While the other day we had the three year anniversary of the start of Covid Lockdown insanity in America, there’s also a twenty year anniversary of another huge event – the start of the Invasion of Iraq.

Some might argue that it is even bigger in terms of global impact than Covid-19, and it certainly seemed huge at the time, but in hindsight I don’t think it can compare, whether in terms of deaths, restrictions on our civil liberties or the global aftermath.

Okay, I have to admit – once again – that I supported it.

I don’t suppose there’s much purpose in digging up the layers of reasoning now, but all I can say is that, while I thought it was a waste of time to try and build Afghanistan into a liberal democracy, I figured Iraq was worth a shot and might steer the rest of the ME in that direction. They already had a massive public sector backed by oil. Get rid of Saddam and his Secret Police and something good might emerge.

Besides that I’d hated Saddam Hussein since the early 1980’s (“It’s a pity both sides can’t lose”) and wanted him and his shit police state gone asap. I was angry that the Gulf War did not wipe him out, especially as the world merely sat by afterwards watching him crush the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds (in addition to what he’d done to them in the 1980’s). However, I grudgingly acknowledged the RealPolitik of the day, no better articulated than by Dick Cheney in 1994 in direct response to that question.

He states that America would have been there effectively all alone. It would have been an occupation. It’s a volatile part of the world and when the central government was destroyed what would take its place? He talks about the potential of Iraq flying apart, with subsequent threats to Turkey from a Kurdish nation, of Syria perhaps grabbing a chunk of the country. He talks about how the conflict would degenerate into urban warfare, the additional dead Americans and the judgment that Saddam was just not worth it. In another interview a couple of years later, in response to the same question, he even mentions the word “quagmire”.

Sound familiar?

I always very much enjoyed all the Lefties condemnation of Cheney’s reasons in 1994, as being nothing more than apologetics for not getting rid of a “US ally” (95% of whose weapons were Soviet) – only to then turning them into great moral reasons for not invading Iraq in 2003. In 1991 Realpolitik that left Saddam in place was repulsive but in 2003 it was a solid moral rationale. Cheney of course had also done a 180 on all this, but he never claimed the moral high ground that the Left always do, merely grim pragmatism.

On that front, one thing the Left steadfastly ignored, or even denied, was that Bush II’s approach was a complete overthrow of the previous one of allowing or actively supporting thugs to stay in power in the name of stability during the Cold War. This had been a centrepiece of Leftist criticism of the USA for decades. The following early 1990’s comment on US and British decision makers by Dr Eric Herring (University of Bristol) is a good example:

They have no desire for the Shiite majority to take control or for the Kurds to achieve independence. Their policy is to keep them strong enough to cause trouble for Saddam Hussein while ensuring that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to keep repressing them. This is not a new policy. It is a direct descendant of British imperial policy from World War One onwards. Britain controlled Iraqi oil wealth through Sunni minority monarchs who put down rebellions by the Kurdish minority and the Shiite majority. When those Sunni minority monarchs became too nationalist and too powerful, Britain fuelled Kurdish and Shiite opposition just far enough to rein in the monarch but not far enough for the opposition to actually win. Divide and rule was, and is, the policy.

On the Right it was acknowledged as a massive change by those opponents, the Buchanan’s and Scowcrofts of this world, the forerunners of Trump. The reasons and arguments for it were acknowledged as a big change too. Building democracies? What airy-fairy crap was that? They did not claim that Bush was lying, merely that he was wrong and that the Liberal Internationalists – now called neo-conservatives – who’d abandoned the Democrats, should bugger off back to them. It would take Trump to make that happen, which is why you find so many supporters of the Iraq Invasion, starting with Bill Kristol, in the Never-Trumper camp today.

And the Bush II approach had some unexpected Lefty allies, most famously Christopher Hitchens, even if they were uncomfortable about that. Or how about the well-known US Middle Eastern expert (and harsh US critic), Juan Cole:

“I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides. The rest of us have a responsibility to work to see that the lives lost are redeemed by the building of a genuinely democratic and independent Iraq in the coming years.“

Even the attacks on Bush’s WMD claims required some serious memory-holing. Bush and others have long since admitted that when WMD’s were not found it destroyed his credibility and that of the war effort, but I’ve never accepted the crude argument that he and the CIA lied, especially when they weren’t the only people worried about Saddam’s WMD’s. In December 2001 the BBC’s famous interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, produced an updated copy of his early 1990’s book, A Higher Form of Killing, which was about Chemical and Biological weapons in the post-Cold War age. He added an 11th chapter, all about Saddam:

If this analysis is correct, then Saddam Hussein’s current determination to preserve his arsenal of poisons becomes much more understandable. CBW may already have saved his regime twice–first, in the 1980s, in his war against the numerically superior Iranians; second, in the 1990s, in his war against the numerically superior Western coalition. Why not a third time?

The unsettling truth is that much of Iraq’s CBW arsenal remains intact. “In Desert Storm,” according to General Charles Horner, U.S. air commander during the Gulf War, “Saddam Hussein had more chemical weapons than I could bomb. . . .* I could not have begun to take out all of his chemical storage–there are just not enough sorties in the day.” Not one of Iraq’s chemical and biological missile warheads was destroyed by coalition bombing.

