Maliki, and the Bush administration accepted these outcomes. The Bush team wanted an Iraqi constitution with equal rights for women. The Iraqis produced a constitution that gives special place to Islam and includes sharia provisions that treat women unequally than men. The Bush administration has accepted the verdict of Iraq’s elected representatives on this issue. Moreover, Bush has proved the left wrong by handing over the oil fields to Iraq’s new government, demonstrating that America had no desire to steal Iraq’s oil. Contrary to Maureen Dowd, Iraq now has an elected government that does control its own military, pass its own laws, and exercise all the power provided by the constitution. Even more impressive, Bush has agreed that U.S. troops will leave Iraq when the Iraqi government decides they are no longer needed.