The Iraq War Was Justified

The 2003 invasion of Iraq seems just as unpopular as ever, thirteen years after the bombing of Baghdad. You would be hard pressed to find any political commentator, candidate, sitting member of Congress, or general member of the public willing to say, on record, that the invasion was the right decision. The best you’d be likely to find are those who try to thread the needle, expressing something along the lines of “based on what we were told at the time, the invasion made sense.” And typically, both Clinton and Trump have flipped on the issue, going from supporting the war when it began to quickly turning against it the moment it became politically expedient to do so.

What’s been largely absent from the conversation is a firm argument that the Iraq invasion was the right course of action, both then and now. It was, and if I were a member of Congress at the time, knowing everything we know now, I would still support the decision to invade.

An important qualifier: This is not to say that the war was conducted perfectly from beginning to end. Mistakes were undoubtedly made, mistakes that if avoided could have saved lives and resources. But the overall objective of the war—to remove Saddam Hussein from power and end any WMD program the Iraqis might then be operating—was laudable and continues to make the world a safer place, for both America and her allies.

Donald Trump actually managed to get it right back in 2002. Responding to a question from Howard Stern on whether he supported the proposed war, Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Ideally, coalition forces would have advanced to Baghdad and removed Saddam back in 1991 during Desert Storm, rendering the 2003 invasion unnecessary. But that didn’t happen. What did happen is that Saddam spent the next decade slaughtering his own people, bankrolling terrorism and compensating the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and thwarting the repeated efforts of U.N. weapons inspectors to investigate the Iraqi biological weapons program.

Contrary to persistent rumors spread by some on the Left that Iraq never had a WMD program, Saddam’s government admitted as much many times over the years following Desert Storm. In addition to the several formal acknowledgements of the existence of a biological weapons program between 1992 and 1998, there were also several pieces of circumstantial evidence, consisting of weapons inspectors being periodically blocked from inspecting certain areas, sometimes by force—and culminating in the 1998 ejection.

In addition, since the initial invasion some previously undisclosed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have been uncovered, including sarin gas. Based on these facts alone, the arguments for invading Iraq begin to look stronger.

But the subsequent geopolitical effects of the war also raise new questions about the wisdom of the invasion—namely, the rise of ISIS.

Maybe ISIS would never have existed, or been considerably less powerful, had Saddam not been removed from power. Many have certainly argued that the Middle East as a whole would be more stable today with a single dictator, rather than the numerous terrorist groups, including ISIS, now flourishing in Iraq and Syria. But those arguments ignore the clear threat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed—by virtue of prior experience, based on everything from his willingness to obtain and use WMDs against Iraqis, to the assassination plot against George H. W. Bush in 1993, to the stonewalling and eventual ejection of the U.N. weapons inspectors. The subsequent discovery of chemical weapons stockpiles only adds further weight to the argument that Saddam was a clear threat, to both the United States and regional allies such as Israel, and needed to be taken out.

And Saddam’s removal improved U.S. national security in other ways, as well. Most notably, and yet rarely reported, is the fact that Moammar Gadhafi, fearing that Libya might be the next country the United States invaded, voluntarily disclosed and began shutting down his own WMD program—only a few months after the initial invasion of Iraq had concluded.

Democrats, Donald Trump, and much of the media would like America to fully buy into the notion that the Iraq War was a manifestly bad decision from start to finish, but the truth is that the war made the United States, and the world, a safer place. The subsequent conduct of the war could have undoubtedly been better—in particular, a more detailed plan for rebuilding the country, as well as a more gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces, could well have prevented much of the turmoil of today—but the invasion itself was the right thing to do.