A year after the beginning of the war in Iraq, it’s been asked whether or not the world is a better place, the U.S. is safer, the Middle East is safer, and the war was a good idea to begin with. The House of Representatives passed a resolution stating that the U.S. is safer than it was a year ago, but House Democrats objected to the resolution and voted against it. We’re not safer, they say; we have given a lot of angry young Muslims even more of an excuse to attack the United States than they had a year ago. So the question remains: was the war a good thing?

“They Hate Us for Our Freedoms”

This rhetoric continues to be spouted by House Republicans who insist that this is a battle over freedoms and ideals. The only reason we’re being attacked, they say, is because they hate our freedoms. Let’s examine that statement. If they hate us for our freedoms, then they are either 1) jealous of our freedom and want to pull us down to the same level they are (one can imagine a Snidley Whiplash character in Iraq preening his moustache and saying, “Those rotten Americans and their freedoms! I’ll show them!”), or 2) they don’t feel that we should have the freedoms we do. In the first case, terrorists would be incapable of creating freedoms on the same level as ours, and they know this, so they attack us out of spite. This proposition is patently ridiculous, for we know that there are plenty of countries in the world that don’t enjoy the same level of freedom the United States does (freedom of speech, religion, the press, as well as other institutions like our court system and suffrage rights) that don’t attack us. This is not a case of “sour grapes,” where people who don’t have the same privileges we do attack us so that we will no longer have those privileges. That’s a very simplistic analysis of the situation. If they were jealous of our freedoms, then they would be better off putting their creative energy into getting those freedoms than attacking us. The other option, that they don’t feel we should have the freedoms we have, is equally simplistic. Why would terrorists care about our freedoms? Why would they care about whether or not we ought to have freedom of speech or the press? A tremendous amount of creative energy goes into terrorism; do they care so greatly about ensuring that we are deprived of particular freedoms that they spend the kind of time that goes into terrorism merely to deprive us of liberties?

The reason terrorists attack people is not because they “hate them for their freedoms” as George W. Bush and other hard-line, demagogical Republicans (and even some confused Democrats) would have us believe. Terrorism is practiced to achieve a political end – this is why, whenever there is a terrorist attack somewhere in the world, a particular group immediately claims responsibility. The message is, “We did this, and we will keep doing this unless you meet our demands.” It’s extortion on a national scale – like taking hostages, except you kill the hostages. Terrorism is the last means of diplomacy for a marginalized group. Terrorists are not affiliated with a government, otherwise we would call their actions “war.” Let’s look at a non-Middle Eastern example of terrorism to get a better perspective on why terrorists operate.

For forty years, the people of the United Kingdom lived in a state of fear because the Irish Republican Army routinely bombed targets in England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. The IRA had a single goal: it wanted the English and the Protestants (“Protestant” being a shorthand word for “English”) out of Northern Ireland, which had been an English colony in the 17th century and became part of the United Kingdom in the Act of Union of 1800. Since the 17th century, the Irish had wanted the English out, and had fought with them tooth and nail, but they had always been squelched by the more powerful English armies. Finally, in the 20th century, the IRA took to attacking civilians. Terrorists move the battle from the sphere of diplomacy into the sphere of public opinion, attacking the people whom the government that is repressing them represents. “You had better get your government to give us what we want, or we will continue attacking you” is the message to civilians; to the government, the message is, “We will continue attacking the innocent civilians until you meet our demands.” Civilians are attacked because the group is usually too small to face a professional army. In the case of the IRA, it had dealt with English forces before and lost, so it took its battle from the battlefield to the civilian world – the streets of everyday life where the odds were a little better that they and their cause would be recognized before they were shot.

Why, then, would Muslim extremists hate America? What would they want to change? Terrorists don’t attack for attacking’s sake; unlike fanatical generals (Napoleon or Hitler come to mind) of states, they are not after power; they want something to be done. The United States is unpopular in the Middle East largely because of our support for Israel. We give the Israelis millions of dollars a year in foreign aid as well as military technology. Whenever the Israeli Air Force blows up the village of a suicide bomber, that’s an American plane doing the bombing and American missiles doing the blowing-up. The whole issue of Israel was unpopular with Middle Eastern countries back in 1948, who felt that the Israelis – with the help of the United States, Britain, and the United Nations – stole a chunk of land in the Middle East that didn’t belong to them. They then proceeded to kick out the Arabs who lived there and slowly took over more land in 1967 and 1973. (1967 was the Six-Day War, where Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights destroyed the Egyptian Air Force while it was still on the ground. 1973 was the Yom Kippur War, a preemptive strike against what Israel felt were the amassing forces of Egypt and Syria.) Egypt used to be Israel’s number one enemy, but that ended in 1979 with the Camp David Accords. Now the Palestinians are Israel’s number one enemy, and most Arabs land on the side of supporting the Palestinians. Fanatical Arabs go the extra step of attempting to hurt the Israelis and their supporters, the United States being the big supporter.

