Today's terrorist killing spree in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle" will doubtless be taken by anti-war commentators as further "proof" that deposing Saddam Hussein was a terrible idea and that the Bush Administration has compounded its original sin by bungling the aftermath. Over and over we hear the shrill cry, "Bush didn't have a plan!", as if a plan were a panacea rather than something that, in von Moltke's well-known formulation, doesn't survive its first contact with the enemy.
Reasoning with the Coalition of the Wild-Eyed is a Sisyphean task, but let's make an attempt by comparing the state of Iraq and the world today with the probable situation if the Iraqi Ba'athists had remained in power.
In one respect the two scenarios are identical: Innocent Iraqis are and would be in danger of sudden, arbitrary death. One difference is that, in Saddam's Iraq, Ba'athist thugs carried innocents off to Abu Ghraib for torture, and there was no one to intervene against the horrors. In liberated Iraq, the thugs are pursued by the Coalition military, have been killed in large numbers and have almost no ability to act outside of a constricted region. The other difference is that, under Saddam, the Western media kept silent about what was happening in the country, self-censoring the news to remain in the tyrant's good graces. Now the press can report what it sees (and much that it doesn't). Hence, life is better for the Iraqi people but, unless one sifts the news carefully (as Arthur Chrenkoff has been doing), it sounds worse.
In the real-world scenario, the principal target of the Islamofascists is the United States. Again, it was the same when Saddam held sway. Then, however, he openly subsidized Hamas and Islamic Jihad, gave sanctuary to other terrorists (e. g., the man who manufactured the bombs that exploded in the World Trade Center in 1993) and pursued active chemical and biological weapons programs (as the Kay Report amply documented) that, whatever progress they had or hadn't made by April 2003 would in time have produced weapons of great use in terrorist attacks. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opposed ousting the Ba'athists and therefore has no obvious reason to lie, Russian intelligence agencies passed on to the U.S. evidence that Saddam was planning his own round of terror attacks against America. Whatever he planned, the invasion stopped it.
According to left-wing mythology, our attack on the Ba'athist regime generated immense anger in the Arab world, rage that has translated into a recruiting bonanza for al-Qa'eda and its blood brothers. If so, the multitude of new recruits have been singularly inert. The State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, after correcting for much publicized data errors, shows that terrorist attacks in 2003 barely inched up from the prior year, to 208 incidents from 2002's 198. Throughout the pre-9/11 years, as far back as 1970, the annual number was quite a bit higher (ranging from 274 to 440 per year under the Clinton Administration, for example).
Looking at the broader international scene, Hugh Hewitt has summarized "The War Dividend" that we reaped from Saddam's overthrow: Most significantly, Libya has abandoned its nuclear weapons program (explicitly out of fear of American action), which turns out to have been much closer to building atomic bombs than anyone suspected. Had the status quo ante continued, we might soon have been facing a nuclear-armed Colonel Qaddafi. He is still a madman, but a less lethal madman.
The perception of "failure" in Iraq derives, I think, entirely from the refusal of critics to compare the actual situation to anything except Utopia. The real world gained vastly from American action, and the gains haven't been vitiated by the need to continue fighting holdouts against liberty.
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