The history of Bush II is being written earlier than most presidencies. Yet history written hastily is not history. In the murkiness of these troubled times, we should be especially vigilant against oversimplification. Conservatives are apt to remember Bush as the steadfast guardian of the nation, preventing terrorist attacks and the spread of WMD. Liberals will doubtlessly malign Bush for waging an unnecessary and costly war and for addressing terrorism through constitutionally dubious means. Both sides are absolutely correct — if the point is to simplify this presidency down to Our Weekly Reader standards. The truth is more ambiguous. I am referring in particular to the reaction of that overlooked but crucial ideological demographic: the pro-Iraq war leftist.
Imagine an alternate universe, where Iraq is a flourishing, peaceful, economically viable democracy right now. What would that world mean for the United States? For one, it would represent a sea of change in U.S. foreign policy, recasting our actions abroad in explicitly humanitarian terms. 25 million people would have been freed from a horrific, torturous regime. The label “world police,” when applied to the U.S., would have become a compliment, not a slander. To all reasonable onlookers, we would appear to have atoned for decades of supporting dictators across the globe and pitting countries against each other for petty economic reasons.
It was for decades our de facto choice whether the Iraqi people would be free, and we consistently squandered our power — when Saddam Hussein, in the genesis of his dictatorship, was armed and coddled by our government; when we made clear to the Iraqis that our concern for Kuwait did not extend to liberation; when more than a decade of sanctions led to mass starvation; when the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food program ended up guaranteeing billions of dollars to Saddam’s coffers and financing even more slaughter; when the U.S. Senate voted 99-0 to commit to regime change in Iraq and then failed to consider action for another five years. All through this atrocious behavior by our government, the moral argument for removing Saddam was gaining energy in political circles, almost none of them “conservative.”
And for a brief moment in 2003, you did not need to be a conservative Republican to publicly support deposing Saddam Hussein. You did not need to believe the president’s ominous speeches about WMD. You simply needed to acknowledge that in a post-Sept. 11 universe, the U.S. could be a force for liberation in areas of the world long enslaved by totalitarian dictatorship. If you were liberal and pro-war, you should be angry as hell right now. You have been most betrayed by this government. You have watched in horror as an airtight case for humanitarian intervention was instead commandeered by war criminals and profiteers. Perhaps you have given your anti-war friends a heartfelt mea culpa, and they have accepted you back into their ideological fold. But what would they be saying if this intervention had been handled responsibly? Could the left tolerate having opposed the swiftest humanitarian success of our generation? How would Michael Moore have spun that?
We hear routinely the war served no national purpose. It’s true. It has not made us safer. It was only justifiable as humanitarian intervention, which, by definition, lacks strong defensive rationale. There were no WMD, and the public was sold the war on (at best) poor intelligence. If Bush lied about WMD — which history must judge — it was clearly to gain public support for humanitarian intervention. This does not excuse the (impeachable) lie or the subsequent disregard for civilian casualties, but it does contextualize the policy. This president could have been a foreign policy liberal. For a few months, he really was. But he chose instead to ignore the ideological forces which first suggested removing Saddam, steering an otherwise pure policy into darker, murkier, constitutionally dubious waters.
It may be that my counter-factual was never possible — that Iraq was going to be a disaster no matter what. But the president’s mistakes will not be forgotten by the American people — they will be inevitably misinterpreted, filtered through our emerging anti-war blindfolds that obscure all context. As an element of U.S. foreign policy, humanitarian intervention is dead. This means there will be no 11th-hour NATO intervention in Darfur (sorry, Madison liberals). Our government — with the blessings of the “liberal” public — will ignore other emerging human rights nightmares. And the worst regimes on the planet will rest easy, confident that since we botched Iraq, their torture and repression can continue unabated.
