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Context

The single dumbest statement I have ever heard in regards to the "war in Iraq" was made to me today, and here it is:

“The Bush administration has destabilized the middle east and stopped the "peace process"...”.

Oh yes, the "Middle East". A temperate zone of quiet book clubs, care free games of whist at the old folks home with cold glasses of homemade lemonade on the porch on summer afternoons and free learning annex classes in how to achieve peaceful contemplation for the soul. A place where a man can get a high colonic for the price of a cup of coffee, and a back massage from anyone you see on the street.

Well at least it was, until the evil Bush regime and his stupidity caused all those Islamic pacifists to convert into blood thirsty killers.

Let's see what history has to say about the “Stable Middle East”. Let’s limit it to just the post World War II period, just to be fair. Come back at the end and see if you can still refer to the “middle east” as having been once stable, and see if you can now understand what a magnificent thing it was that we liberated Iraq.

1948: Arab-Israeli War
Casualties: Israel: 6,373 (4,000 troops and about 2,400 civilians)
Arab: unknown (between 5,000 and 15,000)

“Zionism” becomes a capital crime in Iraq. At this time, 150,000 Jews are estimated to live in Iraq. From 1949 to 1951, 104,000 Jews were evacuated from Iraq. In Syria the 1948 Jewish population is estimated at 30,000

1952: Iraq Jewish Pogrom
Iraq's government barred Jews from emigrating and publicly hanged two Jews after falsely charging them with hurling a bomb at the Baghdad office of the U.S. Information Agency.

1956: Suez Crisis
In reaction to the war, the Egyptian government expelled almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscated their property, and sent approximately 1,000 more Jews to prisons and detention camps

1962-1970: Yemen Civil War

1967: Six-Day War
Casualties: Israel: 780 killed and 3,000 wounded
Arab: 21,000 killed; up to 45,000 wounded

1968 to 1970: Egypt and Israel War of Attrition

1969: Iraqi Jewish Pogrom
Baghdad Radio called upon Iraqis to "come and enjoy the feast." Some 500,000 men, women and children paraded and danced past the scaffolds where the bodies of 11 hanged Jews swung; the mob rhythmically chanted "Death to Israel" and "Death to all traitors."

1970: Jordan Palestinian Conflict(Black September)
Open warfare with PLO with support from Syria results in the PLO being removed from Jordan.

1973: The Yom Kippur War
Casualties: Israeli ,656 killed 7,250 wounded
Arab: 15,000 killed 35,000 wounded

1975-1990: The Lebanese Civil War
Estimated that more than 100,000 people were killed, and another 100,000 handicapped by injuries. Up to one-fifth of the pre-war population, or about 900,000 people, were displaced from their homes, and perhaps a quarter of a million emigrated permanently.
In the 15 years of strife, there were at least 3,641 car bombs, which left 4,386 people dead and thousands more injured

1980-1988: The Iran-Iraq War
Casualties: Unknown, estimated that from 1,000,000-2,000,000 killed. This includes 100,000 Iraqi Kurds killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein In addition, chemical-warfare attacks by Iraq were reported by Iran, at Hoor-ul-Huzwaizeh on 13 March 1984. These have since been conclusively verified by an international team of specialists dispatched to Iran by the United Nations Secretary General. Iraq's air force began strategic bombing against Iranian cities, chiefly Tehran, starting in 1985. In response to these, Iran began launching SS-1 "Scud" missiles against Baghdad, and Iraq responded by launching the same against Tehran. For the first time since the Korean War, human wave attacks are used with Infrantry.

1982: Lebanon War
Casualties: Israeli 675 killed
Arab 17,825 killed both civilian and military

1982: Hama Massacre
20,000 Syrians killed by the Syrian Baath party in the town of Hama. Syrian special forces entered the town and began to slaughter its inhabitants, with many others fleeing. According to Amnesty International, the Syrian military pumped poison gas into buildings where insurgents were said to be hiding.

1987

March: Halabja Massacre
Saddam Hussein launched chemical attacks against 40 Kurdish villages and thousands of innocent civilians in 1987-88, using them as testing grounds. The worst of these attacks devastated the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988. After the attack, Iraqi soldiers in protective gear returned to Halabja to study the effectiveness of their weapons. They divided the city into grids, determining the number and location of the dead and extent of injury. Halabja helped Saddam Hussein gauge the ability of his chemical agents to kill, maim, and terrorize population centers.

April: Operations Preying Mantis. Largest Surface Naval action since WWII. US Navy sinks sank two Iranian warships (frigates) and as many as six armed Iranian speedboats.

May: Iraq attacks USS Stark.

