A Sober View On Going To War Against Terror

Recent news out of Iraq and Afghanistan seems to indicate the wars being waged in both nations have reached a point where it will be only a matter of time before the Taliban in Afghanistan and the insurgents in Iraq are vanquished.

That good must eventually triumph over evil, and that there are sometimes high costs, is a notion that many obviously have found foreign. Among those many are people who belong to the American Left and prominent leaders in the American Democratic Party.

Presidents Bush decided to wage war, and from the start, there was not only opposition, but attempts to undermine the war effort. Leaders of the opposition at some point shared Mr. Bush’s rationale for waging war, but suddenly those leaders appeared to have forgotten what they had said or believed.

The sustained undermining of the war by some Americans may have prolonged the war by enabling the resistance. Indeed, a study by two Harvard researchers found that attacks by insurgents in Iraq increased 5 to 10% following intense criticism by the US media and the American public. You can read the study here.

How many of us remember that the Democrat, President Clinton, signed on October 13, 1998, the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for a forced change of regime in Iraq. The House passed the legislation on October 6, 1998, and the vote was 360 (202 Republicans and 157 Democrats) to 38. Thirty-six members did not vote. On October 7, the Senate passed the legislation by Unanimous Consent.

Soon after the attacks on September 11, the chorus was that President Bush had known about the planned attacks and did nothing. Sure, there was some intelligence, but it was not actionable, to use a bureaucratic term.

Intelligence led President Bush to believe that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. These two beliefs helped to sell the war but were not the rationale for the war. Suppose President Bush did not act as he did on the Iraq intelligence, and Iraq later attacked American interests, the chorus would have been that President Bush again had intelligence but failed to act.