On the evening of March 19, 2003, President Bush rewrote the tenets of American foreign policy by launching a pre-emptive war against Iraq. He said, "My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger."
His statement had woven in it the chief justifications for going to war: weapons of mass destruction, freedom from Saddam and a peaceful Iraq and Middle East.
Three years out, Iraq is free from Saddam, not at all peaceful and don't even get me started about the weapons of mass destruction.
There have been some undeniable positives. I will never forget the image of Hussein's statue being brought down in 2003. An Iraqi kid slammed his shoe repeatedly on the statue's head.
Equally memorable was the sight of Iraqis proudly displaying their purple fingers after having voted. Even in our age of cynicism and lassitude, the act of voting has a virtue and silent dignity to it.
On the day when votes are cast, the politicians keep quiet, and the people speak and serve up a reminder as to who is really in charge. It felt great that oppressed Iraqis got to experience the euphoria of freedom.
Over the last few months, however, not a day has gone by without an insurgent attack and innocent people losing their lives.
At this three-year anniversary of the start of the war, with competing emotions of achievement and insecurity, some reflections are in order.
How I wish the president had not been so obsessed with just his vision and also paid attention to logistics. Owing mainly to his firm belief in the presence of weapons and the appeal of democracy, Mr. Bush brushed off too many weak links in the run-up to war.
I wish he had listened to Gen. Eric Shinseki, whose prediction about requiring hundreds of thousands of troops to police postwar Iraq has turned out to be almost prophetic. I wish Mr. Bush had paused when offered rosy predictions, such as U.S. troops being greeted like liberators and Iraqi oil paying for the reconstruction efforts.
None of this would suggest that the president deserves all the blame for whatever has gone wrong in Iraq. His opponents in Congress -- a once-relevant party called the Democrats -- had the chance to stop him and ask the hard questions. Instead, they preferred to give Mr. Bush a blank check to wage war. Some of them now claim that they did not have access to all the intelligence or that they were deceived by the White House. The fact remains, though, that if they cannot defend their own convictions and decisions, they will never earn the opportunity to defend America.
In the run-up to the war, the president's chief international adversaries were former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac. These gentlemen enjoyed anti-Bush diatribe and were successful at making the Iraq invasion look like a U.S.-British enterprise. However, their own lack of a strategy to confront terror could not be concealed for long.
Today, Chirac battles irrelevance as the streets of Paris burn, while Schroeder is now officially a crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
That Bush is redeemed by the low quality of his opponents will not suffice, however. His administration is confident of being redeemed by history.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote in the Washington Post: "History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately." Mr. Rumsfeld would do well to also remember that taking comfort in history when the present becomes uncomfortable is not a strategy for victory. For realists, it is troubling to witness increasing sectarian strife in Iraq.
Nishant is a graduate computer sciences student. Reach him at nishant.bhajaria@asu.edu.
