In Slate last week, Christopher Hitchens directs our attention to the one quiet canine in the Middle East dogfight: Iraq. Iraqis are angry about many things, but they are not trying to topple their government, not being gunned down by tyrants, not in danger of turning Islamist, or of civil war. Their tyrant is gone. They had al Qaeda, thank you, and decided to toss it. They faced civil war, and decided to end it. Between 2005-2008, Iraq was a hell-hole in a region that seemed outwardly stable. Today, it seems the one stable spot in a region convulsing, with unpleasant outcomes as real possibilities.
At present, the main result of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to dispose of its leader seems to have been to induce, prematurely, the crisis now wracking the neighborhood. Iraq had its storm and passed through it, eight years ahead of the rest of the region. And, as Hitch warned us, that storm had to come.
In 2003, Hitchens said Iraq was an catastrophe waiting to happen, with a psychotic sadist in charge who had gassed his own people, an unraveling middle class and civil society, and a civil war in waiting between a ruling and arrogant Sunni minority and a Shia majority that was shunned and despised.
“The consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway,” he told us, correctly. “To suggest that these consequences … are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two: to experience those consequences with an American or international presence, or to watch them unfold.”
Among the consequences were the Sunni refusal to accept a demotion and throw in with al Qaeda, the Sunni rebellion against their atrocities, and their alliance with the Americans, and then with the Shia, to take back their own country.
The result is a form of a federal union, which, despite terrorist acts and a stalemate last year over forming a government, is light years ahead of the rest of the region. “The country’s political class has repeatedly chosen democracy over dictatorship and accommodation over violence,” the Washington Post said last December. It had been “a good year in Iraq.”
It has not been a good year in the rest of the region, but better than it would be if Saddam were in power, and a key Arab state “heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbors’ affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians were still the private property of a sadist crime family,” as Hitchens says.
As it is, the Iraqi invasion spared Libya genocide, as Gadhafi was so spooked by the fate of Saddam and his sons that he gave up his chemical arsenal. As it is, Iraq’s foreign minister has called for Gadhafi’s ouster, and next month it will host the Arab League summit where it will be an example of what democracy looks like and tilt the “axis of local democracy against one-man rule.”
As it is, though Iraq suffered greatly, it might have been worse. Suppose Iraq blew up now, with Saddam still in power. Imagine the worst case in Libya, and expand it by 10. Suppose he used gas. Suppose the Shia rebelled, and the Sunni supported them, and Saddam tried to kill all of them. Suppose Obama felt forced to go in, averting a massacre. Suppose the Sunni stood by Saddam, and a civil war raged.
President Obama and the whole Middle East ought to thank providence for Bush’s “dumb war” of invasion. And possibly, so should Iraq.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
