Do the Recent Arab Protests Discredit the 2003 Invasion of Iraq?

The recent civil unrest in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen has tempted commentators to point to these events as evidence of the foolishness of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Chris Matthews, on Friday, began the program Hardball with the following statement:

Leading off tonight: Unrest in Egypt. Proving the Iraq war wasn`t needed, these protests in Egypt, as well as in Yemen and Tunisia, are all aimed at dictators supported by the U.S. The demonstrations have not yet turned anti-American, but they could. These are the events the Bush administration hoped to encourage by lying about weapons of mass destruction and invading Iraq.

 Powerline rebuts:

Two weeks ago Egypt and Tunisia were quiet; was that evidence that the Iraq war was needed? Libya is quiet still; is that evidence that the Iraq war was necessary? This is all a bizarre non sequitur.

Indeed. Go to the site for the full takedown.

A day earlier, former New York Times blogger, Robert Wright, made a more seductive argument that recent events discredit the invasion. In a conversation on Bloggingheads he had this to say (it’s at 44:10 in the video):

I do want to get in one point I just haven’t heard. Which is that - when the Tunisian thing happened, naturally some supporters of the Iraq War said – well, had we not implanted democracy in Iraq, this might never have happened in Tunisia. I think in a certain sense it is the exact opposite. I think Tunisia is the case against the Iraq War because what it tells you is - let nature take its course. The drift of technological evolution is – it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get democracy in every case - but, it tends to be anti-authoritarian. So, it was silly to think that if we don’t personally get rid of Saddam Hussein, he will be there forever.

The first objection I have to Mr. Wright’s argument is that it ignores the fact that Saddam’s cruelty was not contained within his own borders. He was a dictator who had attacked four neighbors. Tunisia was not an international menace. So, waiting for the Iraqis to remove Saddam himself would have costs for the international community.

More importantly, Wright’s analysis treats all dictatorships the same, whereas the success or failure of protest movements rests on the character of the regime they are demonstrating against. Is the regime willing to give the order to fire on unarmed civilians? Is the military willing to follow those orders in defense of the regime? Regimes collapse when there aren’t enough willing to kill to protect it – particularly when the military shares bonds of ethnicity, language, religion and culture with the protestors.

The 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square failed because the regime had troops willing to fire on the protestors. The local forces were seen as unreliable, so government officials trucked in soldiers from the Mongolian border. They were told the students were reactionaries threatening the revolution. There were fewer ties of ethnicity or language to cause hesitation. They fired.

The Shah collapsed when his troops wouldn’t fire. Thirty years later, the Mullahs stayed in power because they had an outside force willing to commit acts of violence – specifically, foreign-born paramilitary members in the Basij.

The August 1991 attempted Soviet coup failed for several reasons – one being that the troops wouldn’t fire on the protestors in Moscow.

Tunisia is a homogenous country. There are few religious or ethnic divisions a dictator can exploit. The troops wouldn’t fire and the regime collapsed. My suspicion is that the same is true in Egypt, and Mubarak won’t make it through this crisis.

But, that leaves us with Iraq. Could a protest movement ever have brought down the Saddam Hussein regime if we had "let nature take its course"? Would Saddam’s military have fired on protestors?

I can’t think of a regime where nonviolent protests would be less likely to succeed. Saddam's forces were willing to commit acts of genocide against the Kurds.  His troops slaughtered the Shia when they rose up at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. The Sunni insurgency contained a large contingent of former Iraqi soldiers willing to kill Shia women and children in order to provoke a civil war. It’s clear to me Saddam had enough Sunni troops who feared Shia rule who would kill in order to protect his regime. What happened in Tunisia could never happen in Saddam’s Iraq.

I’m not saying this means one has to be for the Iraq War. I’m merely saying that what happened in Tunisia is not an argument against it. Matthews’ assertion was incoherent. Wright’s was seductive, but dubious. My guess is it will become conventional wisdom within a week.