{"id":543,"date":"2012-08-01T02:29:05","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T02:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=543"},"modified":"2013-02-14T22:21:37","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T22:21:37","slug":"iraqi-irony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iraqi-irony\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraqi Irony"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n

Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n

Amid all the stories about the ongoing violence in Syria, the most disturbing is the possibility that President Bashar Assad could either deploy the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that his government claims it has, or provide it to terrorists.<\/p>\n

There are suggestions that at least some of Assad\u2019s supposed stockpile may have come from Saddam Hussein\u2019s frantic, eleventh-hour efforts in 2002 to hide his own arsenals of weapons of mass destruction in neighboring Syria. Various retired Iraqi military officers have alleged as much. Although the story was met with general neglect or scorn from the American media, the present US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, long ago asserted his belief in such a weapons transfer.<\/p>\n

The Bush administration fixated on WMD in justifying the invasion of Iraq while largely ignoring more than 20 other writs to remove Saddam, as authorized by Congress in October 2002. That obsession would come back to haunt George W. Bush when stockpiles of deployable WMD failed to turn up in postwar Iraq. By 2006, \u201cBush lied; thousands died,\u201d was the serial charge of the antiwar Left. But before long, such depots may finally turn up in Syria.<\/p>\n

Another staple story of the last decade was the inept management of the reconstruction of Iraq. Many Americans understandably questioned how civilian and military leaders allowed a brilliant three-week victory over Saddam to degenerate into a disastrous five-year war before the surge finally salvaged Iraq. That fighting and reconstruction anywhere in the Middle East are difficult under any circumstances was forgotten. The press preferred instead to charge that the singular incompetence or malfeasance of Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld led to the unnecessary costs in American blood and treasure.<\/p>\n

But perhaps that scenario needs an update as well. Journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran\u2019s new book,\u00a0Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan<\/a><\/em>, is a blistering critique of the Obama administration\u2019s three-year conduct of the Afghanistan war and its decision to surge troops; Chandrasekaran chronicles stupid decisions, petty infighting, arrogance, and na\u00efvet\u00e9. In an earlier book on Iraq, Chandrasekaran had alleged that America\u2019s Iraq dilemmas were the result of a similarly bungling Bush administration.<\/p>\n

So was the know-it-all reporter right then about Iraq, is he right now about Afghanistan, neither, or both? And will the media revise their earlier criticism and concede that George W. Bush\u2019s problems in conducting difficult wars in the Middle East were inherent in the vast differences between cultures \u2014 fault lines that likewise have baffled even Barack Hussein Obama, the acclaimed internationalist and Nobel laureate who was supposed to be singularly sensitive to customs in that part of the world?<\/p>\n

In 2008, we were told that Predator drone attacks, renditions, preventive detentions, military tribunals, the Guantanamo detention center, and the surging of troops into difficult wars were all emblematic of Bush\u2019s disdain for the Constitution and his overall ineptness as commander-in-chief. In 2012, these same continuing protocols are no such thing, but instead valuable anti-terrorism tools, and seen as such by President Obama.<\/p>\n

For all the biases and incompetence of Nouri al-Maliki\u2019s elected government in Iraq, the Middle East\u2019s worst dictatorship now seems to have become the region\u2019s most stable constitutional government. Given Iraq\u2019s elections, the country was relatively untouched by the mass \u201cArab Spring\u201d uprisings. And despite sometimes deadly Sunni-Shiite terrorist violence and the resurgence of al Qaeda, Iraq\u2019s economy, compared with those of some of other nations in the Middle East, is stable and expanding.<\/p>\n

The overthrow of Saddam was also supposed to be a blunder in terms of grand strategy, empowering our enemies Iran and Syria. True, Saddam\u2019s ouster and the subsequent violence may have done that in the short term. But how about the long term, nine years later?<\/p>\n

The Assad dynasty seems about to go the way of Egypt\u2019s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia\u2019s Zine El Abidine Bin Ali, and Libya\u2019s Moammar Qaddafi. Syria\u2019s great ally, Iran \u2014 which barely succeeded in putting down popular demonstrations in 2009 \u2014 has never been more isolated and beleaguered as it deals with sanctions, international ostracism, and growing unpopularity at home.<\/p>\n

Who knows whether Saddam\u2019s fall, trial, and execution, coupled with the creation of an Iraqi constitutional government, triggered a slow chain reaction against similar Middle Eastern tyrannies?<\/p>\n

The moral of the story is that history cannot be written as it unfolds. In the case of Iraq, we still don\u2019t know the full story of Saddam\u2019s WMD, the grand strategic effects of the Iraq War, the ripples from the creation of the Iraqi republic, or the relative degree of incompetence of any American administration at war in the Middle East \u2014 and we won\u2019t for many years to come.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92012 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Amid all the stories about the ongoing violence in Syria, the most disturbing is the possibility that President Bashar Assad could either deploy the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that his government claims it has, or provide it to terrorists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[126],"tags":[12,249,74,186,160,250,1041,1016],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-8L","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":924,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syrian-ironies\/","url_meta":{"origin":543,"position":0},"title":"Syrian Ironies","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The more Bashar Assad butchers Syrian dissidents, the more the world community expresses outrage \u2014 while it does little to stop the bloodletting. Why? Ironies on top of ironies 1.\u00a0The politics of intervention. Republicans might seem the most likely to push for an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4443,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-noose-tightens\/","url_meta":{"origin":543,"position":1},"title":"The Noose Tightens","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services His new Middle East neighborhood cannot make Syria's dictator Bashar Assad very happy. Turkey is democratic to his north. A million Arabs vote in Israel to the south. Palestinians are near civil war to establish democratic rule \u2014 their own terrorists more a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2005"","block_context":{"text":"March 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/march-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6949,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/kerry-boasts-of-pluralistic-syria-once-assad-gone\/","url_meta":{"origin":543,"position":2},"title":"Kerry Boasts of ‘Pluralistic’ Syria Once Assad Gone","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0RaymondIbrahim.com\u00a0 U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, was recently\u00a0interviewed\u00a0about Syria. \u00a0While many of his assertions can be debated, one especially requires a response. Throughout the interview, he repeatedly insisted that, if Bashar Assad would only leave power, everything would go well \u2014 especially for all of Syria\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/11769416185_50193bfa40-300x240.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7942,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-biggest-lie\/","url_meta":{"origin":543,"position":3},"title":"The Biggest Lie","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The Left would rather forget its old slogan, \u201cBush lied, thousands died.\u201d by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The very mention of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)\u00a0and Iraq was toxic for Republicans by 2005. 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