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May 11, 2005

George H.W. Bush Was Right About Not Invading and Occupying Iraq

Joseph Britt, in a May 10, 2005 post at The Belgravia Dispatch, takes issue with President George W. Bush's suggestion that the the U.S. was partly to blame for the Soviet Union's domination of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II. This the passage that seems to have hit a nerve:

The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

Specifically, Mr. Bush admitted that the U.S. under President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped cause ``one of the greatest wrongs of history'' -- when Mr. Roosevelt signed the Yalta Agreement in 1945 along with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin.

He also said: "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others.'' He was referring to his attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East.

Before taking Mr. Bush to task, Mr. Britt prefaced it with, "I have nothing but praise for President Bush's visits to Latvia, Russia and Georgia this week and the statements he has made in each place -- especially for stating so forthrightly the truth about the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army -- with one exception." In the next paragraph, he asked:

Was the reference to Yalta, in Riga of all places, really necessary? An argument could be made -- not one I'm persuaded by at all, just a plausible argument -- that Roosevelt at Yalta and Truman afterward could have pressed Stalin harder, and successfully, to prevent the absorption of Poland into the Communist bloc. But the Baltic states? How exactly was Roosevelt supposed to prevent Stalin from keeping his armies in countries that far behind the lines and hundreds of miles from the nearest American army?

I dislike bad history, but frankly what bothers me more is this President's tendency to casually trash decisions made by his predecessors. He's already done this with respect to the Middle East, ascribing to American policy the lack of freedom in a part of the world where water has, historically, been more common than freedom and in which the least free states were almost all Soviet clients, not American ones. If he were going to apologize for anything a former President has done, he ought to have apologized for his father's historic loss of nerve and wretched judgment in unilaterally declaring an end to the Gulf War in 1991. So many of the problems we are having in Iraq now are traceable to what the elder Bush did then.

I disagree with Mr. Britt's contention that if President Bush "were going to apologize for anything a former President has done, he ought to have apologized for his father's historic loss of nerve and wretched judgment in unilaterally declaring an end to the Gulf War in 1991." I get the impression that Mr. Britt, like the Neocons behind the current War in Iraq, would have preferred that George Herbert Walker Bush had invaded Iraq during the first Gulf War, overthrew former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and established a puppet regime in Baghdad.

But as the elder Bush states in A World Transformed, which he wrote with Brent Scowcroft,

"trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guidelines about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances , there was no viable "exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles."

Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations Mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish . Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different-and perhaps barren--outcome.

Declaring a cease-fire after 100 days was not "wretched judgment" as Mr. Britt suggests. If anyone should be declared as having "wretched judgment, it's the current president. That was reflected in the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and without a U.N. Mandate. Not only that occupying Iraq is proving difficult and costly. It has spawned an insurgency that's growing daily and deadlier. Thousands of Iraqis have died during the occupation, whether at the hands of the U.S. and its coalition partners or the insurgents. Sadly, the U.S. doesn't care about Iraqis enough to keep count of Iraqi dead.

Finally, Mr. Britt asserts that, "many of the problems we are having in Iraq now are traceable to what the elder Bush did then." Wrong! The U.S. is having problems because it is occupying a foreign nation. No matter how many people welcome invaders, there will always be resistance. If some one invaded and occupied the U.S., many of us would become insurgents. I know I would. Read more of Mr. Britt's post headlined "Excuse me...Yalta."

Posted by Munir Umrani at May 11, 2005 07:32 AM

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