If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened.
By Christopher Hitchens
"The most heartening single image of the past month—eclipsing even the bravery and dignity of the civilian fighters against despotism in Syria and Libya—was the sight of Hoshyar Zebari arriving in Paris to call for strong action against the depraved regime of Col. Muammar Qaddafi."
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31 comments:
Rockin' article!!
Thank you for the recommendation, I will try to find the book. On the delay of the intervention in Libya, I shared the frustration expressed by CH in his articles of 25th February, 7th and 14th March.
I take your point but I hope you won't mind terribly if I say that in both your cases I hope we won't have need to "celebrate" for quite some time, if at all. Tonight I'll raise a glass to the hope that both you and Hitch beat this.
Seriously!!!It's just as ridiculous a position to hold as saying that America CAUSED the holocaust in WW2 simply because we forced Hitler to accelerate his "gravely needed" Final Solution because we were finally building up the military pressure on him by the end of the war.It's pure sadomasochism plain and simple.
I can't and won't deny that there was no civil war before the US came into Iraq in 2003, and obviously I agree that the ingredients were already there. Whether or not a civil war would have erupted without the US coming back is uncertain, but I think it's a good bet that massive violence and the prolific use of rape and torture by the regime would still be occuring.
The no-fly zone would still be the only thing standing in the way of more genocide, and the sanctions would still be the only thing staving off Saddam's acquisition of WMDs. (If you haven't read "The Bomb in my Garden" by Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's top nuclear physicist, I highly recommend it.) And with Qusay Hussein gaining more power by the day toward the end of the regime, who knows what kind of war would have happened when Saddam died? So your points about Iraq being a country with "a lot of human misery, and largely dysfunctional" would still be present if Iraq was still under the control of sadists that, again, we are complicit in delivering to the country; they are certainly not conditions that are present just because we decided to topple Saddam. The difference is that we would have continued to ignore our responsibility to the citizens there, and Kurdistan, at least, is a hell of a lot better off now.
Honestly, I'm puzzled by your harping on how long it took a coalition to act on Libya. I would have liked to see action sooner, but 31 days is rapid compared to previous interventions, so I can't accept the notion that other leaders would have plunged in if it weren't for the Americans.
It is obvious that all the ingredients for a civil war were there before the arrival of the Americans. Iraq is an artificial country in the first place. But you can’t deny that before the US invasion there was no civil war, and with the invasion the civil war started. It is a fact. Would Iraq have plunged in a civil war anyway, also without foreign intervention? Possibly, but we’ll never know. All we have in front of our eyes is the mess that resulted from the said intervention: a lot of human misery, and a country which is still largely dysfunctional (7th on the failed States list, 4th for corruption, people still dying in daily terrorist attacks…). And in my opinion this mess made the International community less enthusiastic in intervening in the case of Libya. It took nearly one month to implement a no fly zone, a time that Kadhafi used to consolidate his position. On the other side, the argument that Iraq under Saddam would have been in a position to stop the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia doesn’t make sense. Saudi Arabia was against these revolutions and couldn’t do anything to stop them, and not for a lack of will: where it could do something, i.e. Bahrain, it did. The article of CH seems to me an exercise of wishful thinking in order to seek vindication for a policy he advocated and that didn’t go the right way.
I'm fed up with this silliness about the US unleashed a civil war in Iraq. You don't think the retardation of civilization and any form of real progress by Saddam had anything to do with it? Saddam constantly flooded the newspapers in Shiite areas with anti-Sunni propaganda, and vice versa. His divide and rule methods and his never-ending oppression and humiliation of the Iraqi citizens unleashed the civil war, not the fact that the US finally took care of their responsibility. If you want to blame the US for the civil war, do so because they should have taken care of Saddam a long time ago and allowed the country to decay.
I don't think you're very clear on what that big word means, mate. The entire point of my post was that your contention was fatuous and not deserving of any seriousness. But since you insist, what did you want me to address? I think it's silly to suggest that sewing people together or injecting them with acid contributed to the body of medical knowledge we have today. My mistake for assuming that would be known by a person such as yourself, champ. By the way, sentences are usually ended with only one period.
occidental status quo has become a cat chasing its own tail. we cry out about WMDs and those who take national or tribal pride in them, anointing international agencies with a collective moral authority to swoop in and disarm... but we're the ones who furnish the technology, the funding apparatus, the means of manufacture, and thru foreign policy, either directly or in hubris, enable the mad to power.
France was opposed to the Iraq Intervention for the exact same reason Germany was opposed to the Libyan Intervention.Business Deals.France is only now intervening in Libya because the Right Winger in office over there now wants to preserve his manhood that was obviously shrunken as a result of Gadhafi massacring civilians all the while he was trying to put a good diplomatic face on for him.Sarcozy may be doing good in Libya NOW,but remember this is the man who exploited chauvinist anti gypsy sentiment for the sake of votes...........
Oh and to think that our POLICY of Iraqi intervention "Opened up" a pandora's box in Iraq is wholly ridiculous.The blame lies on the Baathists,Caliphatists,and Iranian 5th columnists for the violence,not us.As you admit it was our surge of forces and COIN strategies that finally turned the tide of the war and following the corollary of this,if only certain mental defectives *cough Rumsfeld and George Casey Jr.cough* had opted to apply COIN directives and *gasp* Nation Building strategies from the start we more than likely would have won the war years ago.
