Saddam Hussein did ignore the ultimatum to leave the country, and thus the Iraq War was fought in 2003, resulting in the removal of the Baathist regime in Baghdad 20 days later. The rest of it is common modern history today, with the resultant armed militant insurgency that raged until today.
However, had the Iraq debacle proceeded as envisioned and planned by the Bush Administration just like precedent cases of nation building like West Germany and Japan is modern history, the rewards for making such a high stakes political gamble are great indeed.
Iraq before 2003 was a country in the Middle East ran by a repressive regime akin to a dictatorship. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did have a record for committing atrocities, abusing the human rights of Iraqis and posing as a regional threat, having invaded two neighbours, Iran and Kuwait, and also having led his country into four wars – the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the Invasion of Kuwait (1990), the Gulf War (1991) and the Iraq War (2003). He was also certainly responsible for the use of chemical weapons against his own people and the Iranians. Baathist Iraq, besides being a regional threat and under a totalitarian regime, also sits on the world’s 2nd largest oil reserves, and has the potential to become a regional economic power and political stabilizer in the Middle East.
The possibility of Saddam Hussein supplying Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) to terrorist organizations was nevertheless very probable, considering the fact that Saddam’s Iraq is a closed state and considering Saddam’s past abuses and atrocities. However, to date there is no concrete evidence of any such WMDs, nor could an intention that Saddam wished to aid terrorists in this said manner be easily proven. Thus, therein lies the greatest flaw in President Bush’s argument to go to war.
However, on the other side of the coin, if Saddam’s regime was removed and replaced by a democratic government similar to Japan or Germany, Iraq can also serve as a precedent example of the success of US sponsored imposition of a democratic ruling system in the Muslim world. These are the high stakes that can be reaped as rewards had the Iraq affair turned out well as expected by optimists.
Unfortunately, even with a democratically elected parliamentary government in Iraq today, reality has fallen short of the ideals envisioned by the Bush Administration. US casualties were mounting, and as President Bush admitted himself, 2140 US troops have indeed lost their lives in Iraq by mid December 2005.The Iraqi death toll is estimated at 30,000. Economic development on the ground in Iraq had not been making substantial rapid progress as expected once a democratic regime was imposed. These are political and social developments which the President of the USA, even with his considerable resources at his disposal, find difficult at best to improve and also impossible to control.
The Bush Administration will continue its course of defending its Iraq decision, because to do otherwise would be to spell political suicide. If his critics argued that President Bush ignored realities and done a bad job in his first term as President, one cannot ignore the fact that he had somehow managed to get himself re-elected a second four year Presidential term in late 2004. What can be the reason that the majority of Americans, with the eyes to witness that the Iraq involvement does not seem to be getting anywhere and is slowly turning into a quagmire with ambiguous objectives, nevertheless, still voted and supported President Bush to achieve a second term in office ?
So, can US President Bush be compared to Julius Caesar, the man who laid the foundations of an Imperial Roman Empire and the cause of the death of the Roman Republic? President Bush’s term will be up within another two years, in 2008. By then, he will have joined the long lineage of American Presidents in the annuals of history.
History’s perspectives are not measured in weeks or months, but years and decades. The future outcome of Iraq as an emerging democratic nation is still yet to be determined.
Only time will tell, if the direction of President Bush’s foreign policies in Iraq are ultimately correct in the greater scheme of things. History shall be the best judge of his deeds.
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