20 years later, no regrets about supporting Iraq war

Of those who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq 20 years ago — not just warmongering neocons like yours truly but also plenty of liberals, such as the current president of the United States — most have disavowed it.

A few of the arguments for doing so are strong. Others, I think, are wrong. And one is dangerous, in ways that misshape our foreign policy debates today.

Among the strong arguments, one is especially compelling to me. If nearly every U.S. government bureaucracy is slow, wasteful and frequently incompetent, how much more so would it be in a country as distant and complex as Iraq?

Around the 10th anniversary of the invasion, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction painted a devastating picture of our efforts. Billions of dollars were wasted on projects that were rarely, if ever, completed. Uncle Sam, whose cruise missiles could destroy Iraqi targets with astounding precision, couldn’t keep the lights on in Baghdad.

Bottom line: Nationbuilding may have been something Washington could do in 1945 in places like Japan, under leaders like Douglas MacArthur. A core lesson of the Iraq War is that we shouldn’t trust ourselves to try it again. We do better as a cop than as a savior.

Those are arguments about the aftermath of the war. What about its conception?

The strongest case against invasion, other than the inevitable and tragic toll in lives, is that it would merely empower Iran. That was the private view of several Israeli policymakers I spoke with at the time, when I was editor of The Jerusalem Post.

But the case looks shaky on closer inspection. Nobody on either side of the debate over the invasion was seriously in favor of strengthening Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Tehran, as some were in the 1980s.

Then there are the weak arguments.

One is that, in failing to adequately anticipate the insurgency that followed the invasion, the U.S. bears the brunt of moral blame for the misery Iraqis endured. In fact, Iraqis suffered horrifically under Hussein and suffered horrifically under the insurgency, and the force that destroyed both was the U.S. military, with tremendous sacrifices by Iraqi security forces.

Another weak argument is that Iraq under Hussein wasn’t a serious geopolitical threat, no matter how badly his forces were damaged in 1991. This ignores the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war, the rape of Kuwait, the Persian Gulf war, the Scud missile attacks on Israel and the Kurdish refugee crisis, to say nothing of his genocidal assaults on his own people.

But if there was one indisputably real WMD in Iraq, it was Hussein himself. Until his downfall, he put everyone and everything he encountered at risk.

Finally, there is the argument that George W. Bush and his administration lied about the intelligence. I think they sincerely believed the (mis) judgments of the CIA, which, as the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report concluded, sincerely believed in them itself.

Readers will want to know whether, knowing what I know now, I still would have supported the decision to invade. Not for the reasons given at the time. Not in the way we did it. But on the baseline question of whether Iraq, the Middle East and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant, my answer remains yes.