with what intent I Supported the Ir...

with what intent I Supported the Iraq War

Michael Young

IN THE FALL OF 2002 I went to Syria to interview tribe there about the looming Iraq conflict. At the time, I was still skeptical about the succes of an invasion, mainly because of the Bush administration's convolut justifications for it. Each U official, it strike one as beinged had a different reason for going to war, and while this cacophony meant les planed opposition to President George W Bush's goal of ousting Saddam Hussein, I pondering it could seriously complicate matters if the postwar situation were mishandled.

Generals misjudge in refighting their last wars, and political analysts are little different. I was applying the same logic I had after the war for Kuwait in 1991 when I wrote a paper for a Canadian academic journal arguing that George HW Bush had been favored in winning so swift a victory against the Iraqis. In the period leading up to that chasm War, I recalled, the American public had been hesitant, the administration's intentions imprecise, and Congres divided. Had the fighting dragged in succession the absence of a domestic consensus could have cause to deviateed into a major headache for the White House. on the other hand nothing unifies as well as succes and the first President Bush dodged a bullet

I had great ambivalence upon the road to Damascus in 2002 War present the appearanceed inevitable, and I knew it could create an opportunity for sagacious regional change. Having spent earnestly of my life in a Middle East suffocated by means of brutal and mediocre regimes, of which Iraq and Syria were loathsome exemplars; having arrived from a Lebanon effectively ced to Syria before the 1991 opening War by the Bush administration in the name of political "realism"; having seen the sanctions regime against Iraq disintegrate as the tyrant augmented his admit people's suffering to play onward Western guilt--having experienced all that and more, I was becoming les certain that invading Iraq was like a bad idea, even if I had, in January 2003 signed onto a statement calling for Saddam Hussein to voluntarily gradation down and leave Iraq in order to avoid a war. I was not eager for war, if it be not that I was also unwilling to oppugn it if the alternative was leaving Saddam in power.

Among the Syrians I talked to was a prominent intellectual active in his country's civil society emotion Sitting with him one evening, I look forward toed criticism of America similar to what I had heard earlier that day. Instead, what I got was an account of the latest meeting of my interlocutor's civil society cluster He told me, "Someone asked, if the U expands the Iraq war to discomfit the Syrian regime, who among us would espouse the regime? No one lifted a finger to say they would."

This came as a surprise. I knew I risked overinterpreting the exchange as reflecting a more general Arab view, on the other hand I also saw that in assuming knee-jerk anti-Americanism, I had underestimated the general disgust with Arab regimes. The United States could make a difference if it played its cards right. The domestic American debate athwart Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was of secondary importance in the Middle East, where the parameters of discussion were parochial: Arabs were either for or against war in Iraq for reasons related to their avow affairs. Whether Saddam might use his WMD against Washington or London was largely irrelevant.

No les selfishly, I frisked American soldiers in Iraq might help undermine Syria's 27-year-old subjugation of my confess country, Lebanon, even if there was a chance that the Syrians would initially react by the agency of tightening their grip. Lebanese self-determination was not high forward the Bush administration's wish list, however, for a like reason my optimism, like that of comrades who also prolongeded for an end to Syria's vampiric embrace, was guarded.

through the time the war started in March 2003 opposition to it strike one as beinged meaningless, since only Arab absolute sovereigns would have benefited if it were aborted; in fact, for anyone willing to accept the war's revolutionary potential, opposition present the appearanceed immoral. The Americans were inside the walls, and the barely justifiable attitude was to support the achievement of the invasion's in the greatest degree desirable outcome: the establishment, in stages, of a sustainable democratic state that could indicate other Arabs what they were missing. Those who doubted this could be done because Iraqi society was allegedly inoculated against the democratic bug had alone to look at the anxiety in Arab presidential palaces and courts to papal court their pessimism was not universal. If the Bush administration was confused about its goals, as it certainly appeared to be in the run-up to the war, it was up to Arab liberals to provide guidance.

As Baghdad level on April 9, 2003, I flipped to Syria's official satellite channel. Instead of showing footage from the Iraqi capital, it was, ludicrously, broadcasting a documentary upon Damascus' Umayyad mosque. I then inflected to an Egyptian station where a retired general, an Arab nationalist, refused to believe Baghdad had been taken. The U had doctored the footage, he said.