Remember how I said that Thomas Freidman vacillates between genius and incoherence? Go over to the NYTimes right now, and read some of the former:
…Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.
(fixed the link; thanks, Dan!) Continued…
The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn’t enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there – a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things “martyrs” was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such “martyrs” was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.
The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don’t believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government – and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen – got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.
I can’t believe this isn’t all over…go read the whole thing, and tell your friends.
Working link: Because We Could. It could easily be argued that the Iraq war was a kind of “broken windows” neighborhood clean-up. The idea is going around lefty circles that Saddam was a “scapegoat” for 9/11 and our failure to find Osama, but the truth has more to do with the tolerance of misbehavior. The Saddam regime had flaunted its flouting of norms of international behavior, apparently certain it would never be called on this. That provided breathing-space for other misbehavior, and allowed some pretty radical ideas to be presented as moderate by comparison.
I find it remarkable, every day, to hear reports from Baghdad: 1991 we were told, repeatedly, that we “didn’t want to see American boys patrolling the streets of Baghdad”, as if it were some bogeyman nightmare-land on par with the Nostromo in Alien. Yet here we are, and oddly, it isn’t so bad. Oh, it could still go disastrously wrong; we’re not out of that woods yet. But it has to worry lots of people that the US has rediscovered its confidence (even if, at times, there is overconfidence).
Thus the irony of 9/11 is that suddenly, patrolling the streets of Baghdad didn’t seem so scary anymore, compared with the towers coming down.
“flaunting the flouting” Great phrase there. Darn, it’s good to see someone else who still remembers those are two distinct words!
Tom Friedman, the Kelvim Escobar of the New York Times. Proving it again in this column. Gotta keep him on the roster because of his raw stuff. Just don’t make him your closer.
This is not exactly news. That this was the main reason for the war was obvious from the very beginning. Since 9-11 I knew we had to hit them and hit them hard to disabuse the terrorist of their Hollywood version of American resolve in response to serious threat. Saddam was an easily justifiable and hence obvious target. There were discussions along those lines on Samizdata and other blogs months ago. The real news is that Friedman wrote it in plain language and that NYT published it.
Yes, many blogs – including mine – made the same argument (part of why I’m happy to see it become more common). But there’s a dramatic difference when it becomes a part of mainstream discourse, which Friedman has now helped do.
That’s a damn good thing, and I’m happy to recognize it.