All things considered

An 8220;anniversary8221; of a 8220;war8221; is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a this is, in fact, a war and b it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region8230;

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy US involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein8217;s wing of the Baath Party to power8230; Later, we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger8217;s faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion8230; Saddam Hussein, too, switches sides and courts Washington8230; until the very moment when he decides to 8220;engulf8221; his small Kuwaiti neighbour. In every decision taken subsequent to that8230; there was a8230;high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, 8220;lied into war.8221;

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn8217;t condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was perhaps overhastily dismantled8230;

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don8217;t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam8217;s immense network of mass graves8230; But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons

Excerpted from Christopher Hitchens8217; 8216;How did I get Iraq wrong?

I didn8217;t8217; in Slate, March 17