Iraq war is won - but was it right to have fought it?

A review of Arthur Borden's book, A Better Country - why America was right to confront Iraq

As some other commentators have said, you can tell the Iraq war is going well because the MSM are reporting hardly anything from the country. Furthermore, Michael Yon has reported that he recently visited an infantry unit whose soldiers, having been there eight months, have not fired a rifle shot in anger. I linked earlier this month to a story that the troops of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), based at Ft Campbell Ky., are are being brought home early because of a continuing decline in violence and increasing stability of Iraqi life where the brigades were deployed.

Success has a thousand fathers, goes the saying, while failure is an orphan. All indications are now that the Baathist dead enders in Iraq gave up a long time ago, the execution of Saddam Hussein having taken the wind out of their sails pretty completely. Besides, even the Sunnis finally figured out that the days of Sunni dominance were gone forever. As for al Qaeda, the ones left alive have either been rendered ineffective or have fled the country. Again, the Sunni sheiks and tribal leaders concluded that al Qaeda's brutality and murderousness took the shine off the promised Islamist utopia, so they joined, however warily, to ally with Shia-controlled Iraqi Security Forces or American forces. Al Qaeda's attrition rate has been so high that a Qaeda in Iraq is in the terminal stages of a demographic death spiral. Always consisting of more foreigners than native Iraqis, would-be jihadis are finding it more difficult to get into Iraq and less attractive to do so anyway. (The jihad in Afghanistan still beckons, but that's another story.)

So, with success in Iraq mostly, though not yet completely, achieved, the questions remains: was invading Iraq to topple Saddam the right thing to do?

That's the title question of Arthur Borden's book, A Better Country - why American was right to confront Iraq. Borden, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, writes that he was impelled to author the book after witnessing the attacks against the Bush administration and Bush himself after the Iraq Study Group reported finding no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Borden, a lawyer by professions, knew that the evidence against Saddam was much more extensive than just WMDs or their lack, and that the history of US policy buttressing the regime change had roots much deeper than the Bush administration.

Thankfully, A Better Country does not attempt to examine the conduct of operations in Iraq after the war. Its scope is limited to the casus belli, not the jus ad bellum. There are substantial critiques to be made of the latter, of course, but Borden is right to leave them to others. "While [Bush] made important mistakes after the invasion," Borden writes, "this book maintains that it our country's removal of Saddam there was and remains much to be proud of."

Whether Borden is Catholic I cannot say, but regardless he is master of the Aquinian method: define the problem full and well, state the facts bearing on it - and in this case, the facts that were known at the time - state the "pro" side, and finally offer honest brokerage of the opposition's case. This is not an ideological book. It is bereft of sensationalist language or the common tendency of ideologues to cast the other side into the outer darkness. Borden, with lawyerly precision, lays both sides' cases out and then demonstrates why the case to confront Saddam was and remains the stronger.

The Iraq war was in fact "a necessary war," that being the title of the first chapter. It is here that I think Borden makes a very valuable contribution to the debate. Far from being an innovation of G.W. Bush, based on imaginary connections to 9/11, toppling Saddam was a reasonable, natural and linear result of the Carter Doctrine, first enunciated by President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address. Carter said,

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such as assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

Though the presumption of Saddam's WMD weapons and WMD programs came to dominate the debates over American intervention, President Bush actually made numerous references to the Carter Doctrine (though not by name) in explaining the danger Saddam posed.

Borden also spends three chapters delineating, in turn, "The Missing WMD," "Containment" (that is, could Saddam have been contained if not removed) and "The imminent Threat." These offer excellent summaries of facts relevant to those topics.

At 82 pages, A Better Country is a short but not casual read. Anyone who wishes to escape the shrillness of most debates over the war's genesis and review "just the facts, ma'am," should get this book.