Andrew Coyne: Removing Saddam was no mistake
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An Iraqi boy smiles at a U.S. soldier at a checkpoint in Baghdad
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Font: * * * * Andrew Coyne, National Post
Published: Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Can there be a more attractive literary form than the mea culpa? It shows a becoming humility, and yet a serene self-confidence, a clear eye as much as an open mind. What is it to admit our mistakes, as Pope said, but to say that we are wiser now than we were before? Indeed, I'm tempted to make up some, just to be able to say the same.
Alas, unlike Jonathan Kay, I find myself unable to apply confession's healing balm. My Post colleague and fellow hawk has a spring in his step these days, free at last from that dwindling circle of die-hards in support of the Bush administration's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a policy he now says -- admits! -- was a mistake. Me, I am cursed with infallibility. And so it falls to me to defend the glittering success that is present-day Iraq.
Well, not quite. Jon's point, so far as I can tell, was not the obvious one, that whatever the Americans' success in toppling the Baathist regime, the subsequent occupation has been badly bungled -- there, I've said it -- but that the original decision to invade was wrongheaded in itself; that the whole enterprise was not just mishandled in practice, but mistaken in principle -- as Jon writes, that "it made the world a more dangerous place overall." Well now. If it was a mistake in 2003, presumably it would also have been a mistake in 2004, and 2005, and 2006. That is, if it was a mistake to have removed Saddam, it would be better if he were still in power today.
If we say the world is a more dangerous place with Saddam gone, it seems to me we are obliged to give some thought to what the world would be like had Saddam remained. Fortunately, we have some inkling. The most widely accepted reconstruction of what was going on in Iraq before the invasion, based on intelligence gathered after the regime's fall, is the final report of the Iraq Survey Group, known as the Duelfer Report. This was the report that conclusively established that Saddam had no WMDs after 1991, to the administration's lasting embarrassment.
But what the report also established is that the sanctions regime to which Saddam was subject between the two Gulf wars -- the sanctions imposed by the UN over his failure to reveal how he had disposed of the WMDs he was known to possess before 1991, the sanctions that were supposed to have him "in a box" -- had all but collapsed. Much of this was owing to the infamous Oil for Food program, through which Saddam bribed international officials to look the other way as oil revenues intended to alleviate the suffering of his people were diverted into his own pocket, and thence to purchase arms and weapons technology abroad.
Moreover, as Duelfer makes clear, while Saddam had no supplies of WMDs on hand, he had not disavowed the pursuit of WMDs in future. Far from it: He intended to rebuild the programs just as soon as the last of the sanctions had withered away. And while Saddam was content to let the world believe he had WMDs, when in fact he had none, there would have been no way of knowing if he had acquired them later: the UN inspectors, recall, that were supposed to be the alternative to war were only allowed back in because of the threat of war.
All this, while oil was at $20 a barrel. Now imagine what Saddam might have done with $60 oil. Imagine his cachet with the Arab world, having stared down the UN, having seen off the sanctions, having rebuilt his military. Imagine his reaction to Iran's nuclear program -- or for that matter, Iran's reaction to his. We know that Saddam was well on his way to developing nuclear arms before the first Gulf War, or more specifically before the Israelis bombed the Osirik reactor. But why go through all that time and trouble, when today he could just buy them off the shelf from North Korea?
And now consider that we are still in the shadow of September 11. The Taliban have been toppled and, as critics of the Iraq war would have it, the Americans have kept their "focus" on Afghanistan. That doesn't mean they've caught Osama bin Laden -- the escape from Tora Bora was in 2001, long before the Iraq "distraction" -- but it may well mean he and his followers are in need of a new hideout. We know that they were in continual contact with Saddam, even if Duelfer found that this did not amount to a "relationship." Where in this world would they find a regime more willing to defy the Americans, then at the height of their power? What might they have achieved, within the shelter of a nuclear-armed Iraq?
To say that the invasion was a mistake requires us to believe that, because Saddam had not rebuilt his WMD capacity at the time, he never would. After all that has happened in the last three and a half years, is that a position that can sensibly be maintained? Fortunately, that's a mistake Jon will never have to admit.
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