December 12, 2005

In an unusual and agreeable move, President Bush [on this date] took some questions from his audience for a speech in Philadelphia, an audience that was (reportedly) not pre-screened. As a gesture of reaching beyond his insular White House bubble, Bush’s question-taking was welcome. However, I thought that his answers were incomplete, especially his answer about why his administration continually associates Saddam Hussein with 9/11. Here is how Bloomberg News reported Bush’s answer:

Asked why he and other members of his administration continue linking the conflict in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the U.S., Bush said the attacks in 2001 “changed my look on foreign policy.”

Most of the world agreed “that Saddam Hussein was a threat,” Bush said. “The 9/11 attacks accentuated that threat, as far as I'm concerned.”

...

Bush said he had no regrets about going to war, even after finding the threat from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was empty.

“Knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again,” Bush said in response to one question. “Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country.”

[Applause from audience.]

Dear Mr. President:

You say that America is “a safer country” because you overthrew Saddam Hussein in an unprovoked military action. All right, that is your opinion. But how would you back that opinion up? What can you point to that would quantify how much safer America is than it was when Hussein was in power? And saying that the Iraqis will soon be holding democratic elections isn’t a good enough answer; there’s no guarantee that Iraqi elections will create a country that doesn’t produce terrorists. I don’t ask this question as any great fan of Saddam Hussein, and so far, the fact that this villainous tyrant is now out of power is the very thin silver lining to the dark cloud that is Iraq. As you know, Mr. President, simply saying that something is true doesn’t make it so.

It could be argued that America is less safe now than it was when Hussein held Iraq in his iron fist. Even leaving aside the obvious example that our brave troops are in harm’s way now that Hussein has been overthrown, the reverse of what you say may very well be the more demonstrable position.

By deciding to go to war in a hasty manner, with an insufficient number of soldiers, poorly funded, and without a true international coalition to support us with troops and treasure, you have now strained our armed forces, strained our economy, and strained this country’s international standing. By ordering troops into Iraq, you also stretched thin the U.S. forces in Afghanistan — a nation that actually was directly involved in 9/11 — and made their job of rebuilding the post-Taliban country more difficult than it needed to be.

And by invading a Muslim country that our troops couldn’t leave in a timely way, our military presence is now viewed with suspicion by the Arab world as an army of occupation, and this perception doubtlessly encourages Muslims around the world to sneak into Iraq and help fuel the insurgency. How does any of this make us safer?

Also, by rushing to war against a nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist, you enabled Iran and North Korea, two countries with better documented unconventional-weapons systems, to resume theirs. Now, with our soldiers and diplomats distracted by the chaos in Iraq, it seems more likely (but hopefully not inevitable) for Iran or North Korea to deliver a nuclear device into the hands of anti-U.S. terrorists. Again, how does this make us safer?

As monstrous as his dictatorship was, at least Saddam Hussein kept a lid on the ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq that get in the way of smoothly establishing a successful democracy there, the same tensions that now put our troops in danger. Though cruel, Hussein maintained a secular state in a widening sea of Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorists find greater refuge in this theocratic philosophy, I would submit, than they ever found in Hussein’s regime. Rather than “accentuating” any perceived threat by Hussein, the 9/11 attacks demonstrated the destructive religious forces that Hussein’s dictatorship kept in check. Once again, how are we now safer?

It’s hard to say this stuff without sounding like a supporter of tyrannical regimes, which I most definitely am not. Unfortunately, not every place on the planet is conducive to U.S.-style democracy, as much as I wish it were otherwise. If the country of Iraq had not been artificially carved by colonial Britain out of three different ethnic regions of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, the history of the land may have played itself out differently, and a dictator like Hussein might never have emerged. But your administration didn’t seem all that interested in Iraqi history. In particular, it didn’t seem to concern itself with how post-invasion U.S. forces would pacify an ethnically heterogenous country vastly different from the more homogenous countries of Germany and Japan, countries successfully pacified by the Allies after World War II. But perhaps democracy could have eventually arisen in Iraq without us invading it.

And for all your uncompromising talk about America not abiding this particular dictator, Mr. President, he was abided by several U.S. administrations, including your father’s, before his fatal mistake of invading Kuwait in 1990. Also, this particular dictator may be gone, but others still exist. Do you propse overthrowing them militarily as well?

So, Mr. President, I strongly question your unsupported assertion that America is now safer than it was when Hussein was still in power. The next time that you make this dubious claim, I would like to see hard evidence for it.