Human Rights and Iraq

Now that the Senate intelligence committee has destroyed the WMD argument and the 9/11 commission has destroyed the al-Qaeda link the only way now left to justify the Iraq war is a human rights argument. That Saddam killed and oppressed his people and that we are right to go to war to stop that. This causes me much more problems than bogus 9/11 links. I support the idea of humanitarian and human rights based intervention. I supported the US intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo and fully expect to support it the next time the US has to bomb some asshole dictator to stop killing a people we never heard of before. This brings me to some quotes I stole from other, better blogs. First via Iraq'D Pat Robert's (Republican chair of Senate intelligence committee) answer when asked if he would support the war in light of the committee's findings:

As far as my vote, in regards to authorize of war, I think the war would have been different. I think it would have been based more on something like Kosovo or Bosnia. President Clinton indicated we should have certainly intervened in regard to Rwanda. You can make the same case, if you go back several decades, to Cambodia. You can make the same case in World War II in regards to the Holocaust...

Now I am very open to this kind of argument. However this is not the case that was made was it? I now steal Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy secretary of Defense and chief architect of the Iraq war via Political Animal.

....there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people....The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.

So they never made the human right argument and they never believed it to be enough. They are merely grasping for anything they can come up with, now that the reasons they actually used to justify war have been blown all to hell.

I will have a post later on why I fear Bush and company may have screwed up the case for real human rights based intervention for years.