(This entry is specifically motivated by this post titled "Debating the Invasion of Iraq -- Three Questions for the Pro-War Blogosphere")
First, assuming that you were in favor of the invasion of Iraq at the time of the invasion, do you believe today that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea? Why/why not?
It was a good idea; Saddam Hussein is no longer in power and can no longer do to the Iraqi people and the people of the world what he'd been doing.
Incidentally, I have to question the reasoning skills of a lot of the people who were in favor of "the invasion" at the time but now retroactively opposed to it. If your initial support was based on intelligence estimates that we now think are false, that's fine. But if your entire objection is, "Things are just too bad," then I have to ask: What did you expect? Was Baghdad supposed to turn into Detroit overnight?
Of course you can turn that around and ask me: Just how bad would things have to get before I thought we'd made a mistake? 20,000 American casualties? 50,000? Of course there's a point at which things would be so bad that would say, "in hindsight, this was a mistake." We're nowhere near that point.
Second, what reaction do you have to the not-very-upbeat news coming of Iraq these days, such as the stories I link to above?
Honest reaction? A resigned sigh and an idle hope that things will be better in a few months.
Third, what specific criteria do you recommend that we should use over the coming months and years to measure whether the Iraq invasion has been a success?
Simple idea, though probably almost impossible to nail down the details: Compare quality of life now to what we'd reasonably expect quality of life to be with Saddam still in power, undeterred. (I claim this is the right comparison; if you say that the other option is "find some other way to deter Saddam," have fun explaining what that "some other way" would be and proving your case. Make sure you note -- and explain -- the 12 years of sanctions and UN resolutions that Saddam openly flouted.)
1. Iraqi survival: How many people a day did Saddam kill? It shouldn't be too hard to quantify this. Include everything from specific genocidal incidents to all the starving infants for whose deaths he had the gall to blame the UN (all while he was taking the food-for-oil money and spending it, not on feeding Iraqis but on weaponry and on monuments to himself). Compare that to the casualty rate produced by these insurgencies.
2. Threat to us, posed by Saddam. Consider the magnitude of harm he could have eventually caused us, discounted by how likely or unlikely it was that he'd actually attack. Here everyone cites the lack of WMD as dispositive, but remember: He'd already gassed his own people. He'd already gassed other people. Remember everything we knew he had in his arsenal as of 1991 that's still unaccounted for. Going from whatever threat level this represents to zero definitely counts for something.
3. Threat (or lack thereof) posed by anyone who saw Saddam as an example: Remember when Khadady suddenly decided to come clean? Maybe this was just really good diplomacy on our part, or maybe he saw that capture of Saddam and put two and two together. I certainly know what I believe. There's no good way to measure this kind of deterrent effect, but we all know it's there. On this point, I think Libya alone constitutes success. The only thing that would counteract the above is if we become theatened by some particular country where one could reasonably argue that we wouldn't face that threat had we not gone into Iraq.
4. U.S. casualties. Of course, whether liberating Iraq was "a success" really means asking whether what we accomplish will have been worth the lives (mainly U.S. soldiers' lives) it cost to do so. How do you put a price on this? It's difficult. I will say that right now we're in the neighborhood of one U.S. casualty 2 U.S. casualties (as the original post itself points out) per day. That's totally more-or-less consistent with what one could have expected 18 months ago, or so I claim. I don't know what the breakeven point would be but as long as the rate stays below around two a day, we're well below that point.
(Yes, these corrections to my post seriously weaken this point of the argument. Still, by historical standards we're really doing astonishingly well on U.S. casualty rate.)
Of course, none of this yet even considers whether we're succeeding or failing at the rebuilding effort. That's because even a colossal failure at rebuilding wouldn't mean that the "invasion", proper, was a bad idea or a failure; it would just mean that the rebuilding was a failure. Feel free to make the claim that something about our military action itself is what actually doomed the rebuilding; maybe you can make that case, but since I'm not sure how it will go, I'll wait to see someone else make that case and respond as needed.
Posted by Matt Bruce at September 27, 2004 12:28 PM