Then came the war in Iraq. This war was regarded by practically every country as a preemptive war with no justification. Though the governments of Great Britain and Spain remained behind us one hundred percent, the people vehemently disagreed with the decision to back the United States. In Spain, I saw graffiti which read, “Aznar = Franco / Bush = Hitler.” That can be construed as meaning a lot of things, but support for the war is not one of them. As Howard Dean pointed out two weeks ago on Meet the Press, the “coalition of the willing” consisted of three major countries – Britain, Spain, and Poland – and a whole lot of other minor countries. Europe has seen a lot of war in the 20th century. I don’t think Americans understand that. If we want to see the memories of a war, we can go to a Civil War battlefield or to Washington, D.C. and visit a lot of monuments. The Civil War is far enough away that its memories no longer linger, and Washington, D.C.’s memories have been anodized for your protection (except for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as it should be; it was America’s first brush with solemnity regarding death in battle, as opposed to its exultation). In France, you can walk down the street and see a World War II cemetery. Normandy is a giant graveyard. The battles of World War II took place for us a continent away, somewhere “over there” (as the song goes) where we didn’t have to worry about it. The French, Germans, Russians, and British had war going on in their backyards. Their cities were the settings for war. The Europeans know – perhaps better than we do – the price of war, and they’re not about to get involved in one unless they’re absolutely sure that they have to. In this case, they didn’t feel that they had to.

What had Saddam done to them lately? Not much. He was no Hitler, that’s for sure. Saddam had no aspirations of extending his power and creating an empire. Hitler wanted to be the next Napoleon; Napoleon wanted to be the next Alexander the Great. Saddam had none of this going for him. He was content to rule his country and oppress his minorities like many other countries around the world in which we don’t intervene. He killed civilians? So did Pol Pot; so did Mao Tse-Tung; so did Stalin; so did Franco, Idi Amin, and Slobodan Milosevic. Of that group, only Slobo has been arrested and tried for his crimes. And the only reason for that is because his war crimes were going on so close to the Europeans that they couldn’t ignore them any longer (despite the EU’s best attempts to ignore Yugoslavia, it was Bill Clinton and NATO that finally did something about it).

Bush tried to make a case for a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. No such luck. There was no link. Osama bin Laden was the leader of a radical Muslim group in Afghanistan, while Saddam was a good, old-fashioned dictator who happened to be Muslim. It would be like suggesting that Iran and Iraq should be friends because they’re both countries predominantly populated by Muslims. History would show otherwise: the two countries despise each other, in part due to theological differences, but also because they fought each other for ten years in the Iran-Iraq War (in which the U.S. backed both sides, by the way).

Failing to link Saddam to September 11th, that great bloody shirt, he knowingly misused CIA intelligence data to suggest that Iraq was obtaining uranium from Nigeria. Wrong again; this report had been falsified and the Bush administration knew it, but Bush incorporated this statement into his State of the Union Address, anyway.

Saddam was not the “imminent threat” that he was purported to be. He was like any other world dictator whom we don’t attack. What makes him different from Kim Chong-Il, Idi Amin, or Robert Mugabe? That remains to be seen. People have asked, but the administration hasn't talked.

Are We Safer Now?

Despite the intentional misuse of intelligence (we would call this “actual malice” if it were a libel case – information was knowingly misused), the outcome is good. The world has been rid of a dictator, and that is always good, in and of itself. But this means that we must go after other dictators or risk being labeled hypocritical and jingoistic. It looks like we’re not going after anyone else, so it’s the latter. Whereas Arab countries hated us before due to our support for Israel, now they have something else to hate us for: the invasion of Iraq. Iran and Syria, both nearby countries, expressed fears that they were next. President Bush went to great lengths to assure them that we were not going to invade them next, but that’s small assurance for an administration that is famous for its lies and backpedaling. If we were trying to take out a loan at the Bank of World Opinion, our credit rating would be in the negative digits. That’s exactly what we did in Iraq: we borrowed against our status as a superpower nation and lost.

Immediately after we won the war, Iraq’s prospects went up. Dictator gone = good, right? Not so fast: no one predicted the daily barrage of terrorism and anti-American sentiment that now fills the country. The French and British won World War I, but lost the peace. It will be so with Iraq, as violence increases in that country. We are invaders that have destroyed their way of life, they say. Since the U.S. wrote their constitution, there may be doubts as to its legitimacy. We have done away with one set of problems in Iraq only to watch a new storm roll in – the storm of transition and uncertainty.

The war in Iraq was flawed to begin with. Donald Rumsfeld asked for fewer troops than were needed, and now we are watching American soldiers die – not in combat, but in being police. We have pushed back the timeline for handing over control to the Iraqis to June 30, well before the presidential election in November. The headline “5 more killed in Iraq terrorist attack” doesn’t bode well during election season. The French and British didn’t spend enough time in Germany rebuilding the place after World War I, and the Germans, angry and humiliated, came back for a second round. Iraq will be the same way. We want to get out of there as fast as we can, not realizing that what we’re doing is nation-building and that nation-building takes time. More so in Iraq than Germany after World War II, since Germany already had the democratic institutions in place; in Iraq, we must build them from scratch.

In the end, I don’t think we are safer than we were a year ago. The recent bombings in Spain prove that: countries who signed on to our actions in Iraq are being punished and told to get out. The new government in Spain, headed by PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party) is going to play into the terrorists’ hands and remove its troops. This sends the wrong message to the terrorists; namely, that terrorism works. If we’re going to get involved in actions like Iraq, we must be prepared to stay there and fix the problems that existed before, as well as the ones we created. Otherwise, we run the risk of having Iraq backfire on us and turn into not only a dictatorship, but one that vehemently hates the United States for what we did to it.