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What Iraq and History Teach Us Barry Farber He was probably the most honest of the old men hanging out in rocking chairs around the stove in the rear of the general store in rural North Carolina. He yawned, looked at his watch, and then declared, "Well, it's 7:30. I'm going on home and if dinner ain't ready I'm gonna raise hell and if it is, I ain't gonna eat it!" That's the way I feel the majority of you are treating me and my kind. I am a neocon. I favored the invasion of Iraq. I thought it would all be a cakewalk. I thought the Iraqi masses would welcome us as liberators and we could finance the whole deal with liberated Iraqi oil. And I'm one neocon who won't melt away like some wicked witch when you point out how differently things seem to have worked out. The most unchallenged cliché in world affairs is the oft-repeated warning by George Santayana that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Sure, I thought Saddam Hussein had WMD, but that was far from my main reason for favoring his overthrow. Look at the past, the way Santayana and everybody else insists we should.
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Didn't Saddam's forces use poison gas against the Iranians and even against Iraqi Kurds? Didn't Israeli planes destroy Saddam's atomic bomb factory in Orirak in 1991? Didn't every intelligence agency on earth agree that Iraq had WMD? But neither Saddam's WMD nor his possible threat to America were my paramount reasons for favoring military intervention. To me the "slam-dunk" was after American and coalition forces wrested Afghanistan from the Taliban and al-Qaida could no longer operate there, I figured bin Laden needed another country if he intended to remain a successful enemy of the United States. Yes, you can make serious mischief operating from caves with cell phones, but to plan and pull off 9/11s you need a country. You need mininsties, chanceries, treasuries, embassies, laboratories and "official" forgery of documents.
You need a police force to chase five thousand peasants out of a valley if the terrorists need a new training camp. I saw Iraq as the country most likely to offer itself to al-Qaida. Look at history. Saddam had much more reason to hate America than bin Laden ever did. America helped bin Laden eject the Soviets from Afghanistan. America destroyed Saddam's army while ejecting him from Kuwait in Desert Storm in 1991. You often hear that Saddam, the secular Moslem and bin Laden, the fundamentalist, were irreconcilable foes who could never join forces. To me that argument is weightless. Didn't capitalist America side with Soviet communism in World War 11? If Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs can team up so seamlessly against Israel, why couldn't they join likewise against America? No matter how warped, distorted, freakish, and discredited you find my views now, I'm actually guilty of nothing but heeding history. All you can say is, "Things didn't work out that way." I can say a lot more.
I can wrap myself in the robes of Santayana. History, if not headlines, is all on my side. Why did I expect the invasion to be a cakewalk? History teaches us that in all the annals of Iraqi military history, there's not even one single proud page. Saddam's unskilled attack on Iran in 1980 consumed over a million lives but ground gained was, like football, measured in yards. Ask any Israeli who faced Iraqi troops in their War of Independence in 1948 and they will tell you there were two kinds of Iraqis in that fight; those who ran, and those who threw their boots away so they could run faster. And I saw nothing in the achievements of Saddam Hussein to suggest he'd found a way to induce any higher motivation among his fighting men. Indeed, the invasion of Iraq was a cakewalk. Anti-war critics were already crowing that American forces were "bogged down in a quagmire" in the first few days of the invasion. It turns out they were waiting out a sandstorm. Why did I think the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators? Again, I shield myself from the frost of your contempt beside the fireplace of history. Oppression invites liberation. History teaches us that most people living under dreadful dictatorships welcome liberation. Surely in 1945 the populations of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece — all the countries enslaved by the Nazis, welcomed the Allied troops as liberators. And when European communism collapsed the peoples of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania — all of eastern Europe — rejoiced and hailed America as the great liberator who for more than four decades had "stayed the course" against Soviet expansionism. To this day President George W. Bush's approval rating in what used to be communist Europe is higher than it is, was, or ever will be in the United States. By the way, according to the dazzlingly high Iraqi voter turnout, by far most Iraqis do consider themselves liberated from Saddam Hussein. America staged the elections. History teaches us those who view the foreign troops as unwelcome don't take part in their enterprises. Ah, but shouldn't I have forseen the eruption of violence between the Sunni and Shiite Muslims? History, which we're constantly scolded for ignoring, reveals countless cases of rival factions; be they religious, ethnic, political, or whatever: giving way to joy at the fall of a hated dictator. Just as underbrush gives way to the bulldozer, even serious rivalries traditionally dissolve in the face of something as monumental as having liberation from a Saddam Hussein handed to you by well-meaning foreigners. Can you name one single country liberated from Naziism or communism or any other oppession in which one faction then turned against their liberators by killing as many of their own countrymen as possible hoping the resultant hostility would becloud the image of the liberators? History is no help there. That's new. So, just as that old Carolina codger was going to hit his wife with a no-win scenario, I feel equally victimized. You complain about those who don't heed the lessons of history. And then you blast us neocons for studying history too well. That Santayana quote is both the most oft-repeated and the most unchallenged cliché in world affairs. That lofty declaration is thrown around in many different wordings; the most common probably being, "Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." Is Santayana's throne in immortality big enough to accommodate a companion corollary, namely, "Those who heed history most carefully may also be doomed when history suddenly decides not to repeat itself?"
Editor's note:
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