With the Democrats achieving the majority in the Senate and the House, some of their issues that have been beaten down in the past have been rejuvenated. Here is one of my (yawn) favorites.
· Bush did not give diplomacy a chance. We could have increased the sanctions, encouraged the internal opposition, isolated Saddam and waited for him to be overthrown. Jim Wallis in his God’s Politics blog writes,
“Over time, the brutal Saddam Hussein could have been isolated, undermined, and overthrown (a very worthy goal) from pressures internal and external, and serious proposals were on the table to do just that when Bush went to war.”
Serious proposals? By who? The UN? Our European allies? I guess Wallis wants us to forget the history.
When the decision was made to go to war, we were ignorant of the reasons why since 1996 the UN Sanctions were not toppling Saddam’s regime. In case you have forgotten, we attacked and rolled into Bagdad in record time. We stormed the Palaces and captured vast amount of records. What we found should have been headlines around the world for the next year. After all, it was absolute proof of the biggest financial scandal the world had ever seen. The fact that so little was written about it is mind boggling. It involved officials from 30 countries, some being permanent UN Security Council member countries. It involved a high UN official and even Koffi Annan’s own son.
Suddenly it made sense why Saddam was not getting weaker. The Oil for Food program was a complete sham. The UN was winking at us and passing our UN resolutions against Saddam in the General Assembly while some of their officials and a few key members were working a back-door operation that was making them all rich. Saddam didn’t need a healthy internal economy to prosper and he didn’t care that his people were suffering. This off-the-books cash machine was allowing him to spend money freely on what he wanted and he could blame the poverty of his people on the rest of the world.
Documents showed that this was going on through all of Clinton’s second term and half of Bush’s first term. To think that this would have ceased, or we would have eventually stumbled upon the truth is foolish conjecture at best. The very countries that we were counting on to stand with us were on the take. What should have been the largest international multinational scandal in the world continues to be successfully suffocated in an amazing demonstration of unity by the UN, the international community and the international press. They all have too much to lose. Need to refresh your memory? Look here.
Would diplomatic and political efforts have accomplished a Saddam overthrow? In a word - No.
