Major General LeMay (R) greets Lt. Col Robert McNamara(L), an Army Air Forces statistician. Twenty years later, their roles were reversed when McNamara became LeMay’s boss at the Pentagon.
A recent CNN article by conservative scholar David Frum tried once again to paint the former commander-in-chief in a bright shining light (substitute “lie!”) in that Iraq’s recent parliamentary elections are proof that Iraq is indeed heading down the road to democracy and that George W. Bush’s ill-fated venture that began in March 2003 is already showing positive dividends. Frum begins his expose by stating that Israel will have to retire its title as the Middle East’s only democracy and that Iraq’s parliamentary elections are without corruption, and conducted in a civilized manner. Now, this may all be true, but does this still justify a war which has exceeded $1 trillion dollars and the lives of almost 4500 men and women?!!
Let me repeat for all those conservatives out there like Mr. Frum, who are just so elated now that Iraq’s democracy is finally beginning to take shape. Of course, they will all say in their defense upon finishing this article that I’m just a dumb liberal who doesn’t want to see Iraq succeed, and would rather Iran or Al Qaeda gain a foothold in that country. Neither of these are true; I am for stability in any part of the world. But even if in 5 years, Iraq becomes a tourist hotspot and is thriving in business and you can actually walk down the streets of Baghdad and feel safe, I will never stray from my original belief that there was never any justification for invading that country back in March 2003.
I guess I have to remind people of what the United States went through following 9/11. While Afghanistan is certainly struggling these days and people are beginning to question the merits of ever going in there and rooting out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, I believed then and still do now that we were right for going in there in the first place. For all we know Afghanistan then could have been what Iraq is like now; a shining example of democracy in a part of the world even more untamed than the area of the Middle East that we are used to, i.e. Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq.
The Iraq Was was marketed on the belief that Saddam Hussein did indeed possess weapons of mass destruction and was intent on either using them directly or giving them to extremist groups. That is what George W. Bush kept hammering away at in the year leading up to the invasion. The United States Congress did not adopt the resolution for war because Hussein paid money to Palestinian suicide bombers’ families, targeted Shiite and Kurdish minorities or simply because he ruled Iraq with an iron fist and we owed it to the Iraqi people to give them freedom.
So Bush and his inner circle, with the notable exception of Colin Powell, pushed for war and get their wish. Granted, if nukes or anthrax had been found in Saddam’s supposed arsenal, or if Iraq’s intel service had indeed met with a known terrorist, then the liberal argument of “it wasn’t worth it” wouldn’t have held much water. But when we marched into that country, clearly being greeted as the liberators that our former vice president claimed, and didn’t find any weapons, we can’t just jump from that argument to “oh well, at least we liberated a people from a cruel dictator.” Sorry, this is where the communication breakdown explodes.
Having been a student of history and done my master’s thesis on dissent during the Vietnam War, I feel that I have a decent amount of knowledge on the subject of taking a nation into conflict. In his wonderful biography of Gen. Curtis LeMay, simply titled LeMay,Warren Kozak summarizes the former general’s theory of war: “If a war is not worth winning…do not get involved in the first place” (342). LeMay felt that a country should know the real reasons behind why it fights, and examine them carefully. LeMay’s protégé, and later his superior, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, had a similar idea, as put forth in his 2003 film, Fog of War: “If we can’t convince other countries of the merits of our cause, we’d better be prepared to reexamine our reasoning.” While I disagree with both of these figures on various levels, I couldn’t agree more with the previous two statements.
One does not decide to invade a country over one pretext and then, in the absence of fact, exchange it for another one for mere convenience. It’s almost like saying “my friend and I drove upstate to a country town but when we got there it was raining, but hey, at least we got to eat at this great restaurant nearby.” This is zero room for error in intelligence in the period preceding a war; one must be completely certain, and if the intelligence seems off, chances are it probably is. And to all those who say that Iraq had weapons and then moved them before we went in, or they’d rather shoot first and ask questions later, try telling that to the millions of Americans right now who are just barely hanging onto their jobs because we sit mired in a horrible recession, or that families of those men and women who died for reasons that, to this day, are not quite clear. And if we were so scared of Saddam Hussein’s regime, how come we haven’t invaded North Korea or even Iran? Did we suddenly realize that we don’t always have the market cornered on good judgment?
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Scott hails from Westchester, NY. He received his B.S. in History from Northeastern University, and his M.S. in Archives Management and M.A. in History from Simmons College, both institutions in Boston but insists he is still a Yanks fan! Last spring Scott completed his Master’s Thesis: “Memo To The President: George Ball’s Warnings on the Road to Vietnam” and this academic venture only helped to strengthen his interest in history and American foreign policy.
When he’s not watching the news or dabbling in non-fiction, Scott sings jazz in both big bands and small groups around New York City. He also writes short stories and screenplays.
History – not the spinmeisters like Frum – will show what an awful disaster it was
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I would be happy to drive to a country town upstate even if it did rain so long as there was a good meal up there.
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