Robert Kagan on Whether or Not We Should Have Waged War in Iraq

Robert Kagan has written an excellent column for The Washington Post in response to the current understandable hand-wringing about the war in Iraq.

Kagan asks an obvious question: What might have happened if we had not invaded Iraq? Here's his extended answer to that question:

To assess whether the Iraq war was worth it requires seriously posing the question: What would have happened if the Bush administration had not gone to war in March 2003? That is a missing but essential piece of the current very legitimate debate. We all know what has gone wrong since the Iraq war began, but it is not as if, in the absence of a war, everything would have gone right. Those who want to have this debate cannot simply point to the terrible toll in casualties. They have to address the question of what the alternative to war really would have meant.

There is not much dispute about what kind of leader Saddam Hussein was. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright once compared him to Hitler, and the comparison was apt in a couple of ways. Hussein, as we will soon relearn in excruciating detail, had contempt for human life and no qualms about killing thousands of his own citizens and many thousands more of his neighbors' citizens, about torturing women and children and about using any type of weapon he could buy or manufacture to burn, poison, infect and incinerate political opponents and even entire populations, so long as they were too weak to fight back. This alone placed him in a special class of historical figures, a not irrelevant factor in determining whether his removal, even at the present cost, was worth it. Was it not worth at least some sacrifice to remove such a man from power?

A more intriguing question is whether a decision not to go to war in 2003 would have produced lasting peace or would only have delayed war until a later date -- as in the 1930s. There is a strong argument to be made that Hussein would have pushed toward confrontation and war at some point, no matter what we did. His Hitler-like megalomania does not seem to be in question. He patiently, brutally pushed his way to power in Iraq, then set about brutally and impatiently making himself the dominant figure in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, using war and the threat of war as his principal tools. In the early 1980s he invaded Iran and fought it to a bloody standstill for the better part of a decade. No sooner had that war ended than he invaded Kuwait. He fancied himself the new Saladin, much as Napoleon and Hitler had fancied themselves the new Caesar.

Many argue that, even if all this is true, Hussein was nevertheless contained through sanctions and no-fly zones and therefore could be deterred. Many advanced this argument before the war, too, even when they believed with as much certainty as the Bush administration that Hussein did have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. And, indeed, although for most Americans the question of whether the war was "worth it" revolves around the failure to discover the stockpiles that most believed he had, nevertheless the key issue, I believe, remains the same as before that failure: whether Hussein could have been contained.

For another fact not in dispute is that Hussein remained keenly interested in and committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, that he maintained secretive weapons programs throughout the 1990s and indeed right up until the day of the invasion, and that he was only waiting for the international community to lose interest or stamina so that he could resume his programs unfettered. This is the well-documented, unrefuted -- and unnoticed -- conclusion of both David Kay and Charles Duelfer. Whether Hussein would have eventually succeeded in acquiring these weapons would have depended on other nations' will and ability to stop him.

That is a question to which we will never have a definitive answer, and yet it is critical to any judgment about the merits of the war. The most sensible argument for the invasion was not that Hussein was about to strike the United States or anyone else with a nuclear bomb. It was that containment could not be preserved indefinitely, that Hussein was repeatedly defying the international community and that his defiance appeared to both the Clinton and Bush administrations to be gradually succeeding. He was driving a wedge between the United States and Britain, on one side, which wanted to maintain sanctions and containment, and France, Russia, and China, on the other, which wanted to drop sanctions and normalize relations with him. The main concern of senior officials in both administrations was that, in the words of then-national security adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger, containment was not "sustainable over the long run." The pattern of the 1990s, "Iraqi defiance, followed by force mobilization on our part, followed by Iraqi capitulation," had left "the international community vulnerable to manipulation by Saddam." The longer the standoff continued, Berger warned in 1998, "the harder it will be to maintain" international support for containing Hussein. Nor did Clinton officials doubt what Hussein would do if and when containment collapsed. As Berger put it, "Saddam's history of aggression, and his recent record of deception and defiance, leave no doubt that he would resume his drive for regional domination if he had the chance." Nor should we assume that, even if the United States and others had remained vigilant, Hussein could have been deterred from doing something to provoke a conflict. Tragic miscalculation was Hussein's specialty, after all, as his invasions of Iran and Kuwait proved.

It is entirely possible, in short, that if the Bush administration had not gone to war in 2003, the United States might have faced a more dangerous and daring Saddam Hussein later on and felt compelled to act. So, in addition to whatever price might have been paid, certainly by the Iraqi people and possibly by Iraq's neighbors, for leaving Saddam in power, we might have wound up going to war anyway. There is the further question of what the entire Middle East would have looked like with a defiant, increasingly liberated Hussein still in power. To quote Berger again, so long as Hussein remained "in power and in confrontation with the world," Iraq would remain "a source of potential conflict in the region," and, perhaps more important, "a source of inspiration for those who equate violence with power and compromise with surrender." Whether historians judge the war favorably will depend heavily on whether post-Hussein Iraq does indeed provide a different sort of inspiration, but, again, the effort to change the direction of the region was surely worth paying some price.

This may be no solace to those who have lost loved ones in this war -- and it certainly does not absolve the Bush administration from the errors that it made before and after the war and continues to make today. But these are the kinds of considerations that ought to be part of any serious debate over whether the war in Iraq was "worth it."

I don't know about you, but the thought that Saddam Hussein would bequeath Iraq to his two sons, who seemed even more vicious than their father, if perhaps not as megalomaniacal, was greatly disturbing to me. You probably felt the same. We had no reason to believe that future dealings with Iraq would be any better than those in the past as long as the Hussein family was still in charge. Allowing the country to remain in the hands of such people was unwise.

If you look over to the right-hand column of this blog, you can't help noticing that I'm a frequent critic of the Bush administration. Despite my readiness to believe that the Bushies are willing to lie about anything in order to advance their agenda, I don't believe that their pre-invasion talk of Saddam Hussein's WMDs and ties to al Qaeda consisted of flat-out lies. That is, I don't believe that the Bushies knew that there were no WMDs and that Hussein's regime had no significant ties to al Qaeda, and thus that they conjured up these tales in order to invent a rationale for invading Iraq. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Bushies thought that they knew better than the experts — who, by the way, were hardly unanimous in their rejection of the claims being made by the Bush administration — and thus they fell for their own tall tales. In the case of justifying the invasion of Iraq, their sin was intellectual pride, not mendacity. (But that's not to say that a lot of mendacity hasn't played its part in administration statements about other aspects of the war in Iraq.)

The post-invasion occupation was obviously never going to be a picnic, but, once again, the Bushies fell for their own propaganda. (Let's not rehash the Chalabi nonsense.) Wishful thinking was responsible for the rosy post-invasion pipe dream that the Bush administration tried to sell to the American people — successfully, it seems, I should add — before the war began. The deep disllusion expressed in the latest polls about Iraq is precisely that — disillusion. That's how people feel after they realize that they've been hoodwinked by someone they trusted. In this case, though, the deceiver was self-deceived.

Kagan's column nicely catalogues the many ways in which the world is better off without Saddam Hussein's regime. They're justification enough for overthrowing his regime. Not to invade the country would have been to condemn the Iraqi people to permanent residence in the Hussein torture chamber. For that reason alone the invasion was truly humanitarian in its outcome. The war may have been grounded on falsehoods, but that just means, as Jonathan Rauch once argued, that the war in Iraq was the right mistake.