A Justifiable, Necessary and Winnable War

[hist2004]

A Justifiable, Necessary and Winnable War
Clifford D. May
Scripps Howard News Service
June 02, 2004

Anti-war activists have been feeling their oats. Pro-liberation advocates have been feeling woozy. So let's get back to basics, and ask three simple questions, to remind ourselves how we got here – and to consider where we need to go.
Was the war justified? There can be no doubt about it. Before the war, the news media failed to reveal the extent of Saddam Hussein's brutality. Too many journalists cut a shameful deal with the dictator: To keep their Baghdad bureaus open and unmolested, they refrained from serious attempts to report Saddam's crimes.
Since the liberation of Iraq the broadcast media have …well, they've made no great effort to correct the record. Nevertheless, there has been enough solid print reporting for diligent readers to know that Saddam executed several hundred thousand Iraqis and buried their bodies in mass graves. We know that Saddam waged a genocidal war against the Kurds and butchered the Marsh Arabs, intentionally wrecking their fragile environment in the process.
There are videotapes of many of Saddam's vile misdeeds. He ordered them either for personal amusement or as a management tool -- to make sure the work was getting done. These tapes show Saddam's thugs hacking fingers off those suspected of disloyalty; pulling out the tongues of those who dissented; cutting off the heads of those who offended the dictator. The blood splatters, the victims scream, Saddam's killers sing Saddam's praises.
It's puzzling that the same media outlets that air – over and over -- tapes of Americans abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib do not broadcast these earlier tapes. One possible explanation: Tapes of American abusers are prurient – the women's underwear, the dog leashes, the ****s-on-****s. By contrast, the Saddam tapes are gruesome in a banal way.
But such reasoning is insufficient when you watch veteran film-maker Don North's restrained documentary entitled, “Remembering Saddam,” the story of nine innocent businessmen who had their right hands amputated at Abu Ghraib on Saddam's orders. North's film has been written about by the Wall Street Journal, and North has been interviewed on C-SPAN, but not one network -- not CBS, NBC, ABC or PBS -- has yet aired his truthful, revealing tale of real people who suffered under a brutal dictator, who suffer still, and who are grateful to Americans for freeing them from Saddam's clutches.
Was this war necessary? It is tempting to believe that – had we only left Saddam alone -- he would have confined his atrocities to Iraqis and their neighbors, that he would have spared Americans. Overwhelming evidence contradicts that view.
From the heroic statues he dedicated to himself, it was obvious that Saddam dreamed of becoming a Middle Eastern emperor. The Gulf War forced Saddam to defer that dream, to disgorge Kuwait, to dismantle his nuclear weapons program – a program that in 1991 was found to be much further along than intelligence analysts had estimated.
Saddam did not accept defeat -- he swore revenge and vowed to rise again.
In 1993, he attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait.
In 1995, his son-in-law, Kamel Hussein, defected and revealed that he had secretly resumed his research on biological Weapons of Mass Destruction. (For that, Kamel paid with his life a year later.)
In 1998, Saddam forced UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, having persistently refused to account for a list of prohibited WMD, including anthrax and sarin – the latter a deadly nerve gas, a dose of which was recently discovered in a roadside bomb in Baghdad. To this day, we don't know what happened to those WMD – which is not the same as saying Saddam didn't have them.
In a May 2001 interview with PBS, Sabah Khadada, an Iraqi military officer who had been assigned to the Salman Pak terrorist training camp south of Baghdad, said that Saddam had personally told him and his colleagues: “We have to take revenge from America. Our duty is to attack and hit American targets. …That's how Saddam was able to attract those [foreign] Arabs and Muslims who came to train, because that's exactly what they want to do.”
Among those foreign terrorists was Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, an Iraq-based associate of Osama bin Laden's who in 2002 organized the assassination of American diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman, Jordan (and a few weeks ago severed the head of American Nick Berg).
Little by little, new evidence has been coming to light of an extensive web of Saddam-bin Laden ties. The best effort to untangle that web is Stephen F. Hayes' new book: “The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America.”
This war was necessary -- Saddam was not a hornet that would have stayed in his nest but for President Bush shaking it.
Is this war winnable? Militarily, the US is doing better than many realize. Difficult, dangerous and dirty as a conflict with combatants disguised as civilians is, American forces are learning how to win it.
Liberating Iraq was easier than most experts expected. Occupying Iraq has been harder and more deadly than most anticipated. The third phase, just beginning, is unlikely to be a cakewalk.
Zarkawi, Saddam loyalists and the agents of the Iranian mullahs believe that if they can just they spill enough blood, Americans will lose their will to fight, and Iraqis will lose their dream of freedom.
Surely, we've come too far to prove them right.

