The Economist's parting editor reflects on why his paper chose to
support the American-led invasion of Iraq.
http://economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6744590
...
1993 was also the year of the first attempt by al-Qaeda to blow up
the World Trade Centre in New York, a failure that was followed by
murderous successes in East Africa, Yemen and elsewhere, culminating
in the atrocity of September 11th 2001. The West left Afghanistan
alone in the misery of its sovereignty, which provided a home for
Osama bin Laden and his training camps. Meanwhile it dealt with the
legacy of the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein by trying to use
sanctions and no-fly zones to contain him, and UN inspectors to
police his weapons ambitions. That process led to alarming
discoveries, to bombing raids that killed Iraqi civilians, to the
deaths of perhaps half a million Iraqi children, to the maintenance
of America's air bases in Saudi Arabia, to a deterioration of the
West's reputation in the Muslim world—and to Saddam and his sons
remaining comfortably in power.
All of which is the background to the most controversial decision of
this editorship: the decision to support the American-led invasion of
Iraq in March 2003. Our reasoning began with the fact that the status
quo was terrible: doing nothing, whether about Iraq or about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was itself a deadly decision. It went
on to the risk that Saddam still had a stock of weapons of mass
destruction that if left in power he might wish to use or to sell. In
the light of September 11th and the dismal results from 13 years of
sanctions, we argued that wishful thinking about Saddam would be
reckless. The West should invade, remove him from power, and throw
its considerable resources behind the rebuilding of a free Iraq.
The ensuing three years, I hardly need to say, have seen a debacle.
His WMDs turned out to be a bluff, fooling even his own generals.
Elections have been held, a constitution has been written, but no
government is in place. Institutions remain in tatters. Whether or
not a civil war is under way is largely a semantic issue. Dozens of
Iraqis are dying every day, killed by other Iraqis. So does this
prove our decision wrong, just as the good outcome in ex-Yugoslavia
put our “stumbling” warning in the shade?
This will outrage some readers, but I still think the decision was
correct—based on the situation at that time, which is all it could
have been based on. The risk of leaving Saddam in power was too high.
Outside intervention in other countries' affairs is difficult,
practically, legally and morally. It should be done only in
exceptional circumstances, and backed by exceptional efforts. Iraq
qualified on the former. George Bush let us—and America—down on the
latter. So, however, did other rich countries: whatever they thought
of the invasion, they had a powerful interest in sorting out the
aftermath. Most shirked it.
The only argument against our decision that seems to me to have force
is that a paper whose scepticism about government drips from every
issue should have been sceptical about Mr Bush's government and its
ability to do things properly in Iraq. This is correct: we should
have been, and we were. But when the choice is between bad options
and worse ones, a choice must still be made. Great enterprises can
fail—but they fail twice over if they take away our moral courage and
prevent us from rising to the next challenge.
...
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://www.pobox.com/~jace
