I missed this back when the war in Iraq was still a dream in the eye of many a warhawk . . . . I knew there were some people with their own millennial fantasies, but this is just naked bloodlust.
But there’s a much more basic reason to crush Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Islamic world — mainly the Arab Islamic world — needs to realize that it has failed. Medieval Islam cannot compete with liberal capitalism either economically or culturally. Unfortunately, that message has taken several hundred years to filter through. There is nothing like cataclysmic military defeat to teach the lesson more rapidly. One could point at the examples of Japan and Germany after the Second World War. But the Muslim world provides its own case study. Ottoman Turkey only began to pay attention to Western science and organization after its first serious military defeats at the hands of Austria and Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime because he’s a bad man, sure, because he may conceivably be connected with Al-Qaeda, because he’s developing weapons of mass destruction, because a friendly Iraq would alter the balance of power in the Middle East, sure, because of all of that. But the US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime mainly because the West needs to humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millennial fantasy.
Inhabitants of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries must realize that medieval Islam and strongman dictatorships are bankrupt. Arab political systems have held back progress, and even the Islamic traditionalists who deny those Western notions of progress will have to accept the objective measure of military accomplishment. Let the US send 40,000 soldiers against an Iraqi army ten times the size; let the defeat be total; and let Arab people realize that liberal democracy isn’t just a soft western indulgence, but the most effective form of social organization on this planet, and it is their future, if they want a future.
This is just tragically wrong, despicable, and ugly. If you wanted to crush and humiliate a regime that is holding back progress, Saudi Arabia would have been a better choice. But even then it would be a bad idea. I wonder if Denton has wised up at all in the intervening 3½ years? 40,000 soldiers? How about 4 times that many? As noted in the Times this weekend, Iraq’s defenses were crumbling before the war started.
Now if Iran does make a move, they can rightly say “yeah, and with whose Army?” now that we have wrecked ours. So much for humiliating the enemy, when all we seem to have done is emboldened the real enemy while settling old family scores.
Now playing: Psalm by Roxy Music from the album “Stranded”