Except, oddly, the war doesn’t look so bad to those closest to it. “Those of us who actually have a chance to go out and go on patrols and meet the Iraqi army and Iraqi police and go on patrols with them, we are very satisfied with the way things are going here,” Capt. Sherman Powell told the Today show recently. “We are confident that if we’re allowed to finish the job we started, we’ll be very proud of it, and our country will be proud of us for doing it.” Finishing the job is the key.
A popular bumper sticker claims, “War is not the Answer.” But that depends on the question. If the question is: “How can we eliminate Saddam Hussein, a man who killed 300,000 people, and replace him with a democratic government that we may be able to deal with?” then war was the only answer because, without the invasion, nothing would have changed in Iraq.
For years, we had tried to work through the United Nations Security Council. Saddam simply ignored 17 resolutions ordering him to prove he’d disarmed. He supported terrorists and he was a threat to the United States. Military action was the only reasonable response.
The better bumper sticker question would be: “Which country is likely to be better off in five years, Iran or Iraq?” Of course all that would never fit on a bumper sticker. But if it did the answer would be clear.
In spite of all the recent hemming and hawing over the proposed Iraqi constitution, Iraq is likely to be a constitutional democracy in 2008. Iran’s likely to be a virtual dictatorship, under the control of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or, if he dies, his religious successor.
Those who bet in 1997 that Iran would change under Khatami are probably broke now. And although Iraq is, in a way, broken, that break with Saddam and the past has opened a door to the future. In 2013, we may well be asking not, “Why did we invade Iraq?” but “Why didn’t we use our military to prevent Iran from going nuclear?”