Why the worldwide left should have supported Bush and Blair in removing the Ba’athists

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ~Edmund Burke

"Peace is not God's gift to his creatures. It is our gift to each other." ~ Elie Wiesel

"What always drove me crazy about the [war] opposition was that it was never about Iraq. It was a referendum on American power." ~ Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy

First, here are three articles from/about prominent liberals that supported the ousting of the hideous Tikriti mafia that had stolen Iraq:  1) No less of a friend of Duhbya's than Bill Clinton, urging Britons to support Tony Blair 2) in the war; and 3) an interview from Salon.com with William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, US, on why the antiwar left needs to take seriously the war on terrorism.

    Before I begin my critique of the modern political left, in what amounts to a defense of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, I want first to acknowledge the social utility of political demonizing.  When Abraham Lincoln was urged to defend himself from scurrilous rumors about him then rife among the soldiers, he demurred, saying, “In politics, every man deserves his skunk.”  Such personification of the opposite political side is probably inevitable in human affairs, and certainly very useful for politically  motivating people—rational people, anyway.  But at some point such political hatred becomes poison both for the system and for the hater, and that point has been reached when one cannot support his own principles simply because his opponent has adopted them.  That is crazy, and yet would appear to be the case as far as the world’s political left is concerned.  Previous leftwing lunacies, like PETA or the ELF at the extremes, and most educational and sociological theory among the mainstream, were more inanity than insanity, but when it comes to Saddam Hussein and George Bush, the madness was complete.  Here’s the how, the why will have to wait.

   First, however a couple of background sketches, that ye may know me a little.   I come from a long tradition of yellow-dog Democrats: both northern and southern branches of the family would never, ever vote Repukelican.  That includes my millionaire grandmother who hated the GOP viscerally.  Both my parents, although journalists, worked for Democratic governors and in their campaigns going as far back as Winthrop Rockefeller.  My Washington, DC Aunt and Uncle are truly dedicated partisans and no bullshit, true FOBs (friends of Bill, and Hillary--the first couple having been to dinner parties at their house while in the presidency, and when my grandmother died, they sent us a telegram right away).  I relate this not to impress, but to emphasize the magnitude of my apostasy, and give a sense of the emotional and intellectual inertia I have overcome in my own analysis of political people and their processes.  I grew up absorbing, believing and re-spewing the twin evils of ideological "thinking", meaning blind repetition of standard political dogma, and political "feeling": the "all Republicans have horns" emotional disdain, even loathing, of the opposition.  Then I fell in love with a wonderful person whose kind, generous, humorous, open-minded and socially-liberal father (especially as regarded this long-haired pot-smoking guitar-playing no-good daughter-banger from...Arkansas!), a small businessman, was a registered Republican.  Immediate cognitive dissonance.

   The second "formative" backgrounder occurred right here in River City, at WMNF 88.5 FM, "community" radio, where I was a dj for a couple years, and specifically in a conversation with its News Director, Rob Lorei.  Now, I had admired him muchly in my first few years in Tampa, and I still appreciate that he's devoted himself to improving life for people.  But I have much less respect for him intellectually than I once did, and my distasteful discussion with him was the bright spark of disillusionment that began my journey away from modern liberal/progressive dogma.  It boiled down to this:  Rob insisted that there was no evidence (just Israeli "charges") that Yassir Arafat was a terrorist.  Now, I know some like to deflect the terrorist label by questioning the definition, suggesting one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, etc., but anyone who attacks an Olympic team, who bombs civilians, civilian airliners, who and who hates an entire people to the death because of religion, fits any definition worth talking about.  And it was well and fully known, by 1986, when Rob asserted that there was no "proof" of Arafat's involvement with terrorism, that the PLO was fully behind dozens of these things.  I realized there were only two ways to explain his blindness.  Either he was un- or ill-informed, which seemed very unlikely, or he had decided not to believe the characterization of Arafat because he supported the Palestinian's struggle, no matter their tactics.   I was flabbergasted.  Cognitive white noise.