And your "Iranian influence" idea is a common myth.It's actually a poor Iraqi joke that whenever an American goes to Iraq the first thing he always asks a local is "Wow you guys are really Iranian now huh?" and whenever an Iranian goes to Iraq and talks to the exact same local he always asks" Wow you guys are really American now huh?".At the end of the day you have to realize that despite what the Glenn Beck Pat Buchanan types say,Shiite Arabs are never going to be proxies for the Persian Jursiprudent residing in Qom.It's just not going to happen and this is why Al Sadr's party always has to parasite off larger coalitions all the time just to survive.And remember who's the one who has tens of thousands of troops in country and who's going to keep them there(open secret) the Iraqi Government!!!My point?Don't worry yourself about Iraq it'll be fine;)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110329/ap_on_re_us/us_iraq_ambassador_2
Ad hominem argument. Not that expected any better.....
one of the disasters of the unharnessed comparative psyche is the ease with which it can make arguments in support of just about anything... CH can claim vindication of his 2003 position without having to address any counterfactuals. thusly, this piece strikes a rather fatuous note for all the late term self-justification masquerading as telling-it-like-it-is journalism.
Sorry, the first article of CH calling for intervention in Libya is of 25th February.
I agree that if Khadafi had WMD everything would be more difficult. That was certainly a positive impact of the war in Iraq, and CH is right on this point.
And that's why(if we be frank with ourselves) we should realize we need to have military interventions in these other countries in question as well while these nuclear programs remain PROGRAMS.For the world's sake as well as our own.
The country that mostly insisted on the intervention in Libya and that launched the first attack on Khadafi’s forces is France. You may recall France opposed the war in Iraq. Sarkozy had to insist for more than one week before Pres. Obama finally accepted the idea of the intervention. Now, the same Pres. Obama has insisted more than once that this is not a new Iraq: clearly there are bad memories. The intervention of the USA in Iraq liberated it from a horrible dictator but plunged the country in a civil war and transformed it in a swamp where terrorist groups have been able to fester for years, before the surge cleaned up some of the mess. Now the country is in the hands of a pro – Iranian Prime Minister. Hardly a success story.
Just read the declarations of Pres. Obama insisting on how Libya is not a new Iraq: somebody does have bad memories. It is a fact that the international community intervened later than it could have. The deputy permanent representative of Libya to the UN, who is on the rebels’ side, called for a no fly zone on the 21st February, the first article of CH calling for intervention in Libya was from the 7th March, the Arab League asked for the no fly zone on the 12th March. The intervention started on the 19th, when the rebels were already in a bad fix. Please try to be civilized.
Not only did you break Godwin's Law in 10 words or less (I guess they have an express lane for stupidity to move along quickly), you don't even know what the fuck you're talking about.
I hope you feel better whatever you are going through. Remember, if you believe you can beat it your brain can do remarkable and miraculous things. Beat this!!
What a truly ignorant comment and the stretch some go to try to discredit the wars and more generally the Bush administration.
BRAVO!!! What I have been saying all along! Glad to see Hitch writing again (of course goes without mention); but the uprisings whether a subconscious/unconscious thing (as many Arabs still don't like Bush) def. would not happened without a free Iraq. Saddam leaving not only scared Ghaddafi to give up his nuclear program (making him look weak to his people for the 1st time in their lives) but gave the Arabs (I don't speak for Arabs BTW I am Iranian which is not Arab which makes us of Indo-European origins) a chance to look at figures like Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi, and other dictators as humans and vulnerable by the masses. Some liberals and those on the left will never admit this since it shatters their ideology and world beliefs.
Go Hitch!!
At least try to support your stupid claims.
The same sick argument can be made for the Nazi medical experiments... I am sure that somehow benefited the medical community....
I thought so too, in the first two weeks. But actually, international intervention was agreed upon and brought into Libya far more swiftly than it was in Bosnia, Kosovo, or dare I say it, Rwanda. Compared against those delays and costly years of indecisiveness (or worse, decisiveness to do nothing), we were almost expeditious about Libya. I certainly agree that Iraq's current chaos is a poor advertisement for intervention, but it's also true that may not have acted so comparatively quickly to intervene if Qaddafi still possessed the chemical weapons and nuclear weapons programs he gave up after seeing Saddam fall. Those threats, if Qaddafi still possessed them, would be more likely to delay intervention than arguments about potential outcomes of intervention vs. mass murder guaranteed in its absence. Of course, it would be anachronistic to claim this as a defense for having entered Iraq in the first place, and besides, seeing what's happened to Qaddafi has strengthened other dictators' resolves to cling on to their own nuclear weapons programs as insurance against similar intervention.
Yes Lautaro,liberating 25 million Arabs and Kurds(not to mention many others) in the most important country in the middle east had absolutely nothing to do with the democratic revolutions occurring now.And then as a polemic against this idea,you're going to use the little penis syndrome of the international community as an excuse when many of the countries who dithered on Libya DID NOT PARTICIPATE IN THE IRAQ WAR."Bad Memories" my ass.
Strawman,strawman,strawman......
YES, YES, YES!!!!!!!, ..............I'm more overjoyed to see that Mr. Hitchens is "pecking away again"-(I've seen him type on video)- at his computer, than a Priest is glad to see a school bus pull up to his own church.
This Texan(Me), along with my wife, requires your regularly scheduled articles the way we also crave three meals a day.
Go,Go Go!!!!!!
John G. of Texas
Being terminal myself, I've had cause to give this a bit of consideration. Perhaps the best time to have a wake is while we are still able to enjoy the company of our friends.
CH is still obsessed with defending the disastrous policy of invading Iraq, which he advocated in 2003. Actually the "Iraqi factor" has likely delayed the intervention of the International community, which would have acted more swiftly and courageously if it didn't have the bad memories of the intervetnion in Iraq.
So glad that you’re still thumping the keyboard.
What a tremendous relief that he's back at his desk. The next time he misses a deadline we might want to wait a bit before we start planning his wake.
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