Assessing success

Submitted by Bjorn Merker (Sweden), Apr 6, 2006 at 14:10

With all due respect, I have a hard time construing the sense in which Daniel Pipes deems the invasion of Iraq a success for getting rid of Saddam Hussein. I could understand that assessment if the coalition had gone in, removed the heinous dictator and, mission accomplished, had gotten out.

Irrespective of what subsequently would have happened in and to Iraq (except for a return of the dictator), such a limited mission would have to be judged a success simply for accomplishing its purpose. But in the event that is not what happened, and what actually happened would seem to belong to any assessment of a mission's success or failure.

It took Al Qaida approximately 5 months (till sometime in August 2003) to realize that they finally had been handed the answer to all their prayers and provocations since helping drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan after 10 years of bitter fighting in 1989. Finally, the second and only remaining superpower in the world was committed with troops on the ground on a grand scale in a Muslim country! A dream come true, and the call went out "All hands to Iraq".

By now the thousands of foreign fighters who answered that call have spent two and a half years wreaking as much havoc as they have been able to muster in Iraq. I, for one, am unable to imagine any mode of coalition withdrawal from that country - now or later - that will not be construed by these forces as their second consecutive victory over the worlds two superpowers. And till I am able to do so, the notion of the invasion as a success will remain hard for me to swallow.

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