    My point here is not to argue the Palestinian situation (tho' I will, of course), but that I have a moral opposition to "the ends justify the means", excepting the most dire circumstances.   I had had there and then my first personal encounter with that supremely sophisticated evil: raw ideology. I had met irrational rationalization in the flesh,   someone whose who's views of truth were so predicated on wishes and political angle and whose understanding of facts was so completely filtered by paradigm, that he could not see the simple truth, that in this case, the PLO, was a murderous, terrorist army, driven by the worst sorts of bigotry.  (This charge of bigotry, by the way, as opposed to the idea of land conflict, is exactly true because: when the Brits decolonized, they handed out territory to various clans, and those clans had their land and power disputes, even wars, but they all eventually agreed to the British-imposed political structures and settled down with their neighbors.  Excepting of course for the Jewdogs, who were to be exterminated, pushed into the sea, etc.  The Arabs have never settled with Israel not because they give a damn for the Palestinians, but because they HATE the Jews.)  Are we liberal westerners to accept their bigotry as simply "their way", their cultural norm, (as with their other "backward" beliefs such as the roles allowed to women?)  Such an explanation hasn't any deep root in Islamic history, it is only the advent of Wahabbiism in the last 200 years that has made the Arabs so infantile and racist, as it is well known that the Moors once ran a vastly more tolerant and successful society than they do today.  And since my point is that raw, unadulterated, uncompromising ideology is an evil thing--the cause of more human suffering than anything else--whether perpetrated by Osama or Jerry Falwell,  I was absolutely stunned to see it in someone I had thought a rational, thoughtful, progressive person.  Of course, I was 25, and always a late bloomer, my naivete was showing:  ideology...demagoguery...at a community radio station?  Shocking...

   There is one other critical thing to understand, if you seek to understand how I came to be here from where I was.  I believe in the scientific method for determining facts and rationality for determining truth, and that we must trust in our senses and our sensors to reveal the nature of things.  I believe most things, even most thinks, can be shown to be true or false.  This sounds like I'm flirting with absolutism, which is the most damnable characteristic of ideologues!!  But, for all that I do indeed value the grey between the black and the white of birth and death, many times there is only one correct answer: things either are or they are not (forgive me Prof. Heisenberg).  I do believe most things can be definitively described, quantified almost down to that last quantumfried level!  When it comes to human engineering of society, ourselves, etc., definitions are indeed very complex, with many shades of grey, but some first principles are by now very well established.  I consider many them to be the foundations of Liberalism, or at least what Liberalism used to be.  They are so well understood as to make citing them redundant, but among these are: liberty, justice, equality under the law, free speech, free assembly, pursuit of happiness, and the quest for peace among men... What I cannot understand is how with an avowed creed for such things, the world's political left has been standing for the opposite of all of these in the case of Iraq.

             The case of Iraq--why the left should have supported Bush

   Start with two thoughts: Suppose some war can be beneficial in effect, and suppose you were an Iraqi dissident, someone as desirous of justice and equality as you, but who fought the brutal dictator, perhaps to the point of torture or even death.  Who would you see as supporting your struggle: the worldwide left, which got apoplectic at the thought of the Iraq war? Or Bush, who freed your lands?  But, you say, that fine humanitarian goal was not the reason we were given for waging war.  True enough that it was not the primary reason, (it was among the many justifications offered, however) but that was because, as Colin Powell publicly stated, WMD was the only thing that all political viewpoints could unite on in opposing the Ba'athist genocidists.  If the worldwide left had lived up to its own ideals, there never would have been a need for hyping the WMD evidence, as they would have been calling for the ouster of Saddam (some, such as Nat Hentoff, Elie Weisel, Michael Kelly and Christopher Hitchens, did do so!).  But in a moment of historical opportunity, to its shame, the left decided (felt is the more accurate term) that war is the worst thing imaginable, ever, and so must be opposed no matter what, even to the unmitigated good of ending the Ba'athist terror and freeing the most oppressed people on Earth.     

      It really grieves me that so many of my liberal kin can't see this and instead histrionically ("Bush is the biggest threat to world peace" and other nonsense, like 'No War for Oil': the war was about oil only in that it served to vastly enrich one of the world's most dangerous criminal regimes) demanded the status quo ante remain in place over there..  I put it down to the post-Vietnam disdain of the military and/or an utter lack of understanding of the nature of the Iraqi regime (and human nature?).  But whatever the cause, the fact is that the world's leftists would have rather seen Saddam and Co. in power than support those who removed them.  That is insane.  The list of genocidal atrocities alone is exhausting.  Add to that Saddam's aggressive wars on his borders, his historic development programs for WMDs, illegitimate, Orwellian/Stalinist rule, and his active support for Palestinian suicide bombers and other violent terrorist groups, not to mention his theft of untold billions from his people, and by any criteria you can mention, decapitation of that regime was justified.  I bring you to my hypothesized Iraqi dissident again.  Can you imagine yourself as strong in your opposition to the war were you him, in his shoes?  Who would you thank for your liberation?  Your liberal, supposedly anti-dictator/pro human-rights, reformist/progressive brethren, who protested against the deserved end of the Ba'athists, or George Bush and Tony Blair, who risked their political lives to do the right thing?

