Andrew Hagen

Fred Barnes refutes several of the myths that have developed in America about the process in Iraq. (*)

Mark Helprin says that the war has been run badly. (†) I believe he exaggerates the case a bit, though to the extent it persuades people of the great need for large increases in defense spending, it serves a purpose. As Helprin says, defense spending has declined as a percentage of GDP since the Cold War ended.

While victory is inevitable, the course to achieving it is not. The recent weeks of difficulties should not weigh onerously. The Baathist strategy does appear to have been from the first to allow Baghdad to be taken and then to launch a terrorist insurgency, just as Geoffrey Wawro said last year. (‡) To fight against a guerilla war, the occupying power does best to break up the territory into pieces, and slowly clean out the insurgents from each area. In this sense, waiting to act in Fallujah was proper. On the other hand, we still should have acted sooner in Fallujah. The slow counterinsurgency against Moqtada al-Sadr has made significant progress. The slow whittling down of the armed opposition does not play well for the cameras, but it is working.

Imposing economic sanctions on Syria is another step forward. It will isolate the regime and help cut off Syrian support for the terrorists in Iraq. Iran looms as a more difficult question.

Opponents of the war like Paul Savoy cite the Abu Ghraib photos as evidence that the entire war is corrupt. (§) To take Savoy seriously, he would have to put into the balance the 25 million Iraqis who were liberated by the war, and the millions of people in the region who have taken heart that the United States is ending both its support and toleration of tyranny in the Middle East. To seriously claim that violence inherently leads to more violence, one must consider why it is that wars end. If violence always leads to more violence, than no war could ever end. Savoy’s rhetoric is little concerned with the great value of liberating such a large number of people, and stopping the murderous Saddam regime. Until Operation Iraqi Freedom, the rapes, the murders, the torture all continued unabated. Only liberation halted it.

Furthermore, the small scale of the Abu Ghraib abuse is evidence by omission of the morality of the war. There is no indication that active participation in the Abu Ghraib abuse extended beyond ten or so individuals in the US military, and perhaps to a few higher-ups. In any large group, you will have several bad apples. US military commanders acted to stop the abuse once it became known. There has not been any cover up of the scandal. The scandal was announced to the world in January.

The Abu Ghraib abuse could not have been part of set US policy. It showed an “interrogation” method that did not work. While Seymour Hersh reports that analogous methods of interrogation as shown in the photos work against men of Arabic culture (**), Hersh fails to show a link between the abuse as depicted on the photos and actual US policy. What the photos showed was not an orderly interrogation or useful set of psy-ops photographs, but a situation completely out of control. An article in the Guardian seems more convincing. What was shown, according to it, in the photos was the result of relatively inexperienced and untrained troops using a novel method of interrogation. The troops not being properly trained in this method, the interrogations collapsed into abuse. (††) The abuse was unrepresentative of a worthwhile and moral method of interrogation.

Our unfinished war aims in Iraq are: root out the terrorists; secure WMD; and hand off power to a representative government. (‡‡) Finishing the list is feasible and within sight. Iraq’s WMD program is stopped and the US has learned of its connections to other Muslim countries, such as Libya. Further action against WMD proliferation can be taken without resort to military action, as was done in Libya.

The exception may be Iran. Bombing the Iranian regime would encourage a popular uprising against the mullahocracy, hated by the Persian people, like the uprising we saw in Serbia in 2000 following the Kosovo campaign of 1999. In the process of regime change, Iran’s WMD program could be secured, the most important step of which would be removal of the Iranian regime.

We have had many failures in Iraq as well as many successes. The sacrifices of our troops have been painful and unforgettable. What America should also never forget is that in most of our wars, things have gone badly initially. Valley Forge and Midway were turning points in wars that could have gone badly for America. The Civil War did not go well for the Union side until Gettysburg. Considering the many successes the Iraq campaign has had already, if we just keep grinding we are bound to meet all of our objectives.

The horrifying murder of Nick Berg serves as a reminder of who we fight against. To create their desperate publicity stunt, the terrorists took an innocent human being who went to Iraq to help people, and killed him like an animal. The people who did that to Nick Berg are the kind of people the civilized world—Christian, Muslim, and secular—is fighting against.

In Iraq we must stay the course in relentless pursuit of victory, even as we modify and improve our tactics and operations. We must persevere until victory.