Time asks was Iraq worth it?

Time magazine has surveyed some international thinkers on whether the Iraq war has been worth it. I've posted the opinions that most closely reflect my position.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA I believe that the balance sheet for the war at this moment is quite negative. The war foreclosed the possibility of Saddam restarting his WMD programs and replaced his dictatorship with Iraq's new democracy--both real gains. Balanced against these gains are costs that go well beyond the direct human and financial ones. The occupation of Iraq has served as a tremendous stimulus for Arab and Muslim anti-Americanism and thus has made radical Islamist terrorism significantly worse than it would otherwise be. America's reputation around the world has taken a huge hit among ordinary people who are now more likely to associate our democracy with scenes of prisoner abuse than with the Statue of Liberty. We, of course, do not know what the future will bring, but the upside potential of Iraq's post-Saddam order looks more and more limited. The central state will remain weak for years to come, and where the Shi'ite parties have established their rule, we get not a liberal democracy but an Iranian-style rule by clerics.

> Fukuyama is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy

BERNARD-HENRI LEVY No. Because it was the wrong target: Iran and Pakistan are infinitely more threatening. Because it was the wrong approach: the neoconservatives, who put no stock in government policy at home and thus can't do so abroad, produced no plans for democratic nation building. And, above all, because this war, which aimed to reduce the number and strength of terrorists, has instead increased them. What was needed was to break the infernal cycle of the "clash of civilizations," à la Sam Huntington and Osama bin Laden. Instead, the war breathed new life into it. In short, rarely have the famous words of Blaise Pascal rung more true: "He who would act the angel becomes the beast." What begins as a noble moral intention to bring down a tyrant becomes a political disaster and a gigantic step backward in the long, necessary war against fascislamism. A field of ruins!

> French philosopher Lévy is author of the recently published American Vertigo

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER Is the cause of freeing a people and pushing for progressive political and economic change in the most dangerous region in the world worth fighting and dying for? Undoubtedly. But has this war--with its disdain for allies and institutions, its willful blindness to any scenario other than easy victory and immediate democracy, and its planners' irresponsibility so deep as to be immoral in failing to protect the heritage, infrastructure and lives of a people who never asked for war--been worth it? Squandering lives and vast sums of money through a combination of arrogance and negligence can never be worth it. And if the Administration had been willing to make a full and honest assessment of the true costs and the uncertainty of the benefits before invading Iraq, I doubt that a majority of the American people would have supported the war.

> Slaughter is the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University

LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON I'm principally a strategist, and from that perspective the war has been a disaster. First, the foremost winner has been Iran: it rid itself of its greatest threat, Saddam and his military, without firing a shot; won the Dec. 15 Iraq elections; owns the south, particularly Basra; and has felt the freedom to elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, in turn, has felt the freedom to reclaim leadership of radical Islam, leadership Osama bin Laden claimed on 9/11. Second, the foremost loser--after Iraq itself--has been Israel, whose leaders must now fear more than ever the new strategic maneuver room afforded Iran by the U.S.'s ineptitude. Third, the general war against global terrorists has been affected greatly by the failure in Iraq. Recruiting among Muslim ranks has been aided significantly, while America has squandered the upper hand in the world of ideas, which is the real battlefield of this conflict.

> U.S. Army Colonel Wilkerson, now retired, was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell

BERNARD KOUCHNER No, because of the way Americans went about it. I think it was up to the international community to pull together and get rid of Saddam for the Iraqi people. I have long argued for the "right to intervene." But you have to succeed. To do that, you need the international community standing with you. Saddam had been a major assassin in his country for 35 years. What difference would a few weeks have made? They should have done as we did in Kosovo, setting up a contact group and relying on international cooperation and peacekeepers.

> Kouchner, former U.N. administrator for Kosovo, co-founded France's Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde

I like these quotes because they go against the grain of this fallacy that one is either pro-intervention (and thus pro-Iraq war) or pro-tyranny. Right wing talking heads have attacked the latter strawman as a product of this supposed notion of Westphalian sovereignty, and pre-9/11 foreign policy orthodoxy. Of course, this is nonsense, and Iraq opposition is certainly broader than some imagined anti-interventionist orthodoxy. In the above quotes, Slaughter's and Kouchner's in particular, we see some principled opposition to Saddam's regime, but without the with-us or against-us mentality, that maddeningly precludes having a position on humanitarian intervention within the legitimating rubric of international institutions and the collective security regime.

I was also satisfied to hear the dirty Frenchman echo a sentiment I've previously expressed. That is, it is hardly a surprise that the Bush Administration has been so incompetent at the post-war phase of Iraq, when its election platform specifically decried the idea of nation building, and the Republican machine ideology is pretty much built around scepticism of good governance.