John Kerry said the right thing yesterday about the necessity of the war in Iraq, but it inevitably leads to an awkward question.
“Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.
[…]
“Today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is no — because a Commander-in-Chief’s first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe.”
What’s wrong this? Not a darn thing. Americans were given a series of reasons that an immediate attack was needed against an imminent threat. All of those reasons turned out to be completely wrong. To say that we should have done everything exactly the same is to prove that Bush can’t even identify problems, better yet solve them.
But, does this mean that a President Kerry would have allowed Saddam Hussein to remain the dictator of Iraq? Almost certainly, the answer is yes. Does this pose a political problem? It shouldn’t, but it might.
Kerry’s speech in New York yesterday made it clear that there wouldn’t have been a war in Iraq if he were the commander-in-chief. That, of course, is an encouraging sign about Kerry’s judgment — no preventive invasion means no debacle, no needless loss of life, no resentment against the U.S. throughout the Middle East, no exorbitant financial costs, etc.
And yet it also means that Saddam Hussein would still be the brutal and vicious dictator of Iraq today. For Bush, this offers an effective political, or at least rhetorical, tool: Under Kerry, Saddam stays in power. Under Bush, Saddam doesn’t. Saddam’s a monster, so Bush’s way is better.
Except it isn’t. Bush’s way, as we all now know, is to mislead the world about the nature of the threat, send too-few troops into battle without the resources they need, intentionally forgo meaningful international cooperation, mishandle reconstruction efforts, torture innocent detainees, make no meaningful plans beyond expectations of being welcomed as liberators, ignore the possibility of an insurgency, and bungle the entire occupation. But, Bush reminds us, under Kerry’s way, Saddam stays in power; so therefore, Kerry’s way is, to borrow a Bush phrase, a “bad thing.”
The insinuation is always the same: to condemn the war in Iraq is to be implicitly pro-Saddam. But this is where the Republicans’ argument falls apart.
Yes, under Kerry’s approach, Saddam stays in power. In check and powerless, but in power. But if we carry this thinking forward a bit, under Bush’s approach, Kim Jung Il, a madman with nuclear weapons, is still in power in North Korea. Fidel Castro, a cruel thug who has repressed his people 90 miles from our shore for over four decades, is still in power in Cuba. Atrocious dictatorships still exist around the globe, and under Bush’s vision of American foreign policy, that’s acceptable.
Does this mean that Bush is implicitly pro-Kim Jung Il or pro-Castro? Of course not; that’s absurd. Just because Bush hasn’t used the power of the U.S. military to rid the world of various monsters doesn’t mean that he supports their tyrannical rule or repressive regimes; it means that the U.S. simply can’t rid the entire world of every fiend. We can advance our interests and promote liberal democracy, but Bush can’t invade and occupy every dictatorship on the planet.
And neither can Kerry. Had we pursued a more sensible approach, the Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, the world would be more stable, and the threats to the United States would be less perilous. But that doesn’t make Kerry any more pro-Saddam than it makes Bush pro-Castro.
The GOP would counter, of course, that Saddam was a unique threat, unlike, say, Kim Jung Il. That might persuade a few uninformed voters, but most of us realize that’s complete nonsense. North Korea has not only threatened it neighbors, it has the worst weapon of mass destruction of them all; its leaders have ejected U.N. weapons inspectors; and it’s filled with a populace that effectively lives in a prison masquerading as a nation-state. Saddam, meanwhile, with no WMD, no ties to 9/11, and no meaningful relationship with al Queda, wasn’t a more significant threat; he wasn’t a threat at all.
I realize that there are some who find Bush’s oversimplified worldview — Saddam’s gone, so the ends justify the means — persuasive enough to support the war and question Kerry. But Kerry is not only correct on the merit of his approach to national security threats, he’s right to insist that it would have been preferable to leave a feeble Saddam in power than to pursue this disastrous war.