   (How can war be the right thing?  All war is waste, it is true, but not all war is wrong, if it frees people and ends or prevents a colossal wrong, then the smaller wrongs of waging war must be swallowed to achieve a greater good.  This is one fundamental  lesson of history, and was part of Wilsonian Internationalism, and the Democratic Party, at least through Truman.  How has the left unlearned it?  In a word: Vietnam.  Those of us whose political paradigms were forged in that era grew up with a visceral distaste for all things military and a fundamental tenet arose in the left that all war is bad and must never be waged. I know, I shared it.  This idea is obviously mistaken yet seems to have been wholly embraced by most of the left, not from any intellectually derived formula or long term historical perspective, but from the feelings of woe generated by the Vietnam war.  I grew up believing that the protesters of Vietnam, my heros, saved lives by ending the unjust war, etc.  They were right in opposing a losing strategy (Johnson and McNamara were strategic fools in waging the war).  They may have been right that the war should not have been our business. The sad facts of history are that the tortured self-analytic agonies of the US public actually extended the war and ultimately cost perhaps a million lives.  Sorry, but that's what happened.  That's not Republican history, but Ho Chi Minh's.  Had the US military been allowed to wage that war as it knew how to, instead of being hobbled by the Democratic administration that ran it into the ground, the Vietnam war would have been won in less than five years, probably a lot less, and millions would have survived the war who didn't and tens of millions more would have had a better future than that which has been their lot.  Presuming the disaster of the Khmer Rouge would have been avoided, triple those numbers)

     Opponents of George Bush's war often hide behind several "placard canards" as they lob their lame grenades at the Administration. 

  Let's start with the idea that those in charge of Iraq had any legitimacy to claim it as their own.  They did not, not by any modern notion of rightful government.  As a UN member state, however, Iraq was afforded a certain sovereignty, despite the despotic gang which had stolen it.  This is but one of many flaws with the UN, and brings me to:

   The United Nations.  Since the fall of the Soviets, the UN has acted more like the League of Nations than the august and revered body of careful captains of the global fleet of states we on the political left imagine it to be.  I was always puzzled by the right wing's disdain of the UN, and since that was most vocally expressed by the John Birch Society, felt well justified in assuming that all critics of the UN were racist and isolationist.  But I believe in the evidence of my senses, and my senses tell me that the UN is the crippled wreck its critics insist it has long been, and the list of its abysmal failures includes, Iraq's genocide against the Kurds and the Shia after the Gulf War, Somalia, Rowanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo.  And of course, in the present, now just passed, case of Saddam Hussein.  I don't know that the UN is hopelessly conflicted, but it is not showing much sign of intellectual or moral life.  For instance, after refusing offers of US security for its base in Baghdad, and then keeping the same Ba'athist guards they had under Saddam, they suffered a terrible blow when their base was blown up! Compounding their stupidity, they then withdrew!  What fools and cowards!!  That is exactly how the bad guys win.  Thank goodness we aren't such deluded pussies.

   One of the most disgusting and and frequent calumnies of the left before the war was that the UN sanctions were killing thousands of Iraqi babies, etc.  This is a damnable lie.  Saddam used starvation and deprivation of everything: food, water, medicine, energy, to punish his minorities, all the while lavishing gold toilets upon his scabrous ass.  Saddam killed those babies, by any meaningful measure. 

   We were Saddam's buddies for decades.  So what?  Christopher Hitchens has demolished this argument well, pointing out that we should not be bound today by the bad and immoral choices of the past.

