In the heart of the Iraq War debate, the one argument I could never abide was the humanitarian argument; not because Saddam Hussein wasn't an awful, brutal dictator, but because it was, frankly, it was a classic example of shutting the barn long after the cows, goats, chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, horses, etc., have long since fled.
Marc Danner explains it far better than I do in his response to George Packer's rather churlish review of his book, Stripping Bare the Body:
In Bosnia, the United States should have acted to stop genocide, which I witnessed and reported on and which was going on, and on, even while American warplanes patrolled overhead and United States intelligence agencies recorded the “number liquidated” in Serb concentration camps. In Iraq in 2003, there was an autocratic government but no genocide. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein’s army had engaged in mass killing — against the Kurds in 1989 and against the Shiites in 1991 — American officials, who had been supplying Saddam with critical intelligence in 1989 and who commanded a United States Army in Iraq in 1991, had stood aside and done and said nothing.
A dozen years later, many of the same officials who had looked on when tens of thousands of Iraqis were being killed had no compunction about pointing to those graves to drum up support for an invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration’s “humanitarian argument” for the Iraq war was shameful and dishonest from the start. Sadly, many of those who well understood its dishonesty and cynicism, and who could have served the country — and done their jobs — by acting to expose it, for their own reasons stood and cheered America on to war.
The humanitarian argument for the Iraq War was post-facto ass-covering. Nothing more.
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