Iraq: a year later

If you are looking for a balanced and intelligent discussion of the war in Iraq from a liberal yet pro-war position. Michael Ignatieff's The Year of Living Dangerously is as good as any I have read. I don't agree with everything but he makes some good points. Let me quote a couple. Here is a great summation of the rationale for the war:

I supported war as the least bad of the available options. Containment -- keeping Saddam Hussein in a box -- might have made war unnecessary, but the box had sprung a series of leaks. Hussein was evading sanctions, getting rich through illegal oil sales and, so I thought at the time, beginning to reconstitute the weapons programs that had been destroyed by United Nations inspectors. If he were acquiring weapons, he could be deterred from using them himself, but he might be able to transfer lethal technologies to undeterrable suicide bombers. Such a possibility might have been remote, but after 9/11 it seemed unwise to trifle with it. Still, I thought, force had to be a last resort. If Hussein had complied with the inspectors, I would not have supported an invasion, but the evidence, at least till March 2003, was that he was playing the same old games. Getting Hussein to stop these games depended on a credible threat of force, and the French, Russians and Chinese weren't ready to authorize military options. So that left disarmament through regime change [ . . .]
The discovery that Hussein didn't have weapons after all surprises me, but it doesn't change my view of the essential issue. I never thought the key question was what weapons he actually possessed but rather what intentions he had. Having been to Halabja in 1992, and having talked to survivors of the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, I believed that while there could be doubt about Hussein's capabilities, there could be none about the malignancy of his intentions. True, there are a lot of malignant intentions loose in our world, but Hussein had actually used chemical weapons. Looking to the future, once sanctions collapsed, inspectors had been bamboozled and oil revenues began to pick up, he was certain, sooner or later, to match intentions with capabilities.

This is crucial. Saddam had the intentions and he had a source of revenue. Given the corrupt (oil for food money pay offs, etc.) and weakening nature of the containment process, and the changed risk assessment post 9/11, regime change - America's stated policy - would only come through force.

Ignatieff ends with a sobering conclusion:

Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice.

Ignatieff might not have meant to criticize John Kerry but I think his conclusion is a devastating critique of the Senator. Can you honestly tell me you think Kerry would be a strong and determined leader on rebuilding Iraq? He voted against the funding to support the rebuilding effort! I would like to see one example where Kerry took a bold stand and saw it all the way through. Could someone point to any indicators that Senator Kerry has a commitment to finishing the job in Iraq? It seems to me that Kerry is an angry more liberal Jimmy Carter. With the risks such as they are, a vote for Kerry is simply not compatible with rebuilding Iraq and fighting the war on terror.