The Battle of Iraq

The key to understanding the reasoning behind the Iraq War is: It wasn't really a war at all. It was a battle, in a larger war, the War on Terror. Everyone knows why we're fighting that war. We should have been fighting it decades ago, but September 11 woke us up to the fact that terrorism is a danger that needs to be confronted, something we really didn't want to believe before that day.

In war, you have a strategic goal, and you pick your battles to maximize your chance of achieving that goal. Any particular battle or operation — e.g. the invasion of a city — has a million unique and independent justifications for it, and a million reasons why it might not be a good idea. The trick is to weigh all those factors and make a judgment call about whether the likely rewards outweigh the risks. Not all the justifications will be consistent, and sometimes it will seem as if the proponents of a particular operation are jumping from justification to justification without any real coherency. For any particular operation within a war, there often won't be one raison d'être, the way there is with the war itself.

The War on Terror has a clearly defined raison d'être: destroy the infrastructure of terrorism. But to do that, we need to perform many tasks simultaneously: we need to wage war on terrorist organizations, cut off their funding, annihilate their camps, kill their members. We also need to limit the proliferation of terrible weapons and the tools to make them into the hands of people who care little about who are targeted with those weapons. Just as important, we need to reform the culture of the repressed societies which breed terrorism, especially — but not solely — in fundamentalist Islamic countries (which right now constitute the core of terrorist culture). We need to bring freedom and tolerance to all corners of the globe, so that populations are not susceptible to the manipulation of their governments or the propaganda of terrorist extremists.

The Battle of Iraq is the perfect example of an operation which worked towards all of those aims, but for which no one of them was the primary justification. In overturning the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, and replacing it with a liberal democracy, we will be elimininating the funding of Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel and eliminating the haven Iraq was giving to terrorists who had no other place to go. We have prevented a government which has in the past shown no concern for the lives of innocent people from ever possessing weapons of mass destruction, and either using them as blackmail, or selling them to terrorists who simply want to use them for slaughter. Finally, we'll be opening up a police state to the free trade of goods and the free trade of ideas. The Iraqis — relatively well-educated and wealthy by the standards of the region — will, with our help, create a free society, like the Germans and Japanese after World War II, and become a model for the rest of the Arab world, who will hopefully push for reforms in their own countries as well.

There were risks too. Innocent Americans, British, and Iraqis would die, and maybe in large numbers if Iraq used chemical or biological weapons, or if the urban fighting got dirty. But the number of people who would die as a result of the war would pale in comparison to the number of people who are murdered — or otherwise die — every month by the policies of the Ba'athist regime. During the war and in the months following it, resentment of America by Arabs in countries other than Iraq might increase, and we might suffer an increase in terrorist attacks. But it is better to confront an enemy now, than to allow it to grow stronger and let it confront you on its own terms, later.

Don't forget the monetary price tag of the war. Hard to measure, but certainly in excess of $100 billion. But what has been the damage of September 11? If one event like September 11 is prevented, it will have been worth the cost many times over. And what of the cost of a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack on a U.S. city? I hope we never find out.

Then there were the questions of "If Iraq, why not X?" Why not North Korea? After all, they've announced their intention to build nuclear weapons. Why not Saudi Arabia? The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis, and the Saudi family funnels money to terrorists. Why not Libya, Lebanon, Iran, or Syria? You can't really give a deeply principled answer to those questions, because in many cases the situation is similar to Iraq in many ways. Again, it comes down to a judgment call. We have limited resources, and we have to look at our options and decide the best way to expend those resources. We are oil-dependent on Saudi Arabia, so attacking them would have wrecked havoc on our economy, and, even though they are covertly aiding our enemy, they are overtly our allies. At least, they are our allies in the same sense that Stalin was our ally against Hitler — temporary allies of convenience, but allies nonetheless.

At the end of the day, someone has to make the decision about where, when, and if military force is necessary, and Iraq was certainly a reasonable decision, and one I happen to think was the right one. The important thing to realize, here, is that the invasion of Iraq was a battle, not a war, and our thinking about its justification must be appropriate to that fact. With that in mind, there can be no question that the invasion was morally justified, and so far the decision's effect on progress in the War on Terror seems to be extremely positive, though we won't know for sure for years, if not decades.

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