Fifth Anniversary Of The Iraq War

4,000 dead American soldiers, and many more wounded. But what is even more striking is just how worse-off Iraq is compared to Saddam's day. Twenty percent of the population of Iraq, five million people, have been forced, upon pain of death, to move. Half of those have moved out of the country altogether. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and continue dying. It would almost as if a terrible war had struck California, and the entire population of the Bay Area had to move, at gunpoint, to Siberia.

And the engineers of this war are proud of what they have done. They are co-equals with Saddam in creating suffering beyond measure. A perfect example is Fouad Ajami's triumphal reminiscence in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

In the 80's and 90's, I had come to admire Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shiite academic, from his frequent appearances on PBS' MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and his eloquent essays in The New Republic. His hands are too bloodied by this war, however. The excerpt below is from Wikipedia:

In an August 2002 speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, US Vice President Dick Cheney sought to assuage concerns about the anticipated US invasion of Iraq, stating: "As for the reaction of the Arab 'street,' the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are 'sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.'"

Ajami cautioned the United States about the likely negative consequences of the Iraq War. In a 2003 essay in Foreign Affairs, "Iraq and the Arabs' Future," Ajami wrote, "There should be no illusions about the sort of Arab landscape that America is destined to find if, or when, it embarks on a war against the Iraqi regime. There would be no "hearts and minds" to be won in the Arab world, no public diplomacy that would convince the overwhelming majority of Arabs that this war would be a just war. An American expedition in the wake of thwarted UN inspections would be seen by the vast majority of Arabs as an imperial reach into their world, a favor to Israel, or a way for the United States to secure control over Iraq's oil. No hearing would be given to the great foreign power."

But he also goes on to say:

America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world -- the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects.

Ajami retains a positive view of the war three years later. In a 2006 book on the invasion and its aftermath, he described it as a noble effort, and argues that despite many unhappy consequences, it is too soon to write it off as a failure.

Vice President Cheney cited Ajami again in an October 21, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stating, "We have no illusions about the road ahead. As Fouad Ajami said recently, Iraq is not yet 'a country at peace, and all its furies have not burned out, but a measure of order has begun to stick on the ground.'"

Here is some of what Ajami wrote in the WSJ (with emphases added):

Still, five years on, this endeavor in Iraq is taking hold. The U.S. military was invariably the great corrector. In their stoic acceptance of the mission given them and in the tender mercies they showed Iraqis on a daily basis, our soldiers held out the example of benevolent rule. (In extended travel in and out of Iraq over the last five years, I heard little talk of Abu Ghraib. The people of Iraq understood that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were psychopaths at odds with American military norms.)

In those five years, the scaffolding of the war came under steady assault. People said that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam, that no "smoking gun" had been discovered, and that the invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a breeding ground of jihadists.

But those looking for that smoking gun did not understand that the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad was a correct one. Radical Arabs attacked America on 9/11, and a war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism.

Baghdad was the proper return address, as a notice was served on the purveyors of terror that a price would be paid by those who aid and abet it. It was Saddam Hussein's choice -- and fate -- that he would not duck and stay out of harm's way in the aftermath of 9/11. We have not fully repaired the ways of the radicals in the intervening years. But the spectacle of the dictator's defeat, and the sight of him being sent to the gallows, have worked wonders on the temper of the Arab street.

So we did not turn Baghdad into a democratic city on a hill, and we learned that the dismantling of Sunni tyranny would leave the Arab world's Shiite stepchildren with primacy in Iraq. A better country has nonetheless risen, midwifed by this American war. It is not a flawless democracy. But compare it to the prison it was under Saddam, the tyranny next door in Damascus and the norms of the region, and we can have a measure of pride in what America has brought forth in Baghdad.

This is not a Shiite state that we uphold. True, the Shiite majority was emancipated from a long history of fear and servitude, but Iraq's Shiites have told us in every way they can that their country is not a "sister republic" of the Persian theocracy to their east. If anything, the custodians of political power in Iraq have signaled their long-term intentions: an extended American presence in their midst and the shoring up of an oil state in the orbit of American power.

...In the past five years, the passion has drained out of the war's defenders and critics alike. Our soldiers and envoys are there, but the public at home has moved onto other concerns. Still, the public is willing to grant this expedition time, and that's for the good. There is no taste in this country for imperial burdens and acquisitions in distant lands. But Americans also know that the lands and sea lanes of the Persian Gulf are too vital to be left to mayhem and petty tyrants.

May I remind Ajami that a war fought in Arab lands, against the will of the vast majority of Arabs, can't succeed in its goals in a permanent sense. Only an imperial power can impose its will in that way, making a mockery of Ajami's pretense of supposed American nobility. The failure of al-Maliki's government to bring Sunnis into the fold (a failure I can fully sympathize with, however, because of Sunni intransigence) means that Iraq is now a Shiite state, Ajami's demurrals notwithstanding. The prison of Saddam's Iraq, where most people stayed alive at the least, was preferrable to today's jailbreak Iraq, where so many more people have died. And Graner and England can hardly be construed as isolated psychopaths when George W. Bush himself vetoes bills seeking to limit torture on prisoners. The psychopaths are running this war!

Ajami's contempt for "the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference" fails to grasp that it is exactly the difference between a limited, focused war on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where success might be possible, and a quagmire in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where failure in both places is certain.

So, what we had then was a war of vengeance, against Saddam, and imperial conquest of oilfields (that we have trouble tapping because of the danger), at the cost of many billions of dollars and nearly countless lives: but not a war Ajami himself, nor American elites, were prepared to sacrifice for in any notable way. And the Arab street? Angrier than ever! And it's that anger we need to assuage to prevent future 9/11s.

Lots of luck keeping the spoils!