Published May 13, 2004
<center>Why is the U.S. in Iraq?</center>
Day after troubling day, death tolls and dollar costs rise. Insurgents hungry for influence in the vacuum long filled by Saddam Hussein continue to mount killer attacks. An unsettling dispute over coffin photos yields to noisy worldwide furor over prison photos. A saga both freakish and frightening--the videotaped beheading of an American civilian--shockingly punctuates two already shocking weeks of torture tales from Abu Ghraib. Back home, the schism that divided the people of this nation before war in Iraq cannot yet begin to heal--and perhaps won't soon heal even after U.S. forces break camp and head stateside. In whatever future year that occurs.
It's natural and logical, given the recent run of dreadful and gruesome news, for citizens to ask why the United States, along with sizeable investments of its blood and treasure, remains in Iraq.
For some Americans the only answers to that question come draped in cynicism: This is all about oil, or a doctrinaire president's hubris, or a hawkish cabal at his elbow.
Many other Americans, though, comprehend why it is so vital for this nation to help birth a new and free Iraq--even if those reasons are elusive on the many dark days such as these, when heartening news grows scarce.
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No discussion about staying in Iraq can, or should, avoid reflection on why we went in the first place.
Fourteen-plus months ago, in an editorial titled "The case for war," this page reluctantly abandoned its oft-stated hope that combat would be avoided if the rest of the world would stand united in insisting that Hussein meet the demands of the United Nations Security Council. Hussein refused to comply--and the UN failed to enforce the "serious consequences" its Security Council had threatened against Iraq.
That editorial cited six reasons for war. Today, one of those reasons--the likelihood that Iraq possessed illicit weapons stockpiles--rings hollow, despite evidence that until his final days as dictator, Hussein coveted those weapons. As it stands, history will record a mistaken belief in weapons of mass destruction as one vocally shared by Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac. Bob Woodward's recent book "Plan of Attack" describes a skeptical President George W. Bush asking after a CIA briefing in December 2002: "I've been told all this intelligence about [Iraq] having WMD and this is the best we've got?" To which CIA Director George Tenet responds: "It's a slam-dunk case!" Bush reportedly probes: "George, how confident are you?" Tenet: "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!"
We're content, for now, to let the many partisans still squabbling over the war do our worrying about whether Bush should have believed Tenet--or should have gambled that the CIA director he inherited from Clinton was mistaken. Losing that gamble, of course, potentially involved catastrophic consequences for the U.S.
And what of those five other reasons for war?
- Iraq today still has deadly terrorists, although as localized battles continue, not many of them qualify as good risks for life insurers. What's undisputed is that Iraq no longer has a regime that harbors terrorists indefinitely.
- Removing Saddam Hussein hasn't resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Hussein's current inability to pay bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers has to be scored as a plus.
- Democracy soon will have a first foothold in the Arab Middle East. If the current schedule holds and if the UN doesn't turn tail, Iraq will have moved from dictatorship to national elections and self-rule in less than two years.
- The world's long refusal to confront Hussein left his neighbors, including such U.S. allies as Turkey, Israel and once-raped Kuwait, wondering if and when Iraq would mount an attack. That risk today stands at zero.
- The editorial argued: "[Hussein's] butchery and our collective inaction also have cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives." Today's deaths in Iraq are appalling. But Hussein's thugs are no longer busy excavating for mass graves.
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Instead, the U.S. and its small number of committed allies are confronting Iraqis with what for them is a strange fate. Soon they will chart their own futures, resolve their own disputes. The growing involvement of newly trained Iraqi forces in subduing radical Shiite militias in some cities is encouraging. Eventually, Iraqis will protect and rule Iraqis.
It now appears likely that UN and U.S. efforts will produce a government apparatus--staffed in part by veteran technocrats and bureaucrats who kept their jobs under Hussein by calling themselves Baathists--to run the country. The more challenging prospect is developing military and police capabilities to protect that fledgling government. The U.S. cannot leave Iraq until those security forces have the training and the confidence to keep peace.
In the coming months or years, that is essentially the policy reality by which either President Bush or President John Kerry will abide. President Ralph Nader, by contrast, would flee Iraq by dawn's early light.
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Put short, the U.S. remains in Iraq today because of unfinished business. Leaving while insurgents remain free to kill liberated Iraqis, or before Iraq has a government that can defend itself from anarchy, would elevate today's localized chaos to an enduring national norm.
Those who would cut and run are correct to say that many of the administration's predictions--remember those putative throngs of Iraqis heaping flowers on U.S. troops?--materialized fleetingly if at all. Just as many equally fervid predictions from the mouths of critics--a military assault hopelessly stalled in the desert, revolutionary upheaval throughout the always unhappy and humiliated Arab street, a refugee crisis of international proportion, terrorist attacks in the U.S.--also fell short.
The crises in Iraq today are genuine. But they are not hopeless. The most troubling of these, the evidently chronic abuse of Iraqi prisoners, will be fully aired; too many investigations are under way, too much evidence is in the hands of an angry and embarrassed American public, for this indefensible mistreatment to be airbrushed.
This is not to say that more Americans, and more Iraqis, won't die. Some will, in tragedies yet to be defined. The March desecration of American corpses, this month's beheading, will be eclipsed by future horrors.
In arguing in favor of war last year, this page concluded with two sentences that were as prescient then as they were when they first appeared here in 1990, as Americans debated whether to launch the Persian Gulf war against Iraq: "If there is a war, the U.S. and its allies will pay a heavy price. But the price of stopping Saddam Hussein isn't going to get any smaller."
Regrettably, the price of stopping Hussein includes the cost of repairing what he savaged. When that work is done and the price fully paid, this will, on difficult balance, be a safer world.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