July: USS Vincennes Shots down Iranian Airliner, killing 290 civilians. 400 Iranian pilgrims die in clashes with Saudi Arabian security forces in Mecca

October: First Palestinian Intifada Begins.

1990-1991: Iraq Invasion of Kuwait and Gulf War.
Casualties: Coalition military deaths have been reported to be around 378, but the DoD reports that US forces suffered 147 battle-related and 325 non-battle-related deaths. There are an estimated 22,000 Iraqi combat deaths. The Iraqi government has claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the war.

** Note: as of 1991, only 100 Jews and one synagogue are still in Iraq. At one time, Baghdad was one-fifth Jewish. In Syria, less than 100 Jews are known to exist from a post war population of 30,000.

1991: Iraqi Shiite uprising.
Several cities raised in response by Saddam Hussien, thousands of civilians killed. Marshlands in southern Iraq are drained in an attempt to displace the marsh arabs.

1996:

Feburary: Operation Desert Strike
Iraqi weapons program leader and son-in-law to Saddam Hussein, Hussein Kamel, returns to Iraq. Within days of his return, he is murdered along with his brother, father, sister and her children. Kamel had forced Iraq to reveal portions of its illegal nuclear and chemical weapons programs.

May: UNSCOM supervises the destruction of Al-Hakam, Iraq's main production facility of biological warfare agents.

November: UNSCOM inspectors uncover buried prohibited missile parts. Iraq refuses to allow UNSCOM teams to remove remnants of missile engines for analysis outside of the country.

1997

June: Iraqi military escorts on board an UNSCOM helicopter try to physically prevent the UNSCOM pilot from flying the helicopter in the direction of its planned destination, threatening the safety of the aircraft and their crews

September: An Iraqi military officer attacks an UNSCOM weapons inspector on board an UNSCOM helicopter while the inspector was attempting to take photographs of unauthorized movement of Iraqi vehicles inside a site designated for inspection. Later that month, while waiting for access to a site, UNSCOM inspectors witness and videotape Iraqi guards moving files, burning documents, and dumping waste cans into a nearby river. UNSCOM inspector Dr. Diane Seaman catches several Iraqi men sneaking out the back door of an inspection site with log books for the creation of prohibited bacteria and chemicals.

October:Iraq says it will begin shooting down U-2 surveillance planes being used by UNSCOM inspectors

1998

Feburary: The United States Senate passes resolution 71, which urged President Bill Clinton to "take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."

John Kerry votes in favor of the resolution...

April: UNSCOM reports to the UN Security Council that Iraq's declaration on its biological weapons program is incomplete and inadequate.

May: UNSCOM learns that an Iraqi delegation has travelled to Bucharest to meet with scientists who can provide the country with missile guidance systems.

August: Iraq officially suspends all cooperation with UNSCOM teams. Scott Ritter resigns from UNSCOM, sharply criticized the Clinton administration and the U.N. Security Council for not being vigorous enough about insisting that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction be destroyed. Ritter told reporters that "Iraq is not disarming," "Iraq retains the capability to launch a chemical strike."

Scott Ritter now works for Al-Jazzeera, but then again, so does David Frost ( go figure...)

September: The U.S. Congress passes the "Iraq Liberation Act", which states that the United States wants to remove Saddam Hussein from power and replace the government with a democratic institution.

John Kerry votes in favor of the Act...

October: Iraq announces it would no longer cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors

November: Operation Desert Fox
U.S. President Clinton orders airstrikes on Iraq. Clinton then calls it off at the last minute when Iraq promises once again to "unconditionally" cooperate with UNSCOM. UNSCOM inspectors return to Iraq.

December: Iraq announces that U.N. weapons inspections will no longer take place on Friday, the Muslim day of rest. Iraq also refuses to provide test data from the production of missiles and engines

President Clinton orders American and British airstrikes on Iraq. UNSCOM withdraws all weapons inspectors from Iraq. Iraqi vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan announces that Iraq will no longer cooperate and declares that UNSCOM's "mission is over."

UN Security Council members France, Germany and Russia call for sanctions to end against Iraq. The three Security Council members also call for UNSCOM to either be disbanded or for its role to be recast. The U.S. says it will veto any such proposal . Iraq then announced its intention to fire upon US and British warplanes that patrol the northern and southern "no-fly zones".

1999

December: The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic) is created to replace UNSCOM. The U.N. Security council once again orders Iraq to allow inspections teams immediate and unconditional access to any weapons sites and facilities. Iraq rejects the resolution.

2000

Iraq rejects new U.N. Security Council weapons inspections proposals

Second Palestinian Intifada Begins.

2001
Baghdad suburb bombed by US and UK war planes, 3 people killed.

Yeah, "Middle East Stability..."