   Occupation and War for Oil.  In the first case, by any definition in accord with history, this is not an occupation, (150,000 troops within 25 million?) and we will be pulling out (without taking anything) the very few (3.5) divisions we have probably too soon.  Secondly, the oil is not going to be owned by us, but as Bush and the others repeatedly say, by the Iraqi people.  Bush even opposed the moves in his own party to have the 87 billion be partially repaid by the Iraqis, because of that type of criticism, even tho a reasonable case could be made that they should use some of their in-the-ground wealth to pay back those who sacrificed lives and treasure to free them.  Do Haliburton and Exxon et al benefit? Yes. Is that why Bush/Blair risked all? No. The reason oil mattered in this dispute is that it provided unlimited wealth to someone who was using it for unlimited evil.

   Unilateral action.  Tell that to the Brits, who've sacrificed dozens over there.  Or the many other countries whose citizens have died and are being targeted by the evildoing motherfucker jihadist/ba'athist shitheads who're terrorizing Iraq now.  We tried to get the UN off its high horse to act in concert, but as detailed above, it is a dysfunctional body, which wouldn't enforce its own mandates, and as in Kosovo, the solution to the UN's problem was given by a US president.  Curious, I don't recall such vitriolic leftwing opposition to Clinton's war as to Bush's. (those who did were proved wrong, then, too, but did they shut up? Nooo...) Could it be that the worldwide left just hates him for his style? 

   Preemptive war is wrong, or unAmerican.  Depends on what you're preempting.  And as for Saddam, what preemption? The evidence that Saddam & Co. have long been waging war on the civilized world was legion before the war and continues to mount.  That's on top of the documented facts of their chemical missile attacks--by the hundreds--against the Iranians, and their atrocities against the Kurds and Shi'ia.  Their efforts to develop nukes, bio and chemical weapons were not doubted over decades, were several times exposed and reconstituted, and were not and could not be stopped by the underachieving Hans Blix.  Many terrorism experts believe the Iraqi Secret Service was behind the anthrax episode, seeking cover under 9/11s blanket.  The trial of the first bombers of the World Trade Center exposed sams_list with Iraq, which the Clinton admin refused to follow up on.  The still mysterious TWA flight 800 explosion has been suggested as an Iraqi act.  They were paying families of suicide bombers in Israel a lifetime's earnings to kill innocents.  Their desire to control the region in their manner could not be countenanced for the same reasons that the Japanese could not be allowed their empire in the 1930s--they were hideous monsters with no concern for life, liberty or justice.  The insistence on awaiting a "first" strike with a return address is ludicrous, as they would never have provided that, especially with the cover generously provided by the existence of their fellow travelers, Al Queda.

   W's war was illegal.  By what standard?  By the UN's own standards the 1991 war never ended, and could be 'legally' re-started at any time, if Saddam refused his obligations under the armistice, which he did from day one.  His genocidal 1991 crackdown on the Shi’ites was unbelievable in that no one, not Bush I, Clinton, or the UN, who’s jurisdiction it surely was, lifted a finger to stop it.  Legally and morally, if only in this one case, and there were many many more, the war was long overdue.

   War is bad--it only leaves victims.  Yeah it sucks and it's a damn shame it has to come to that.  But on the simplistic life-for-a-life calculus, the short and quick Iraq war certainly took fewer lives than another decade or more of Ba'athism, (and most of those killed were Ba'athists! A-plus!)  Ask the Kurds and Shia, if you doubt that. Or ask the Marsh Arabs, if you can find one, Saddam killed almost all, and ruined their habitat forever.  (We don't even begin to know the species he also extinguished there.  The Greens should have called for his ouster on that and the Kuwaiti oil well fires alone)  Any question of the left's preoccupation with the psychology of victimhood is answered by a listen to any news story on far left media (Democracy NOW, WMNF/Pacifica etc). about the US army's actions there.   There is frequent mention of the "cries of women and children in the background" as US troops conduct searches, raids and arrests.  Such reporting is not only irrelevant, but unprofessional, as it betrays the emotional affinity of the reporter, and conveys a message that making women and children cry is somehow important compared to finding those who would restore Saddam to power (and kill many Iraqis as well as some of our troops in the process).