After the war, the U.N. weapons inspectors’ attempts even to locate, let alone eradicate, Saddam’s stockpiles of gas and germs, were consistently frustrated, and finally ended in August 1998 when Iraq withdrew all cooperation from the U.N. team. Since then, it may be regarded as almost certain that Iraq has continued to develop CBW, possibly even to the extent of experimenting on prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Just three years later, in late 2004, Paxman would produce a program called The Power of Nightmares to argue that it had all been made up. As that previous linked article points out about the stunning hypocrisy of Paxman and the BBC:

In late 2001, when Harris and Paxman were apparently doing most of their writing, to August 2002, when the book was published, the notion that Saddam Hussein had kept his stockpiles of WMDs and was an immediate threat was not yet an argument in America’s and George W. Bush’s interest; it was still, at that point, an argument with which to indict the West.

Of course. Paxman and the BBC have a bit of their own “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” going on. And of course that included the Democrat Party, with the current President very much in the lead:

So it goes. The latest piece by John Minto over at the Daily Blog looking back at this anniversary argues that Bush, Blair and John Howard are war criminals, but in an almost throwaway fashion, also pulls this myth out of even earlier history:

It’s also worth remembering the estimated one million Iraqi children who died because US sanctions on Iraq through the 1990s deprived them of medical support. When challenged later about this former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the price in Iraqi children’s lives was “worth it”.

A million now is it? I’d always seen it quoted as half-a-million, but I guess once the basic lie is established one may as well boost the number. Better throw Bill Clinton on that War Criminal pile too.

This nonsense served the anti-American left very well in the 1990’s. One of Minto’s all-time favourites, good old Wobbly, John Pilger, pushed this argument relentlessly – when not even they imagined that a US President would actually use military force to overthrow a guy seen as their “pet thug”. It had three sources.

The first was from 1995, when the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) gave officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Health a questionnaire on child mortality and asked them to conduct a survey in the capital city of Baghdad. On the basis of this five-day, 693-household, Iraq-controlled study, the FAO announced in November that “child mortality had increased nearly five fold” since the pre-sanctions era. Richard Garfield, a public health specialist at Columbia University, (and a critic of the sanctions and embargos) wrote in his own comprehensive 1999 survey of under-5 deaths in Iraq:

“The 1995 study’s conclusions were subsequently withdrawn by the authors….Notwithstanding the retraction of the original data, their estimate of more than 500,000 excess child deaths due to the embargo is still often repeated by sanctions critics.”

Then, in 1996, the World Health Organization (WHO) published its own report on the humanitarian crisis. It reprinted figures — provided solely by the Iraqi Ministry of Health — showing that a total of 186,000 children under the age of 5 died between 1990 and 1994 in the 15 Saddam-governed provinces. According to these government figures, the number of deaths jumped nearly 500 percent, from 8,903 in 1990 to 52,905 in 1994.

But then the fun really started. Based on these two reports — a five-day study in Baghdad showing a “five fold” increase in child deaths and a Ministry of Health claim that a total of 186,000 children under 5 had died from all causes between 1990 and 1994 — a New York-based advocacy group called the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) concluded in a May 1996 survey that:

“these mortality rates translate into a figure of over half a million excess child deaths as a result of sanctions.”

Impressive. CESR not only doubled the Iraqi government’s highest number and attributed all the deaths to the embargo, but they also came up with a very creative comparison that I’m sure you’ve chewed over many times:

“In simple terms, more Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions than the combined toll of two atomic bombs on Japan.”

Finally, UNICEF arrived at the same figure in a 1999 report that took the Iraq infant and child mortality reduction trend-lines of the early 1980’s, calculated (e.g. guesstimated) what they should have been in the 1990s, and then noted the difference. Very sophisticated extrapolation. But even they got pissed off later with the way the claim was being used, to the extent that they began issuing regular press releases stating that:

“The surveys were never intended to provide an absolute figure of how many children have died in Iraq as a result of sanctions [rather they] “show that if the substantial reductions in child mortality in Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s — in other words if there hadn’t been two wars, if sanctions hadn’t been introduced and if investment in social services had been maintained — there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths of children under five.”

Good enough though for Far Left propagandists to repeat and embellish three decades later. And as far as Madeleine Albright’s “admission” is concerned, if she was willing to take the reporter’s question and “facts” at face value it amounts to the same thing as a person admitting to the cops that he’s been smoking MJ when it later turns out to be Oregano. That makes the person an idiot, but not a criminal.

Sadly that sums up much our ruling class, whether dealing with disasters like Iraq, Afghanistan or C-19. The people of Iraq likely have no regrets at Saddam’s destruction, although I’m sure they question the price they paid. Would it have been worse for them at his hands had the invasion never happened? Probably; fewer deaths perhaps but more pain and suffering over a longer period of time.

For Americans of both Left and Right persuasion there’s no doubt it wasn’t worth it.