When US soldiers extracted former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from his hiding hole outside Tikrit on Dec. 13, they also punctured a political argument that had achieved undeserved prominence. The argument assumed that ideologues in the administration of President George W. Bush had led the US into an inescapable quagmire in pursuit of an unrealistic vision. It concluded that the US should abandon Iraq at the first opportunity.
To such thinking, images of the Iraqi tyrant wretchedly surrendering lend useful perspective.
Doggedness ridiculed
For weeks, opponents of the invasion of Iraq had ridiculed the doggedness with which the administration stuck by its agenda. They portrayed the mission in Iraq as a deadly experiment in imposed democracy by a cabal of intellectuals they called "neoconservatives." They accused the neocons of contriving a case for deposing Saddam out of exaggerations about weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism and of naively expecting Iraqis to welcome coalition troops as liberators, not murder them with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. As postinvasion casualties increased, as weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, and as questions lingered about Saddam's ties to terrorists, many of the adherents of this view urged the administration to call the whole thing a mistake and withdraw. And as the administration held course, they increasingly complained about troops dying in empty service to flawed ideology.
Success, however, vindicates strategy and the thinking behind it. Saddam's capture makes what invasion opponents disparaged as allegiance to a bad idea look more like admirable perseverance toward righteous goals, however challenging.
Inevitably, postinvasion Iraq is a mess. Given sufficient effort, however, messes give way to order. The capture of a mass murderer—fittingly described as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction—is an important part of that effort in Iraq.
In fact, Saddam's imprisonment isn't the only good news from the beleaguered country. Power generation is rising and at times has exceeded preinvasion levels. Despite sabotage, oil production has reached 2.2 million b/d, exports 1.7 million b/d. Since the end of Saddam's regime, spending on public health has increased by a factor of 26, doctors' salaries by a factor of 8. Schools are getting new textbooks. Thousands of teachers and school administrators are receiving training in modern education. Yes, guerrilla and terrorist attacks continue and might increase for a while. With Iraqis no longer having to fear Saddam's return, however, good news should outweigh the bad.
Perseverance yields progress. Proposals of those who misconstrue it would have very different outcomes. Retreat from Iraq before Dec. 13, for example, might have made it possible for Saddam to return to power or at least encouraged him to try. It would have cursed Iraqis to a bloody power struggle if not more torture, rape, and murder and put Iraq's neighbors back in jeopardy. And capitulation by the US to guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings would have alienated allies around the Persian Gulf and intensified the terrorist threat. Perseverance thus has proven to be superior both as an interpretation of US behavior and as a coalition strategy.
If there was a disadvantage to Saddam's capture it was that the attention it attracted obscured another important development. The capture coincided with reports of the discovery of documents establishing that Mohammed Atta, suspected of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US, had been trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, a Palestinian terrorist. If true, the knock-the-neocons argument against US military action against Iraq weakens not only because it confuses perseverance with dogmatism but also because it's factually wrong.
Questions necessary
Especially concerning military invasion, questions about motives are legitimate and necessary. To some observers, officially stated US motives—combating terrorism and liberating Iraqis—have never sufficed. Fair enough.
But the accusation that the US was keeping troops in Iraq only because villainous intellects in the Bush administration had trapped themselves in a mistake was uniquely destructive. Like many other arguments for retreat, it hinged on assumptions repudiated by events. But it went a step further by presuming away simple perseverance. Such an assertion of futility belongs nowhere near a project that was never going to be easy. That it has fallen with Saddam upholds the essential ambition of Iraqi reconstruction: hope.
