Whacking Saddam vs. Liberating Iraq

In the January/February 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs, King's College London Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman has a review essay of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq , which details the 2003 invasion. Freedman examines the plight of liberal hawks such as Packer who supported the Bush administration's push to invade Iraq. He also makes an interesting point about the difference between the goals of removing Saddam from power so as to eliminate a possible threat to the United States, and liberating the Iraqi people from the rule of tyrrany.

One conclusion drawn from the attacks of September 11, 2001, was that al Qaeda should become the object of Washington's single-minded focus and that Saddam had become yesterday's enemy. But another view, to which Cheney and Rumsfeld soon subscribed, was that the attacks made Saddam even more dangerous because al Qaeda provided a new outlet for his aggression. Cheney and Rumsfeld were not prepared to accept that there was no compelling evidence of Saddam's hand in the attacks and that the links between al Qaeda and the secular government in Baghdad were at most tentative. Here was a man with a proven interest in acquiring the deadliest weapons, who by all accounts was still trying to do so and was no longer feeling constrained by tepid UN measures. He had to be stopped.

Leaving aside problems with the evidence supporting this gloomy projection -- which was supplemented by innuendo and stretched to the breaking point -- it is clear that removing Saddam from power had little to do with the liberation of the Iraqi people. The connection between the two was mentioned, of course, usually with great enthusiasm, but emancipation was not the reason the Bush administration went to war or invoked international law to justify it. For Cheney and Rumsfeld, the war was about solving the Saddam problem rather than the Iraq problem, about bringing security rather than justice, about toppling a regime rather than building one. After all, the Bush administration had proudly said that it was not in the business of nation building and would happily leave it to others. Not only did Bush administration officials give little forethought to the difficulties Iraq might face after the war; it did not want others to reflect on those issues any more than they did for fear that such attention might undermine the claim that a short, decisive victory could be achieved with remarkably few troops. It suited the White House to take at face value assertions from Iraqi exiles that solving postwar problems would be relatively straightforward.

It was only after the war, once it became evident that Saddam had been living in a fantasy of his own and his regime had actually posed little immediate threat, that the Bush administration started to stress the promotion of human rights and democracy as rationales for the U.S. involvement in Iraq. For a while, these motives became the war's defining cause. Unfortunately, the insurgency then grew so serious that the central justification for continued U.S. involvement became defeating terrorism within Iraq -- a problem that had never been mentioned before for the distressing reason that it is a product of the war's botched conduct. In the future, the United States' objectives in Iraq may be redefined yet again, according to whatever turns out to deny insurgents any claim to victory.