Getting a war all wrong

I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but8230;I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein8217;s Iraq. The nature of political action is that its consequences are unknowable. That is the source of the wonder, beauty, and ugliness that politics can bring into the world. Should I have let that unknowability determine the morality of the case8230;? Would we have had a moral war in 2003 if there had arisen an Iraqi version of Nelson Mandela8230;? Perhaps it is incumbent upon those who now regret supporting regime change8230;to tell us what the alternative moral course of action was. Was it to wait and watch until the time bomb that was Saddam Hussein8217;s Iraq blew up in everyone8217;s faces?

True, I underestimated the self-centredness and sectarianism of the Iraqi ruling elite put in power8230;2003. I knew them well, after all. And I underestimated the extent to which Iraqi state institutions had already been dismantled by UN sanctions, which changed a totalitarian regime into a criminal regime8230;long before anyone thought of unseating Hussein by force. Nor did I ever imagine that the conversion of the Iraqi army into a civil reconstruction force8230; would be translated into Paul Bremer8217;s order for the overnight firing, without pension, of half a million or so men8230;

But my biggest political sin is that8230; I, and more generally the whole community of Iraqi exiles, grossly underestimated the consequences on a society of 30 years of extreme dictatorship8230; All of a sudden this raw, profoundly abused population, traumatised by decades of war, repression, uprisings, and brutal campaigns of social extermination, was handed the opportunity to build a nation from scratch. True, they were adept at learning the most arresting symbols of their re-entry into the world 8212; the mobile phone and the satellite dish8230;But it proved infinitely harder to get rid of the mistrust, fear, and unwillingness to take initiative or responsibility that was ingrained into a people by a whole way of survival in police-state conditions. No one made allowances for the deleterious consequences of all this on reconstruction, identity-formation, and nation-building. Is that an argument for, or against, regime change in 2003?

Excerpted from an article by Kanan Makiya in Slate