President Obama went on TV the other night to talk about the end of the combat mission in Iraq, and what he did not say is what very few are saying, least of all the ideologically disturbed, facts-rearranging left.
It is that this was a war that had to be fought. Yes, it was miserably managed for a stretch, but President Bush courageously initiated the tide-turning surge opposed by just about everybody else, including Obama. A consequence is that Americans are safer today than they would have been, along with the rest of the world.
Although his opposition to the war was the main theme of his early presidential campaign, Obama gave little hint in the speech of what he now thought about it. He seemed barely able to stifle a yawn as he correctly praised our soldiers, adding by way of lame conciliation that President Bush also liked them. He told us how much money we had spent on the conflict and said he is now going to focus on the economy.
For a voice of wisdom telling us that even Al Gore would have taken on this war if president, look to Arthur Herman, a historian who notes in a piece available on the Internet how President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Gore were among those once worrying loudly about the need to stop Saddam Hussein from employing his weapons of mass destruction.
When Saddam expelled weapons inspectors in violation of U.N. resolutions, Clinton got serious. On top of a policy of deposing him, Clinton bombed suspected weapons hideouts for four days. The attacks didn't help, and neither did U.N. sanctions that further empowered the dictator. Through crooked deals, Saddam got rich off shipments that were supposed to save the Iraqi people from hunger.
Bush came to power with lots more on his mind than Saddam and little inclination to mess with him. Then came 9/11, and he had to consider that Saddam, a nation-invading, genocidal maniac responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and unendingly hostile to the United States, was harboring an al Qaeda chieftain, had supported terrorist groups and had paid for terrorists to be trained by al Qaeda. Experts said he still had a lot of WMD around.
At Bush's urging, Congress voted to back action against Saddam if he could not otherwise be curbed and Secretary of State Colin Powell convinced the United Nations to adopt a resolution authorizing military intervention if necessary. Though Saddam did allow weapons inspectors back in, his government dodged their demands, and as a U.S. senator named Joseph Biden said, there was "little option but to act."
We did just that, no WMD were found and critics screeched that President Bush lied us into war. In fact, an official search group did find weapons programs in contravention of the resolution. The head of the group thought some WMD remained hidden in Iraq and some had been shipped to Syria. As Herman notes, he told a Senate committee that "the world is far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein."
All could still have been lost if Bush had not faced up to his failures and then faced down widespread opposition in authorizing more combat troops operating under a new policy of keeping neighborhoods safe from terrorists that had been chased away. The effort set the stage for political stability, which remains uncertain.
It's an anti-historical contrivance that this war was an imperialist adventure to secure oil. Wars are always awful, and this one is no exception, though its monetary cost was no more than Obama spent on one ineffectual, politically corrupt stimulus bill. The war reduced risks from deadly menaces and could continue to do more of the same. That now depends on people other than Bush. Let's hope they perform as well as he did.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.
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