September 11th and Iraq

An article in today’s Washington Post (Antiwar Activists Decry Media's Role in Promoting Pentagon Event), covers objections to news media support for a Department of Defense event “to remember the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and to support the troops in Iraq.” The article contained a quote from an anti-war activist: “Because they're promoting a lie, that the war in Iraq had anything to do with September 11."

Did Iraq’s leadership, did Saddam Hussein, meet with Osama bin Laden and help plan the September 11th attacks? No. However, Saddam’s hostile regime was directly responsible for the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, one of al Qaeda’s spurs to action. Iraq also continued to rouse Iran’s defensive impulses, causing further build-up of weapons in the region. And Iraq did flout United Nations sanctions to cooperate with weapons inspection teams, as well as international norms prohibiting assassination of national leaders. Iraq was a problem that was not going away prior to September 11th. Instead, leading nations around the world were allowing Iraq to slide back into civilized society, through their inaction over Iraq’s continued and escalating defiance of post-Gulf War rules.

After September 11th, the Bush administration decided to unseat the Taliban in Afghanistan – a worthy cause for reasons other than disrupting al Qaeda operations. Since the Taliban took power in the mid-1990s, they had systematically laid waste to human rights, especially with regard to women, and irreplaceable cultural artifacts. They were barbarians, and it is to the world’s shame that inertia allowed their rule to continue as long as it did. But Afghanistan is only one piece of the Middle East puzzle, a larger problem that involves numerous countries, authoritarian regimes, religious influences, economic stagnation, and the need to educate and employ a restless populace. For years, America was content to support the Saudi monarchy so long as oil continued to flow. That the house of Saud needed to hand over their mosques to Sunni fundamentalists to make the deal palatable was none of our concern. Until two towers collapsed, a wing of the Pentagon crumbled, and a plane’s wreckage burned in a Pennsylvania field.

Of course oil is the basis of American interests in the region. Were it not for oil, the fuel that drives the world economy, the Middle East would hold our attention as much as sub-Saharan Africa, which is to say not much at all. But a geological roll of the dice gifted the area with vital resources, and as preeminent nation in the world, the United States must ensure continued access to oil. To do that, a broader American strategy was put into place, one that could address both the growth of Islamic dissidents, the pool where al Qaeda finds recruits, and also the delicate political-military balance of the region.

Looking at the region after the fall of the Taliban, the next major nexus point was obviously Iraq. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in 1990, had used chemical weapons on minority Kurds in the late 1980s, had invaded Iran early in the decade, leading to years of warfare and attrition. Negotiations had proven fruitless due to lack Iraqi cooperation – there was no information to indicate that the regime wanted to change internally, and their past history of evading arms control restrictions and creating illegal networks to funnel weapons into the country meant that any proclamation about disarmament was eyed with skepticism.

Given the horrid way the Ba’athist regime treated the Iraqi population, I cannot regret that they were overthrown. That insurgents and malcontents from the former elites proceeded to institute guerilla war was not unexpected, and better planning could certainly have minimized some of the post-invasion bombings and other disturbances. But now that the U.S. is involved in the country, sponsor of a new democratic government, we cannot afford to pull out before stability is achieved. Were we to do so, then the Osama bin Laden’s and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s of the world would sweep in and create another Taliban-era Afghanistan, a place where religious fundamentalists could plot their next attack on the degenerate West.

The war in Iraq definitely had something to do with September 11 – those attacks were America’s wake up call that the status quo in the Middle East could not be permitted to continue.

[transferred from a now-defunct location]