Silly Little Country

Baker's Free Pass

I have long wondered about James Baker's free pass; he seems personable, and most of the media seem ot have a lot of respect for his efforts in the past as a diplomat.
The great contrarian Christopher Hitchens sees it differently and right now I think Hitchens' points are spot-on:

In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let's give Baker his due—"on side." The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to "address the root cause" and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the "root causes" of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.

The tragedy is that those with a yearning for the days of Bush 41 seem now to be growing in influence, and they are an appalling bunch; it is depressing to watch their self-satisfaction.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 7:44 PM