Jonathan Gurwitz: Two years later, does U.S. still belong in Iraq?

Jonathan Gurwitz: Two years later, does U.S. still belong in Iraq?

Web Posted: 03/20/2005 12:00 AM CST

San Antonio Express-News

A question is popping up around the globe as the topic of cocktail conversations. Even in countries where cocktails aren't served as a matter of religious propriety, people are incredulously asking, "Could George W. Bush be right?"

Youssef Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, now head of a consulting firm in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, writing in the Washington Post:

"Regardless of Bush's intentions — which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion — the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills.

"It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right."

Columnist Richard Gwyn, a Bush and Iraq war critic, writing in the Toronto Star:

"Here it is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right.

"President George W. Bush wasn't right to invade Iraq. His justifications for doing so were (almost all of them) either frivolous, in comparison to the scale of the venture, or were outright fraudulent.

"Having conquered Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, Bush and his officials and generals then made every blunder that could be imagined by an occupying power, adding several original ones of their own.

"But on the defining, fundamental question, Bush was right."

Journalist Claus Christian Malzahn writing for Der Spiegel Online:

"When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall and demanded that Gorbachev 'tear down this wall,' he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators.

"When the voter turnout in Iraq recently exceeded that of many Western nations, the chorus of critique from Iraq alarmists was, at least for a couple of days, quieted. Just as quiet as the chorus of Germany experts on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, when the Wall fell. Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on. Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then."

From Casablanca to Kabul, people who were supposedly genetically predisposed to suffer despotism in silence are suddenly sounding the chorus of freedom.

If this groundswell for democratic change is causing Arab, Canadian and European critics to feel somewhat conflicted about Bush, it's giving bitter-enders on the American left — some of whom are still replaying the past two presidential elections — and cynics on the right a case of cognitive dissonance.

Bush, after all, is supposedly an evangelical simpleton and a tool of oil-producing, Arab autocrats or Zionist imperialists, depending upon the source.

But such ideological fantasies are now running headlong into a brick wall of historical facts. And so the critics must decide.

Are they on the side of millions of Afghans and Iraqis breaking the chains of despotism, Lebanese shaking off the occupation of a dictatorship, Egyptians asserting their political liberty and women across the Middle East claiming their basic human rights?

Or to ensure that nothing positive accrues to the despised Bush and to fulfill the Cassandra-like prophesies about the war in Iraq, are they on the side of homicidal religious fanatics, human rights criminals, racists and sexists?

To pose the question this way is a mistake. It borrows from Bush’s principle, “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” Where is the voice that says, “An aggressive war is wrong, period.”? It doesn’t matter what comes out of the war: it’s just wrong. Reagan himself held to three simple moral principles that he learned from his mom: Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan for you, for all of us. Everything works out for the best in the end. I believe those things, and if I believe them I have to acknowledge that they apply to big things like the war in Iraq. But the war itself is evil, and should not have happened. We can see, sixty years later, that the Holocaust and World War II had many good outcomes, but they were evil and they never should have happened. The Crucifixion, which we remember this Good Friday, had an unbelievably good outcome for all of us, but it was an evil act and it never should have happened. No one can justify it. The same reasoning applies to our aggressive war in Iraq. No amount of good consequences can ever justify evil acts. Period.

Supporters of the Bush Doctrine would be wrong to declare as democratic faits accomplis the astounding developments in the Middle East. The likelihood is great that events in the region will more closely resemble Tiananmen Square than the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Far more wrong, however, are administration opponents, blinded by ideological zeal, who are unwilling to grant any credit to Bush for these astounding developments, recognize the American military's role in shattering the Middle Eastern mantle of oppression or cheer the brave people of the region risking their lives to transform their moribund societies.