El Opinador Compulsivo

Victor Davis Hanson dixit. Las cosas están bien o mal dependiendo de quién las haga:

Punditing the War
I didn’t think it was such a good idea in 1998 to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein, as the Congress, on Bill Clinton’s prompt, sort of authorized. At least that was the force of the 1998 resolution that “urges the president to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.”

George Bush must have agreed as well, since he did not seem to be considering removing Saddam during his first eight months in office —but surely did after 9/11.

Do we remember the rhetoric in those unhappy Clinton years, when Democrats were outdoing each other to threaten war to remove Saddam? Sen. Tom Daschle bragged that his vote for the resolution would “send as clear a message as possible that we are going to force, one way or another, diplomatically or militarily, Iraq to comply with international law.”

If there were any doubt what he meant, he added, “‘Look, we have exhausted virtually our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law. Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so?’ That’s what they’re saying. This is the key question. And the answer is we don’t have another option. We have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily.”

But after 9/11 I felt we were in a global war, both against Islamic fascists and the dictatorial regimes that sponsored them. That Saddam had harbored killers as diverse as Abu Abas, Abu Nidal, the architects of the first World Trade Center bombing, Zarqawi, the al-Qaedists in Kurdistan, and other liaisons with terrorists was, along with the other 22 “whereas” in the October 11, 2002 resolution, enough for me and most other Americans.

Credo
My own position on Saddam was perhaps closest to Sen. Harry Reid, who, in the post 9/11 climate of that October 2002, gave a speech to the effect that Saddam’s violations of the 1991 accords had de facto restarted the war: “That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

Since then, like many conservatives, I have had disagreements with the way the war has been waged—mostly the pull-back from the first siege of Fallujah, the reprieve given to Sadr, the restrictions on the use of American force, the ubiquity of American officials in Iraq on television, and the utopian effort to establish the perfect water, sewer, or electrical system rather than the ad hoc one that would do.

But all that said and done, I continue to believe that by any historical standard none of those mistakes needs doom the effort, nor were they exceptional by the benchmarks of past wars, nor can we lose this war on the battlefield. If Gen. Petraeus fails he will be unfairly forgotten, but if he succeeds, and I think he will, he will be fairly canonized.