An Iraq War veteran pens a powerful defense of the decision to invade, remove Saddam

We've been coming back to the Iraq War lately for two reasons. One is that the media keep bringing it up in the form of a knowing-what-we-know-now gotcha question aimed at Republican presidential candidates (although they offer no such question to Hillary Clinton concerning the 2011 withdrawl of all U.S. troops . . . not that she would answer). The other, more pertinent reason, is that ISIS is overrunning Iraq at the moment, taking advantage of the absence of a residual U.S. force and Barack Obama's refusal to wage a real fight against them.

Conventional wisdom long ago decided that George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and that for all his faults, Saddam Hussein's presence was preferable to what came after - not to mention the price we paid in blood and treasure to remove him. I have remained one of the steadfast defenders of the decision to invade Iraq and take Saddam out, and I discussed that in some detail last week. But I am just a guy who remembers what was happening at the time and found the post-event revision of history unconvincing. David Patten was there, fought in the war and remembers in much clearer details why we fought, and why the current revisionist narrative is total B.S. Many of the post-invasion decisions the Bush Administration made were mistakes, and resulted in a very difficult four-year post-invasion period that only turned our way with the 2007 surge. Patten doesn't deny that and neither do I. But anyone who now argues that we would have been better off leaving Saddam in power is forgetting the true nature of his regime and the destablizing force he represented in the region.

Patten deals with the real problems Saddam's regime posed for the world

Writing for The Federalist, Patten absolutely destroys that narrative:

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Many people today assume that doing nothing at all would have been a better option. In fact, a disturbing number of foreign-policy experts now contend that Hussein was some sort of necessary evil. They imagine he was balancing Iran and suppressing all the Islamic extremists. So while they may have wished he’d have been a little nicer, they feel we were still pretty lucky to have had him around. Aside from being a depressingly cynical approach to foreign policy, this view is demonstrably inaccurate. If Saddam was the cork bottling up all the chaos that later came rushing out, he was certainly a very leaky cork. Did Saddam “balance” Iran during the ’80s, or did he start a war that claimed more than half a million lives? When the Iraqi Kurds were fighting a civil war in the mid-’90s, were the Baathists offering their regional balancing services, or were they fueling the bloodshed? When Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, was blowing up embassies, hijacking planes, and killing U.S. servicemen, where were the Baathists and why weren’t they holding these Shia radicals in check? Hussein was not a U.S. ally and he did nothing at all to shape the region in our favor. Nor could any sane assessment of his 24-year official reign conclude that he was in any imaginable way a stabilizing force in the region. Yet, the popular view today is that if President Bush had only left him alone, two of the Middle East’s biggest problems—Iran and Islamic extremism—would be solved. Sen. Marco Rubio is correct when he says the world is better off for the United States’ removing Hussein from power. This should not be controversial. Given everything we know about the Baathist regime, we have every reason to believe the past 12 years would have been significantly worse with Saddam still in control of Iraq. The Arab Spring almost certainly would have been a blood bath; there would be no promising seed of democracy growing in Tunisia, or potential reformer in Egypt; we would not be talking about a potential Kurdish state, but more likely of a Kurdish genocide; Iran would not even be pretending to negotiate an end to its nuclear program, but would be arming to the teeth to “balance” Saddam; Qaddafi would not have relinquished his weapons of mass destruction program, and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb likely would be in possession of them today; terrorists with international reach would likely be benefitting from Saddam’s support; at the very least American counter-terror forces would find the Middle East a much more challenging environment to conduct their work. And without question Iraq would be in a far worse state than it is today.

A few reasons I love Patten's argument: First, it doesn't rely on the dopey Saddam-had-WMDs argument that the Bush team ill-advisedly relied upon in trying to sell the invasion to the UN - all for the purpose of getting a Security Council resolution they didn't even need. That was far down the list of reasons Saddam needed to go. Second, it takes what should be the obvious approach of separating the invasion decision from those made after Saddam was deposed. Saddam's regime did indeed fall in lightning-fast fashion, and we were indeed greeted as liberators - contrary to the revisionism that wants you to think otherwise. That regrettable decisions to disband the Iraqi army and to delay the turning over of sovereignty do not mean the invasion was wrong. It means we made mistakes in the subsequent phase. Third, Patten deals with the real problems Saddam's regime posed for the world in a way that today's revisionists either ignore or don't remember. It's easy to imagine in retrospect that things wouldn't be as bad if we had just left the situation alone, but anyone who remembers the true nature of Saddam would recognize that takes a pretty fanciful imagination. Now, you can certainly question whether the Republican candidates of today are capable of making this argument in the current political environment. When I wrote last week about the Iraq War and why it was justified, one liberal commenter actually got his knickers in a twist because I went into detail instead of simply saying yes or no. You can see why. The present conventional wisdom is that the answer is no. It wasn't justified. They don't want you explaining your case. If you say yes, they blast you because "everyone knows" the correct answer is no. If you say no, they throw a party because you're disagreeing with Bush.

Bush had the war won. Iraq was stable and becoming prosperous, only to see Obama squander that success

They want you to do one or the other. Patten actually reminds us all of why we had to do this, in addition to recognizing the mistakes we made along the way. A lot of conservatives want Republican candidates to respond to the question with a question: Rather than defend the war, they want candidates to demand that the media ask Democrats whether they would defend Obama's 2011 withdrawal, "knowing what we know now." And yes, the media should ask that question. But Republicans can and should defend the invasion. It was the right thing to do. They should say so, then honestly assess the bad decisions that were made after the fact that made the war effort more difficult, but ultimately recall that by the time he left office, Bush had the war won. Iraq was stable and becoming prosperous, only to see Obama squander that success by refusing to sign a status of forces agreement that would have kept U.S. forces in Iraq. If Republican candidates won't say that - either because they are afraid of the media narrative or because they don't understand it - then maybe they're not prepared for the presidency.