Iraq: Ten years on, were the ‘radicals’ right?

About 10 years ago, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq, I covered an anti-war rally in New York City, said Rod Dreher in TheAmericanConservative.com. I found the crowd to be “a disgusting bunch,” with their mindless anti-war slogans, their stupid drum circles, and their hateful “Bush = Hitler” posters. The protesters actually “made me feel more secure in the rightness of the war,” because how could such radicals be right, and everyone else—including the president, Congress, and the majority of the public—be wrong? Today, with the anniversary of the invasion upon us, I have to admit that the chanting protesters had it right after all. Launched in a fit of post-9/11 fear and hysteria, the Iraq War proved to be a tragic and needless nine-year-long adventure that cost more than $1 trillion, saw 37,000 of our troops killed or wounded, and took the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

Those protesters deserve no retroactive applause, said Nick Cohen in Guardian.co.uk. When they took to the streets, those supposed progressives were, in effect, defending the regime of Saddam Hussein—a savage dictator who’d tortured and killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and tried to exterminate Iraq’s Kurdish minority “in true Hitlerian fashion with poison gas.” Yes, the U.S. failed to understand the depth of Sunni-Shiite hatred and botched its attempt to stabilize post-invasion Iraq. But the liberal case for freeing Iraqis from Saddam’s brutal oppression is as solid now as it was in 2003—and the liberal refusal to acknowledge it no less mystifying.

That isn’t why we invaded Iraq, though, said Conor Friedersdorf in TheAtlantic.com. The Bush administration insisted, falsely, that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction, while the neoconservatives who pushed the war saw it as a way to install a “democratic” government in the Middle East and show Muslims how dangerous it was to mess with the U.S. In 2002, conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg banged his drum for the war by quoting neocon Michael Ledeen: “Every 10 years or so, the U.S. needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” If the term “radical” applies to anyone, it’s surely those who caused so much human suffering on such amoral grounds.

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