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COMMENTARY
March 20, 2004
One year later
"There is no neutral ground -- no neutral ground -- in the fight between civilization and terror said President Bush yesterday, seizing the agenda for the first anniversary of the Iraq invasion (today). The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation." And despite defections it is being won. A year after an invasion that this correspondent certainly supported and continues to support Iraq represents a remarkable victory. It is in no way irrelevant to the larger struggle: for victory in Iraq has contributed to progress on every other front from Libya to Pakistan to Iran to North Korea to the killing or capture of terrorists all over the planet. It is true that the case the U.S. Britain Spain and other countries made for the support of the United Nations remains incompletely proven. Iraq does not seem to have retained any significant stocks of the weaponry for which all kinds of documentation was nevertheless recovered. Yet there is abundant proof the Saddam regime conspired to conceal numerous breaches of U.N. resolutions from U.N. weapons inspectors -- enough to satisfy any legal requirement. And anyway the U.N. didn't in fact support the U.S. and allies so the diplomatic issue of "WMD" is bogus. This is the same United Nations that has been exposed in an oil-for-cash scam with the Saddam regime that involved the misappropriation of some $100 billion including more than $10 billion of direct kickbacks to Saddam and cronies -- providing the chief sustenance to a regime that might otherwise have collapsed without foreign intervention. The failure to win U.N. support for what the U.N. helped to make a very necessary invasion is hardly something for which the Bush administration can apologize. That threat was especially significant in light of Saddam's known connexions with international terror networks. And no one can credibly argue that these did not exist. Saddam sheltered Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas. He co-operated with Al Qaeda through Ansar al-Islam which trained in the Afghan terror camps and was managed by figures on the payroll of Saddam's Mukhabharat. There are many indications of the transit of agents between camps in Iraq and in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Meanwhile Saddam's agents have been implicated in both attacks on the World Trade Centre -- in 1993 through Ramzi Yousef and in 2001 through Mohammad Atta. Et cetera. And this is before the clincher. The attack by international Jihadists on Spain was openly declared to be in retaliation for Spain's contribution to the fight in Iraq. "Hello-o!" as they say -- we have a common enemy. Moreover while the idea that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq made life worse for the Iraqi people may be sold to reflexive anti-Americans in European caf?s it could not possibly be sold in Iraq. Not where Saddam's survivors are still exhuming the remains of several hundred thousand victims of his killing fields. By comparison with the scale of Saddam's irresistible daily butchery the casualties from increasingly cheap-shot terrorist attacks are minor. And the number of allied troops lost in achieving this result is tiny by the standards of every previous war (except Afghanistan). By any reasonable standard Iraq is far ahead of where it was. As the (Pentagon "neoconservative") Paul Wolfowitz points out the electricity supply is now half-again what it was pre-war from infrastructure rebuilt from the ground up. Oil production is far above projections. Public health funding is at 26 times Saddam's level. Ditto the country's schools universities and technical institutes -- open and quickly expanding. No one who has seen Iraq "before" and "after" can seriously argue about the big picture. The evidence of a booming economy is in the extraordinary buzz of traffic and business in Baghdad Basra and almost everywhere else. The Iraqi Marshes are being restored after their destruction by Saddam and dozens of smaller projects contribute to the environmental recovery. Iraqi refugees both internal and external have flooded home ending one of the world's great U.N.-funded refugee crises. The people have voted with their feet and a country that was put to sleep is again awake and in movement. Iraq now has a credible constitution agreed by all parties to the interim government and will resume sovereignty on June 30th. There is every prospect of the first truly multi-party free elections in the Middle East outside Israel. It cannot be a showpiece bourgeois democracy given the hard facts of Iraq's modern history but what is being accomplished is more than even I thought was possible. Iraqis are taking charge of their own affairs. And the worst of the transitional crises seem now to be overcome. In particular the very targets the terrorists are selecting show their desperation. A power-play by the Shia mullahs has been faced down. The new Iraqi police -- with 200 000 in uniform now the largest constituent of the "coalition of the willing" -- now leads the enforcement of public order. So what went wrong? The "liberal" viciously anti-Bush media paint a picture of failure in Iraq through extremely selective coverage of what is going on there. Hatred makes them blind; but those with eyes can see a victory. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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