December 17, 2003

History Lesson

Lee Harris explains the roots of the Iraq war...

This is something that most liberal critics of the second Iraq war would like for us to forget - that this war is part of a historical process that began with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and cannot be understood apart from it. Before they can condemn the second Iraq war as an act of aggression, they had best go back and reflect on the origins of the first Iraq war. The first Iraq war began because one man, Saddam Hussein, wished to acquire the oil fields of his neighbor, and he used the army that he had built up with his country's own oil revenue in order to do this. Had he been permitted to succeed in this venture, it is certain that he would have used this new source of revenue in order to build up an even larger army that he could have then used to gobble up all the other militarily weak but oil rich Arab states in his vicinity, including Saudi Arabia, until the day arrived when he controlled all the oil fields of the middle East, at which time he could have commanded a virtually unlimited source of revenue that he could have directed to whatever aggressive purposes he thought best - a rather large amount of power to put into the hands of "a vile monster."

… Now let us suppose that, back in 1991, the American President and the American public had said, "Saddam has done nothing to us. He has only invaded a far away insignificant little country -- what difference can this possibly make to our own well being?" What would have happened then? Is it remotely conceivable that the rest of the world would have lifted a finger to stop Saddam Hussein, if the United States had been itself unwilling to shoulder the bulk of the burden of defeating him?

… Which leads us to something else we forget, namely, that unless America had acted then, no one would ever have known what a paper tiger Saddam Hussein's army really was, and today, rather than being a powerless old man held captive by the United States, Saddam Hussein would have been sitting on top of the world, his vast armies undefeated and his oil revenues sufficient to buy an arsenal of WMD's.

And, yes, all of this could have easily happened without Saddam Hussein having ever done a single thing to hurt a single American.