Three Years On

Iraq, do you feel you were right?

KM: I still think that in the long run history will judge this to have been a morally just war, one that will in time produce a better Iraq than the one ruled over by the Ba’ath Party. And yet I now realize I was wrong on a whole number of questions. I misjudged, for instance, the damage done to the Iraqi state and institutions by 13 years of sanctions.

And while de-Ba’athification and demilitarization were right in principle, they were mishandled in practice and that was partly because we in the Iraqi opposition did not think through the other side of dismantling enormous bureaucracies of repression. That other side was winning over the people who were in these institutions and reconciling them with the new order.

The Ba’ath party was hated, but it also turned out to be far more resilient and deep rooted in Iraq than we thought. Now, the answer to these misjudgments was not to leave the rot of Ba’athist Iraq in place. After all, the whole world—in the form of numerous United Nations resolutions imposing sanctions on Iraq following Saddam’s invasion, annexation and rape of Kuwait—was responsible for that rot. To just leave the situation to fester, as the Arab world and Europe seemed to want to do, was in my opinion more immoral than regime change, however badly this was handled by the United States government and the new class of Iraqi politicians who today rule over Iraq.