Issue Position: War in Iraq

Issue Position

War in Iraq

Last year, when the war in Iraq was just starting in late March, I gave an interview to Channel 9 in the Midland -Odessa area about the war. The reporter liked my response but said it was unfortunate he could only use 10 seconds of it rather than the whole two minutes. In the interests of consistency, I will begin this segment by repeating and updating what I said..

At that time I said that I thought the war was justified because it appeared that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he might provide to Al Qaida for use against us. I found it suspicious that we had suffered from anthrax attacks and that the leader of the 9-11 attacks, Mohammad Atta, had suffered from something like anthrax on his leg and had previously met with Iraqi operatives in the Czech Republic. While those meetings weren't confirmed by our government, they were confirmed several times, both before and after our government's denials, by the Czech secret service and government. Since Iraq was known to have worked on weapons grade anthrax, like the Anthrax included in the letters, I suspected that Iraq might have supplied Al Qaida with the bacteria used in the letters. In addition, I had read that Al Qaida cells were operating in Northen Iraq. Furthermore, based on Secretary Powell's presentation to the U.N., it appeared that Iraq was working on biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and was trying to develop nuclear weapons as well. Thus, I thought that the war was justified to further our national defense. I further thought that we would win it handily because of the superior effectiveness of our military forces.

However, I expressed reservations about what we would do after we won and ousted Saddam Hussein from power. I noted that when my daughter had lived in Oxford, England, my wife and I had visited and spent considerable time in the British Museum of Natural History. I was impressed at that time as to how well developed Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) was with cuneiform writing, a legal system (the code of Hammurabi), and other trappings of civilization many thousands of years ago. However, I also wondered why that area had never been able to develop continuously. I thought that I had found the answer in the museum. The British had brought back many palace walls, friezes, and tablets from the area. Depicted in the artwork were scenes of soldiers returning from war carrying the heads of the vanquished. In the writings, they told tales of slaughtering their enemies, destroying their houses and spreading the rocks in their fields, which they also sowed with salt. In short, they destroyed both the physical capital and the human capital of the vanquished. Thus, vengeance and the destruction of capital had been incorporated in the culture of the people of Iraq for thousands of years, and that is why they had not been able to continuously develop in spite of their obvious intellectual accomplishments. Saddam Hussein had only been able to control the country by exercising the terrible mechanics of repression by a despotic ruler to which they were accustomed. I feared that once we defeated the Iraqi army, we would have a hard time bringing the country under civilized control, and I expressed the view that I didn't think enough thought and planning had been given to the question of what to do once a military victory had been achieved.

In hindsight, I was seemingly wrong, as was the U.S. administration and the intelligence services of the entire world, about Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction (albeit, I would not be surprised if some later surfaced in Syria). Had Iraq not seemed to be an imminent threat to us, it would have been better to keep Hussein bottled up under strict controls for another year or more. However, we were wrong, and based on the information we had, I believe we did the right thing by going to war. Nonetheless, I think that the administration has botched the postwar occupation. For one thing, we assumed that the Iraqis would welcome us and enthusiastically seek democracy. Thus, we didn't worry sufficiently about post battle insurrections and the difficulty in establishing a democratic replacement government.

Since the main battles ended, we have tried to impose arbitrary rules on Iraq concerning representation in their governing councils (with quotas for women and various minorities). We also have tried to ensure that they would have a true democracy. However, Iraq is a country that has never known true democracy. At best, they can develop a federal system with representative democracy with a strong central executive. If the central executive is a benevolent despot, that may the best we can hope for.

We should try to minimize our losses as they develop a new civil order. Thus, we should encourage them to develop an effective police force and national guard, and to have elections so they can feel that they have a stake in their own government and can replace it legally if it becomes too despotic, without any benevolence. We should encourage them to adopt a federal system with substantial regional autonomy in order to reduce the risk of civil war.

We should maintain forces in Iraq to serve as a backup to their elected government and to help stabilize the region and prevent civil war and the development of a breeding ground for terrorists. However, our forces should mainly remain on relatively remote bases and only intervene judiciously--and as the Iraqis develop their own military capabilities, we should start withdrawing much of our military from the region.

Economically, once they have a newly elected government, we should encourage the Iraqis to default on all past debts incurred by Saddam Hussein's regime. Many past debts were incurred by Hussein to buy arms for the war with Iran, and the current government need not repay debts from the former regime. The Iraqis should start over financially, funding their needs out of current oil revenues. That would give the whole country an incentive to find, produce, and protect as much oil as possible.

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