Regards,
Hist2004

[Abolith]

Good Read, as always.

Danke hist2004

[SOG]

well id like to add on to that to some extent and would appreciate feedback.

1st, every side, left right and middle, has multiple reasons for why this war was started. ill name a few lumped together:

1. one of the biggest, oil.
basically according to unbiased mass scientific research, the majority of our cheap oil will be gone in 25 years. hence the emphasis on more and more hybrid vehicles. appearntly, iraq has a great amount of oil, mainly because it hasnt been as heavily tapped as opec's. they will, along with the saudis, have one of the last oil reserves for cheap oil in the world.

2. oil leads down many roads, one being, a huge multi multi million dollar contract (haliburton) to properly tap into that oil and get it to the world. also, any money pumped into iraq, we may be able to trade for oil.

3. if saddam were still in power, not only would he be controlling that oil, and probably not wanting to sell the US too much, because of thier actions against him in gulf war 1 and post gulf war.

4. also people would complain that he's such a horrible guy, but he has some of the last oil, so here we are feeding him all this money, so he can terrorize more or continue?

5. some say this is a continuation of what should have been done in the gulf war. of course if we would have done this back then, we would have still met with major resistance from media etc, claiming we worked with the un to free kuwait, that is it, we need no more. i do think the US would have recieved less flack doing it back then, but not by much.

militarily, it would have been slightly better, but not by much. people claim saddam has had time to rebuild defenses, tanks, republican gaurd, yet when we went in we steam rolled by his conventional forces once again, and are having a hard time dealing with insurgents. not only did he not have the money to rebuild his forces, aka he owed kuwait, russia, germany and france billions, and he was caught stealing his nations wealth in trucks as he turned tail and ran. he had no money to rebuild nor would any loan him more.

6. to free the people of iraq. i think thats a noble cause, but i dont think its the main quest. its a noble side bonus, but its not why were there.

7. wmd? maybe, but doubtfull. could something be found? sure. but again like the name "iraqi freedom" i think it was a case pushed too heavily by the administration as for being the cause of why we are there.

8. a subtle side tactic, change the face of the middle east, bring in all sorts of democratic features, hoping the new generations of iraqis will latch on to new lifestyles, and basically sub culturize iraq into the 21st century. doing this to a hardened middle east state would have quite a interesting effect on the middle east as a whole.

9. remove saddam, "free iraq" and basically create a competition equal to opec in the long standing future. again, iraq has a great amount of oil untapped. saddam arguably attacked kuwait over competition and money owed. by removing saddam from the equation who was not a fun guy and is proven to have had terrorist ties (from the multiple confirmed posting here alone in the past few months of evidence) we have basically created a near equal competitor to opec. everyone bitching about oil prices world wide, chinas and many other sub nations world growth and thus heavier oil usage, we now not only have a alternative to opec, but more to go around.

my personal theory:
oil, yes. we cant give money to saddam and he would likely blacklist us from oil. a very good concern.

haliburton contracts? no. it was a bonus of action, but not reason.

wmd. overplayed, overstretched. the amdinistration basically chose the wrong cover story with which to campaign. a lie? no. on the amount? yes. im sure theyll find wmd here and there, proabably nothing in the amounts claimed.

to free iraq? nah, its a bonus objective.

sole reason? probably to free up the oil market, provide a competitor to opec since iraq will have some of the last oil, and to make sure we arent starved of oil by saddam for kicking him out of kuwait for the debt he owed the kuwaiti's, and him trying to destroy thier business to put himself ahead in his oil distribution and contract.

simply put, he hates us, and hes sitting on one of the last major oil reserves. in the self interest of our nation and people removing him promises a stronger future into the transition of alternative fuel based technology.

so is this war bad? personally i dont think it is. i think we needed to wait and build our readiness via many generals advice, and i think we should have attempted this after afghanistan. two wars at once=bad, period.

but do i think leveraging the world oil market, creating competition to a monopoly who abuses thier lead at will (opec), and removing a madman with a sadistic past so he does not get the entire worlds money for his oppressive whims, continue starving his people whilst killing others, is a decent cause, not only in self interest but world interest.

will we win? with more and more insurgents dead every day, with more weapons being taken away and destroyed every day, with more iraqi police and military flooding the streets everyday, with more and more facilties and construction and repair being done everyday, despite none of this getting major coverage or focus, there is a good chance if we stay the course we may yet win.

[Sir Zach of R.]

Let's make an example of a few captured terrorists. First, cover them in pigs' blood. Second, inject them with pigs' blood. Third, shoot them. And I'm goddamn serious too. If it worked for Blackjack Pershing, it'll work now.