Staying the course: Christopher Hitchens is a leading advocate of the war in Iraq and the U.S. military presence there. Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

Christopher Hitchens: The War Is Both Just and Necessary

Imagine if we had listened to the counsel of the so-called anti-war movement. Saddam Hussein would be the owner and occupier of Kuwait. Bosnia would be part of Slobodan Milosevic’s greater Serbia. Kosovo would be ethnically cleansed and annexed. The Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda would still be their guests. And Hussein would still be terrorizing people in a state most aptly described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below.

If I had such a bad record, I wouldn’t be demanding explanations from those of us who said it’s about time we stopped capitulation to dictatorship, racism, aggression, and totalitarian ideologies. We did not want to allow the failures of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Afghanistan and elsewhere repeated in Iraq.

The war is both just and necessary. Iraq had lost its sovereignty as far as a state can under international law. It participated in regular aggressions or occupations of territory, violated the letter and spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, violated the Genocide Convention, and played host to international terrorists. Its sovereignty was at an end.

Iraq was under international sanctions; it was a ward of the international community. Its people were being starved to build palaces for their psychopathic dictator. The Baath Party fueled ethnic hatreds with a policy of divide and rule. An imploded state would have made things worse. Do you know who would have invaded then? Turkey would have invaded to take Kurdistan. Iran would have invaded to support its extremist proxies, and Saudi Arabia would have intervened to do the same favor for the Sunni and Wahhabi extremists. In fact, all those powers are trying to meddle in Iraq now. But we are fortunate, as are the Iraqi people, that there is a coalition to hold the ring and prevent it from becoming another Rwanda or another Congo. Intervention was the only responsible course.

We know and we make no secret of the extraordinary difficulties that have attended this noble, risky, and worthwhile enterprise. We have seen the abysmal consequences of that, but we have the responsibility of imagining what the alternative would be. The positive consequences are many. A federal, democratic Iraqi constitution is being debated now on six television channels and in perhaps 100 newspapers, in a country where three years ago it was death—for you and your family—to possess a satellite dish or to attempt to distribute a leaflet. Not a quick death either. A man who planned and ordered and supervised and took delight in genocide, torture, aggression, and the occupation of two neighboring states is in jail. He will follow Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet into the dock quite soon. I know there are some people here who don’t take delight in that, but I do. It is justice long overdue.

The Kurds, the largest stateless minority in the Middle East, who have suffered many years of oppression and occupation, have begun to scramble to their feet and assume their full height as a people. Even before the intervention, they were producing an autonomy, a democracy, and self-determination of their own in the provinces of northern Iraq, which when I saw them last, were a landscape of desolation and depravity. You could still smell the poison gas, the mass graves, the ruined cities, the burned hillsides. The women still had chemical wounds that burned. Out of that, the Kurds have begun to build and to help their fellow Iraqis when they could have easily chosen chauvinism. They could have said, “We’ve had enough of Iraq.” Instead, they’ve accepted their international responsibilities. President Jalal Talabani is a leader whom any country in the region could be proud of. That is an extraordinary, unarguable, and unambiguous gain.

Iraq used chemical and biological weapons against Iran and its own inhabitants several times. It went to great lengths to conceal its programs. Hussein lieutenant Tariq Aziz—Galloway’s best friend—offered then chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus $2 million to doctor his findings. Dummy sites were constructed for U.N. fools to inspect. Material was moved and buried, and scientists were intimidated and told that their families would be killed if they cooperated with any inspection. With this knowledge, who would have given Hussein the benefit of the doubt if he said he’s no longer fooling around with weapons? What responsible leader of any democracy could face his people if that bet turned out to be wrong?

Also, don’t forget about Libya. Not everything about Libya’s abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction can be attributed to the intervention in Iraq, but it should be noted that when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi wanted to capitulate, he did not approach U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan or that great French statesman Jacques Chirac, nor German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He came to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to George W. Bush and said, “I’m out of this game now.” That’s not nothing.