Iraq and Justification

Whether or not this war is "justified" is a tough multifaceted beast that I do not think I could settle with just one post. One also must ask, what defines justification? Could it be that in spite of dubious pre-war intelligence and global corruption/miscalculations a free and democratic Iraq emerging from the ashes will justify the war regardless of the willy nilly fashion in which the war was waged/planned or is the war unjustified regardless of the outcomes secondary to the loss of lives for a the questionable assertion of "threat" and the semantics surrounding its time frame? Does the retrospective revelation that the premises and assertions that we once strongly believed to be true have turned out to be false nullify the self-defensive actions that with only the hindsight of time have turned out to be misleading and perhaps aggressive rather than defensive? How you answer these questions will mold the lens with which one views the war and its aftermath.

That being said, I think it is important to paint a realistic picture of the pre-war period based upon all the available evidence in order to give this epoch its due. Saddam's WMD's had served as an adequate deterrent from keeping the advancing army of Bush I from crossing to far into the Kuwaiti/Iraqi border and driving Saddam out of power. The threat of US soldiers encountering a chemical/biological attack was all too real and kept the US from removing Saddam from power (amongst many other important reasons not mentioned here). After '91 with the US backed UN sanctions and the decimation of Saddam's arsenal, the appearance of a functional WMD program was as important to Saddam as actually maintaining one. According to Deulfer Saddam kept alive the duplicitous appearance of WMD's to the point of explicit deception of even his Iraqi guard and specifically his citizens.

Though his WMD's were destroyed after the Gulf War and with the advent of UN sanctions Saddam was clever enough to abuse a program intended to specifically aid the citizens of Iraq during the lean years of the sanctions. As he siphoned money from the program (estimates state that 1/6 dollars went into Saddam's pockets) he continued to use the miserable state of his citizens as a tool of propaganda intended to sway global opinion against said sanctions. Pre 9/11 Saddam's weapons (or appearance) served as a deterrent, post 9/11 in a very paranoid US they became a very real threat. Though the WMD intelligence is now assessed with a critical eye retrospectively, during the pre-war period the intelligence was accepted prima facie, and believed to be a very serious threat. Now we can look back with the aid of 2 years, CIA reports, a US occupation and realize that the intelligence was misleading, that Saddam's non-compliance with the UN was actually his posturing in order to buy time for his corrupting influence upon the UN security council to take full effect(with France/Russia/Germany complicit in the deception and therefore in the blame), that the WMD intelligence was in error and may have been inflated by the Iraqi's themselves (not to mention questions of a cherry-picking US administration), and that there is more to blame for the failures of diplomacy than the "Bush Doctrine" and a rush to war.

We have the luxury to sit here and debate this, hindsight allows us the clarity it the present that it denies our past, but when the intelligence was assessed by anyone from Clinton, to Bush and even Putin (who personally warned Bush of the regimes weapons) the situation was very different.

I was initially against the war. I felt that the inspectors needed more time, that diplomacy seemed to not be given a chance. Retrospectively I realize I was wrong about a lot (particularly in regards to the diplomacy that was doomed to fail regardless of the US terms). That being said, there are still many glaring mistakes in the way this war has been waged and planning for the post-war period has been abysmal. Regardless, I now feel that it is vital to ensure that a stable Iraq emerges from this war and that a real functional and secure democracy is enacted. Iraq, UN corruption, the humanitarian toll of the sanctions are complicated variables that demanded a delicate and urgent solution. Maybe this is the best (or worst) solution to the conundrum, only history will be a true impartial judge and (only 2 years out) we are still living it.