And then there is the question that makes my stomach turn just thinking about it.

Two thousand Americans have died in Iraq, doesn’t that make you think the war is wrong?

In the context of the history of the region, its my belief that the only thing wrong with the war in Iraq was that we didn’t do it sooner.

If the argument is that we should have stayed home, history provides us a roadmap for how that strategy has gone so far, and until 2003, that strategy led directly to the deaths, not of 2,000, but of millions.

The Middle East was never “stable”, unless you consider a concentration camp or charnel house to be the model of stability on which you refer. .

For the last 60 years, the Middle East has been a meat grinder into which tyrants and dictators have fed their own people with little or no concern for being held accountable so long as they remained the clients of the western world.

The direct result of the Bush Doctrine is a clear message to the worlds governments and not just those in the Middle East is that “Things have changed” and for people throughout the Middle East, they have changed for the better, not because of peace rallies or the actions of a few politicians, but the actions of Americans, who in the process of defending the United States have gone to another country and provided the stability and leadership to a people who have long been ignored by our government and the western world.

Unfortunately while providing that leadership, some of our people were killed. One soldier lost is a high price, but soldiers die, that’s what they are called upon to do. This is what makes them different than postmen or social workers. They take an oath to defend the country from enemies foreign and domestic, sometimes that defense involves shooting and perhaps being shot at and perhaps even killed.

Sometimes that enemy is a uniformed soldier from another country but sometimes that enemy is a sickness, a philosophy that teaches that life has no meaning and that only in death can one achieve true happiness. This is the sickness that has infected the Middle East, and to that sickness there is only one known cure, the removal by force of the cancer of tyranny and the application of the salve of human dignity in the form of Democracy.

All humans crave the dignity that comes with self-determination, no matter their religion or culture.

Iraq now stands before the world as an Arab Secular Democracy and because of it and not in spite of it, the people of Lebanon who have been long oppressed by their own occupation at the hands of the Syrians have bravely thrown out the Baathists and elected a government of their own in open defiance of the regime in Damascus. Because of the security that has come with the elimination of the Saddam Regime, Israel has taken the risk of giving up the Gaza Settlements, exposing the Palestinian and Iranian lead terror groups for the fraud that they truly are. Because of the stability provided after the removal of the Saddam Regime by the United States, most countries in the Persia Gulf are seeing the rapid expansion of voting rights and even women’s rights in places where just a few years before it would have been impossible.

Should we have stayed home and continued to ignore the plight of the Kurds? Should we have stayed out of Kuwait? Should Syria’s crimes continue to go unpunished? Should Saddam have remained in power? To some, the Middle East will always remain “none of our business”, but the truth of it is, the “Middle East” made it our business. Our security and theirs became intertwined on September 11th , when we started to be killed on our streets by people raised in the sickness of middle eastern terrorism, a disease that we, through our inaction allowed to fester to the point that it began to kill us in our homes.

2000 men and women have died in Iraq. That is a sad metric, but in the context of the Middle Eastern history of the past 60 years, it is a mere drop into the bucket of blood that has been shed in that terrible place over the years. The difference is, that these 2000 have died bringing hope to the people of the region and a future to us all. 25 million people in the Middle East now use democracy to settle their differences rather than guns. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are unique in the history of mankind as places where, even during open warfare, civilian refugees were found going into the war zone, not streaming out. Over 3 million Afghanis are estimated to have left Pakistan refugee camps as soon as it was clear the United States was coming to Afghanistan. The same phenomenon occurred in Iraq. A war without refugees is simply not what we expected, but it is what we got.

Once upon a time, we fought the Germans with regularity. While we still have differences with Germany but now we do tend to return the calls of each others countries leaders when a crisis between us arises, rather than raise an army in response to a threat from “the German menace”. We should never forget that it took thousands of deaths of soldiers, sailors and airmen to create the conditions in which that miracle could occur; it wasn’t natural that it happen; we made it happen - by force.

The result of that action is that we live in peace with a former adversary. Yet, we will never find ourselves looking back at the deaths of World War II and saying “ Was it worth it?” because we have the eyes of the people of Treblinka and Auschwitz looking back saying not why did you come, but rather ‘Why didn’t you come sooner?”.

The same will one day be true of our action in Iraq. One day, the debate on the Iraq war will not be “Why did we go?” but rather “why didn’t we come sooner?”. It will come as soon as we learn to look at the people of Hilabja as every bit as deserving of our respect as the people of Auschwitz.

Posted @ October 26, 2005 09:43 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Doug Purdie at October 27, 2005 09:54 AM

Posted by: OBloodyHell at October 29, 2005 11:21 AM