   Bush is just a pawn of Big Energy and the military industrial complex.  Yes, but so are we all.  This is something very few people, especially liberals, understand about our world:  if the oil stopped flowing, we'd all be at each other's throats in about a week, as soon as the food ran out.  I don't mean the US vs. Canada; I mean your neighbor and you.  Whatever could stop the oil could also bring down the electric grid, in which case I give us twenty four hours before utter bedlam.  I have approached this idea from the perspective of an interest in cometary impact disasters, but if your job (president) is to protect the world, generally, and the US, specifically, from the human threats to its peace and prosperity, you have to consider what your enemies could do to seriously fuck you up.  In this regard there are several major ongoing threats, and I for one am glad that the current administration is actively dealing with them.  If you want to talk about getting the world to run on something besides fossil fuels, I’m 100% with you.  But until that dream is a reality, we have a right to defend our lifeblood.   As for the MIC, in the hands of the world's broadest, most successful democracy, it has gotten the world to the point where global war is unthinkable, and military force has been used only for righteous, progressive, humanitarian reasons for the last decade (Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq).

   Bush & Co. hate civil liberties.   I think Ashcroft is an idiot, but that's because of his religious beliefs.  I'm not sure how much long term damage he can do to the American experiment, but I do know this: if Al-Quaeda succeeds in its desire to explode a nuke in Washington or New York, among the consequences would be the worst civil-rights nightmare a Liberal could ever imagine.  There is no rational reason to doubt that they want to do it, and given the money at their disposal, the terrible security of post-Soviet nukes, and the utterly indefensible borders of our country, no rational reason to suppose they won't succeed.  So when I look at how easily the 9/11 people got in and moved around in this country for years, and I remember that Jose Padilla and John Lynd were homegrown religious zealots working for the bad guys, I don't have a whole lot of trouble with the Justice Department's efforts to keep up with such lunatics.  More should have been done much earlier.

   We're not the world's policeman.  Wrong, we clearly are and have been for at least 87 years.  Am I the only liberal who remembers when it was the right wing that used to say that?  How weird is it that modern liberalism has nothing in common with Wilsonian Liberalism, and that the neo-cons do?  And some people are immensely grateful for our efforts: the Kurds and Shi'ia, of course, and the main street in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, was renamed Bill Clinton Blvd. after he exercised might for right and policed the Serb death squads back to Serbia.

   Why do we have the right to impose our  will on Iraq or anywhere?  It's not about our will, it's about the prime desire of all men, to have a say in the doings of their life:  Self Determination.  As America is the beacon for the world's oppressed, and the most powerful democracy by far, I see it as our duty to help the downtrodden of the world to achieve their own self-determination.  No greater good has been done for Mankind than the political freedom that has swept the world since WWII.  Without exception, newly freed countries have used the US Constitution as their model, and yet, the modern left hates modern America so much that it cannot comprehend what Lincoln meant when he described this country as "the last, best hope for Mankind on Earth." ('course, he was a Republican!)  I guess that's what happens when all your comforts are met, and mortal threats retreat. 

   Saddam was as bad as any number of dictators, singling him out is selective enforcement for venal ends (Haliburton, etc.)  This attitude, often expressed by lefties, betrays a complete ignorance of the world.  Are there many bad regimes?  Yes.  Were there any as bad as Iraq?  By any criteria, not by an order of magnitude, no.  Iran, North Korea and Syria are all very bad, terror supporting, repressive regimes, seeking nuclear weapons (these are why they are on the "Axis o' Evil" list), but none have the track record Saddam had in mass murder, genocide, aggressive war, and only Iran has oil wealth enough to make it a major threat.  Iraq also had 17 UN resolutions it was in violation of, which is significantly different from all the others.  (Notice, too, how cooperative those countries, and Lybia, suddenly are after this show of force and determination by the US, and how much more serious the Europeans are being with regards to forcing compliance with nuclear inspections in Iran, for instance.)

   This last point brings me to a conclusion that is very difficult for me to accept, but as I believe firmly in the evidence of my senses, I must: namely, that the modern left, for all that it concerns itself with figuring out people's problems and solving human misery, is very bad at both.  The law of unintended consequences can come to their rescue to some degree (in sociology and education, perhaps, because they do mean well), but not in excusing their eternal blindness and miscalculation on national security questions, or its pathetic, destructive, counterproductive, wet noodle approach to disciplining international bastards...

    Finally (whew) I come to this in my review of left wing lunacies: Bully for Nader!  Once a hero of mine, his pathetic 2000 vanity run for president predictably split the electorate and handed Jeb Bush the opportunity of a lifetime, to see his shameless Florida electoral fixes actually work and elevate his 'numbskull and boners' brother into the world's most critical job.  Which so far he's done pretty well at.  Maybe Ralph's a hero after all....So either, I've lost my mind, or, demonstrably, the Democrats have...

~ Matt Terry 2003 ~