A ‘preposterous’ analogy about wars
One can agree with Hugh Bailey (April 17 column, “Recalling a war we’d rather forget,”) that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was beset by mistakes and a venture “we’d rather forget,” while simultaneously finding his suggestion of an equivalence with what Vladimir Putin and Russia are doing in Ukraine way off the mark.
Bailey manages to critique America’s decision to invade Iraq without mentioning the names of Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay. Saddam was a murderous tyrant who, with his Sunni Baath Party, subjugated and brutalized the majority Shiite population of Iraq, as well as the minority Kurds, and persistently threatened and even invaded countries in his region. His sons, who were destined to succeed him as dictators, were notoriously sadistic torturers and murderers who had amassed large personal fortunes through corruption.
After his capture by US-led coalition forces, Saddam was tried by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity. He was accused of committing numerous massacres during his 24-year rule. These included, among others, the 1982 slaughter of Shias in the town of Dujail and the 1988 Halabja massacre, in which he used chemical weapons against a Kurdish town that dared to rise against him. He was convicted and hanged. His sadistic and corrupt sons had been killed in a three-hour firefight with coalition forces in Mosul.
To the extent that the objective of the U.S. invasion was to depose Saddam and his sons, the righteousness of that cause cannot seriously be questioned. The principal fault in the effort did not lie in the objective, but in the utter failure of the Bush Administration to prepare and plan for what would happen after Saddam and his sons were deposed. This was never going to be easy, principally because of the utter folly of the 1916 Sykes-Picot framework under which the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was created by the British and French from parts of the defeated Ottoman Empire following World War I. Most of the ongoing intractable problems in Iraq are directly traceable to geopolitical mistakes made more than 100 years ago.
The American effort in Iraq surely can and should be criticized. But the idea that the U.S. motivations and objectives, or the mistakes and failings in planning and execution, are somehow analogous to what Vladimir Putin and Russia are currently doing in Ukraine is utterly preposterous. As lamentable as the U.S. intervention in Iraq may have been, the fact of the matter is that three horrendously evil human beings were dispatched to their eternal reward and the majority Shiite and minority Kurd populations of Iraq were freed from brutal subjugation. That Iraqis must now somehow resolve the still-existing political problems created by the Sykes-Picot framework is not the fault of America.
Most importantly, though, the U.S. invasion of Iraq deposed a brutal and murderous criminal. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being prosecuted by a brutal and murderous criminal. That’s a big difference.