Last Friday evening, I watched National Geographic’s Inside 9/11 program, and for me, it provoked a lot of thoughts on the current state of affairs. Mostly, I was disgusted with where the Bush Administration has taken this country since 9/11/01, but that’s probably not a surprise to anyone who has read this space before.
If you haven’t seen Inside 9/11, I recommend watching it. It’s a two part program and it’s a fact based look at what happened prior to that fateful day, the events of September 11th and the response of the US in the wake of the attacks. At the end of the second part, the program reviews the US response in Afghanistan and the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden. Directly after that, the invasion of Iraq is mentioned. While watching that, the invasion of Iraq seemed like a giant non sequitur to the military action in Afghanistan. What did Iraq have to do with 9/11 or terrorism in general? Why is Iraq a new front in the war on terrorism?
The reason it didn’t make sense to me is that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iraq played no role in the 9/11 attacks. I can’t explain why the US is in Iraq (you’ll have to ask Cheney), but I can state one thing unequivocally. It has NOTHING to do with the war on terrorism. Well, that is unless the plan was to create more terrorists. That’s working brilliantly.
Let’s look at this war on terror connection to Iraq a little more closely. How could it possibly be related?
· There were no connections between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, and that’s understandable since Saddam Hussein’s government was secular in nature and not Islamic.
· Both Iraq and Al Qaeda were enemies of the United States, but that doesn’t make them unique or link them in any way.
· Would Iraq become a supplier of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists? That’s a logical thought, but is also the reason that UN weapons inspectors were in Iraq doing their job to make sure that wouldn’t happen, prior to the US invasion.
· Spread freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East in an effort to provide security to America – this seems to be a “popular” connection, but it’s the most ill conceived of them all. In other words, the strategy is “convert them to our way of thinking so that they won’t hurt us again.”
If you buy into the spread freedom and democracy angle, then Iraq was probably the right choice. It was a secular government in a region that is increasingly trending toward more Islamic regimes and it was a government without any friends. Who would miss Saddam? Probably no one would care, right?
Here’s where this strategy breaks down. The Middle East is a region that has deep mistrust of the West, and that goes back to the Crusades. Arabs have always had a very long term view of the world and they remember the past. Put that into contrast with our society where everything is about the short term, from the stock market to what is on TV tonight, and you have a culture mismatch. If you look at the situation with absolutely no historical perspective, the idea of invading Iraq and having a happy ending seems almost plausible. However, if you examine the history of the region with the West, the very thought of invading a sovereign country in the Middle East with an eye toward converting it to a Western style democracy is foolhardy. There is way too much distrust between the societies, and much of it is deserved. The idea that freedom and democracy will flourish in the Middle East by force feeding it to an occupied country seems naïve, especially when the occupier’s President unintentionally uses the word ‘crusade’ to describe the effort. If you’re an Arab, wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that this war is an extension of Christianity versus Islam when the aggressor uses the language of the Crusades? That’s not a public relations idea that’s going to take hold in the Middle East.
Also, since when does America start wars preemptively? A look at our history shows that we’ve never done that before. Supporters of the war will respond to that thoughtlessly with “this is a different kind of war” or “the rules are different in the war on terror.” Baloney! If you want to provide security for Americans, don’t go and stir up a hornets nest. If we really want to spread freedom and democracy to the region, we should have the courage NOT to invade. Change is often a long term process, and that’s probably even truer when talking about culture change. That’s not the kind of change that can be forced overnight; it has to be an evolutionary process and a partnership with the West is the way to do it.
The US likes to think of itself as the standard bearer for the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the War in Iraq has revealed that today’s United States no longer deserves that lofty title. The latest blow to this is the continuing saga of torture. Torture has been proven to be ultimately self-defeating, yet we have an Administration that has used and wants to continue to use torture as an interrogation technique. What happened to the sentiment of overthrowing Saddam because he tortures his own people? It’s OK for us to torture them, but not him? Isn’t this a classic double standard? And I haven’t even brought up the fact that the new regime seems to have set up its own torture structure. Are we replacing one set of torturers with another? Surely, that wasn’t the point of the invasion. What a truly shining example we are setting for the rest of the world by defending our use of torture.
As I said earlier, I can’t tell you the real reasons the United States invaded Iraq, but I do know that it has nothing to do with the War on Terror, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the security of this country. If we don’t know why we are there, how can we possibly figure out how to extricate ourselves from this mess? So far, no one in Washington has an answer to that question.
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