Hitchens and Iraq

Two events this week -- the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the death of Christopher Hitchens -- have brought to mind something that has always bothered me in conversations about the Iraq war: the fact that the "pro-war" side is often made to answer for the crimes of the other side. In the case of Hitchens, a general criticism is that he never changed his mind on Iraq despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed, maimed, or forced to flee the country. Quite often he is accused of having blood on his hands. Here's one good example.

There are, in my mind, two possible answers to this. The first is to turn the logic on its head. If it is true that removing Hussein from power unleashed a "quagmire" in Iraq that could only be resolved when the power vacuum had been filled, then this was inevitable. Hussein was not going to live forever, and there would likely have been a protracted power struggle involving mass amounts of civilians deaths whenever he passed on. In which case the presence of large numbers of American troops may have had something of a pacifying effect; as bad as Iraq was, it wasn't Rwanda or Sudan. It may be true that the presence of foreign occupiers was what was driving the violence, but there are good reasons to think that that is not the case. There were different strong factions within the country, from the Kurds to the Sadrists to the Baathists and others, with fundamentally different interests and a strong desire to control the mechanism of the state to improve their own standing. There were a number of regional powers that would have been happy to encourage violence and instability in Iraq both as a method of proxy warfare and to prevent a strong Iraq from materializing and threatening their interests in the future. It simply is not clear that there was any realistic counterfactual scenario in which there was not large-scale bloodshed in Iraq.

And could you imagine how Hussein would have responded to an Arab Spring in his country?

The second is to flip the logic entirely. The groups most responsible for the violence in Iraq are the groups that Hitchens wanted to fight. The people Hitchens wanted to defend from these groups were the civilians being victimized by them. The level of violence that occurred in Iraq following the invasion can thus taken as vindication for Hitchens: these groups will use violence against civilians or governments whenever it is tactically advantageous to do so, and therefore they should be obliterated. Carrying that out will have costs, but failing to do so will have even greater costs, and for a longer period of time.

Many of the other criticisms of Hitchens' support for the war -- "blood for oil", "imperialism", your typical warmed-over '60s Marxist rhetoric -- have also turned out to be vapid. (Although I do recall Hitchens making the argument that if we were going to fight for any materialist reason, securing the supplies of energy that fuel the global economy was a pretty good one.) And as Nick Cohen once wrote of anti-war protests in London, it was pretty odd to see a bunch of leftists marching in opposition of a war against a fascist regime. It is true that the Bush administration made many excruciating mistakes, such as not getting the electricity back on quickly, or protecting the National Museum. Probably the biggest one was appoint Bremer as Viceroy, and then letting him screw up everything he possibly could. But these were actually less inevitable than the counterfactual that the internal politics of Iraq would have remained peaceful in the absence of invasion. And now there is some real hope that a stable state that is responsive to its citizens will emerge. That would have been exceptionally unlikely in any other state of the world.

Perhaps these reasons are not sufficient for supporting the war in retrospect. But too many people are too glib about it now. It's not enough to simply say it was a "mistake" and let it go at that.