Posted by
Wil on Monday, September 22, 2008 5:52:36 PM
This post is in response to a comment by Caday5 on my last post. I know as I have read elsewhere that I shouldn't "feed the troll", but I can't help myself. I may not have much time to argue on this one, but anyone else feel free:
In 1990, when we went through the whole UN system to force Iraq out of Kuwait, we had multiple allies around the world, and a UN mandate to do so. Part of the ending of that war was that our mandate did not extend to regime change in Iraq, simply to a removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. So despite the fact that our troops were in Baghdad and there was no organized resistance to them, we stopped, and soon after left Iraq.
What did Saddam do in response? He shouted defiance from the moment we left. He went after elements in his own nation that rose against him and killed thousands of them, so we instituted no fly zones. He repeatedly shot at the planes we sent to enforce those zones. We were doing so at UN request, yet the UN did nothing in response. I was an Arabic linguist. I know of several missions he shot at just when I was working. Again, the UN did nothing. In all, he flouted 14 or more resolutions from the precious UN and they did nothing. Why? Because several of them were involved in an oil for food scandal making millions from it. Others were afraid of retaliation. For 12 years, our planes were shot at and our resolutions ignored and people thought it wasn't worth fighting back. We allowed him to be defiant with no personal responsibility for 12 long years. His people suffered though, through years of sanctions and limited trade, they suffered greatly. But none of that reached the ruling circles. So you tell me, is warfare worse than containment? Ask someone who has lived in a regime being contained. War is brutal but war has an end, containment does not.
Al Qaida formed as a response to American presence in Saudi Arabia, they had no love for Saddam or the Ba'ath party. They first went after governments like the Saudis who allowed us to have troops there, then when capable began to go after us. In 2000, 17 sailors died on the USS Cole, before the Iraq war. They died in port in Aden, Yemen because Al Qaida wanted us out of Saudi Arabia. As long as the UN wanted the no fly zones maintained to protect the Shi'ites and Kurds, we had to stay in Saudi Arabia. Unless we decided not to live up to our UN obligations, we would keep offending them.
9/11 changed our perspective. We had to deal with Al Qaida, they had shown us what they were capable of. And we had to deal with Iraq because our containment of them was a recruiting tool of Al Qaida. We had 4 choices:
1) Walk away, let Saddam continue to rule, watch him brutalize his own people when the no fly zones went away, let him restart weapons programs and threaten his neighbors, and let him use oil profits to undermine us as we fought in Afghanistan.
2) Level the place. Carpet bomb Baghdad, all military bases, all centers of control, and let them pick up the pieces. Do the same to Afghanistan and let the chips fall where they may as we come back home. Think the UN would like that better?
3) Attempt to maintain the status quo in Iraq while fighting in Afghanistan. The problem was we had thousands of troops in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, enforcing all these UN mandates, and they were being undercut right and left. How well would the alliance remain if we were fighting in Afghanistan against other Moslems?
4) Deal with Iraq while dealing with Al Qaida in Afghanistan. Messy, difficult, and in fact, mandated by the UN when Colin Powell took his intel to the UN. The idea that we went in without a UN mandate is not true. It was after we went in that they changed their mind. This was the toughest but most noble of choices.
Like Korea, Vietnam, WW1, and every recent war in our history, except WW2 and Afghanistan, this was a war of choice. We chose to fight what appeared to be an imminent threat to our ability to succeed against Al Qaida. The idea that Iraq was a first is wrong.
1) We fought against Spain in 1898 in a war brought about because we sent a ship to monitor a nearby colony where conditions were horrible and refugees were entering America by the thousand. When that ship was blown up, we assumed who did it and declared war. Winning the Spanish American war was the end of over 60 years of isolationism.
2) We fought in WW1 in a war between Germany and Britain mostly because Germany kept sinking our shipping. We could have stayed out, but we saw a difference between the two sides in what was really none of our business.
3) We fought the Germans in WW2 because they declared war on us. Only Japan attacked us.
4) We fought Korea and Vietnam under the Truman Doctrine, the idea that Communism was expansionist by nature and that we had to stop its expansion into the third world. Sometimes we stopped it by propping up anti communist dictators, (like Zia in Pakistan and the Shah in Iran) other times we stopped it through proxies (like the Contras in Niceragua) and a few times we stopped it with our own troops. UN mandates were used some of the time, but this was really a US strategy and others could accept it or fight it.
In fact, none of these wars were after an attack (except Pearl Harbor and 9/11 leading to Japan and Afghanistan), and the idea that there is some nebulous UN playbook that all the world follows is a joke.
So Iraq was not a simple "cowboy" response of an evil america, it was a decision made like all wars are with good intent but with a real case being possible to make against it. Did it lead to Russia invading Georgia? Lets look at facts:
1) Putin has said repeatedly that it was Kosovo that fueled resurgent Russian nationalism, not Iraq. When Kosovo was carved from the nation of Serbia, the fear in Russian circles was that Russia itself could easily be carved up this way. Chechnya, a muslim enclave, had been clamoring for independence and Russia brutally put down the insurrection. But Kosovo paved a pathway for Chechnyan independence. Putin and others decided to use the Kosovo model for Russia. Russia had enveloped these states into the Soviet Union by planting Russians in them during the 1910's and 20's. Now it uses these people as a pretext, a reason to go in and rescue an oppressed minority. Georgia is just one of the former Soviet states with Russian minorities from this source.
2) Russia has bitterly accepted that it lost the Cold War because its economy could not sustain its military. Now it sees that its oil wealth has invigorated it economically and Europes total dependence on Russian oil has given it a political tool it lacked in the past. It sees a chance to regain superpower status. It sees that now is its chance to reassert its strength, before a Georgian pipeline, a free Iraq, American drilling, and a safe gulf region reduce Russian profits on oil.
3) Russian leaders want the perks of economic ties without the constraints of political ties. Like China, with a vibrant economy but a repressive regime, Russian leaders, hope to be the same.
Ultimately, none of these factors relate to US actions in Iraq except that some of the World is so angry at us, that they will support any opposition we face. Whether we were in Iraq or not, this was coming. The only way to stop it was to make Georgia too tough to invade or to make the consequences too severe to face, or to see a change in Russian leadership. The third is our best hope, but for that, we rely on the Russian people and their election decisions.