www.AndrewSullivan.com - Latest Posts

Good perspective from Andrew Sullivan as always, I enjoy reading these back stories on why we are where we are.

Whose war is this? If it succeeds, it will have many authors, as victories always do. If it fails in any measurable way, its architects will be strikingly few, restricted to the handful of leaders who are required to take responsibility regardless of merit or cause. So perhaps now is the best moment for proposing the true orchestrators of this, the first full-scale invasion of the twenty-first century - while wet fingers are still thrust nervously upwards in the air. And, for all the easy judgments about this being "Bush's war," it seems to me that the picture is immensely more complicated than that. History is rarely so free of irony that the actual initiator of hostilities is the real force behind them. Others lie behind him, and others still behind them. And this war, perhaps more than many others, is laden with irony.

It is, first and foremost, the United Nations' war. Without the U.N., it would never have happened. Indeed, without the U.N., it wouldn't have even been necessary. Back in 1991, U.S. and U.K. forces were only a few hundred miles behind the positions they advanced to in the middle of last week. Saddam was reeling, after a coalition invasion to repel his aggression against Kuwait. Both the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shi'a in the South, emboldened by the war in Kuwait and encouraged by Washington, launched an uprising against the same tyrant we are still battling today. With American air-cover, they could have succeeded. But the Americans, in the greatest military miscalculation of the last few decades, hung back. Then-president George H.W. Bush insisted that his war aims did not include the removal of Saddam Hussein, but were limited to the liberation of a small oil company known as Kuwait.

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Latest Posts