Million Dollar Answer?

One question which has never really been answered about the U.S. invasion of Iraq is what the true motivation for it was. I only bring this up, because all this time people have been searching for an answer, Jeffrey Kopstein, political science professor at the University of Toronto, has had it all along.

Says Kopstein,

"Let's start with the reason for the war, the real reason. The real reason came out of an analysis of 9/11, an analysis that has yet to be challenged. This analysis was straightforward and forms the core of the neo-con position. It runs as follows."

Here is Kopstein's argument in point form:

1) Modernization has provoked a fundamentalist Islamic backlash in the Arab world.
2) This backlash can affect us here in 'the West' as evidenced on 9/11.
3) The only possible solution to the backlash is to impose political and social modernization on the Arab world from outside the region
4) The best way to do this is to pick a large Arab country, invade it, occupy it, and stay put until the country is set on an irreversible path towards becoming politically and socially modern.
5) Once that first country becomes socially and politically modern, there will be a domino effect and all the other Arab countries will follow.

Iraq was apparently chosen as the target because Saddam was a brutal, aggressive, dictator who wanted to have weapons of mass destruction (unlike the leadership of any other Arab countries, presumably).

I don't even know where to start with this. For now, let's just note the breathtaking arrogance that suggests that we (in the West) have the right to invade, occupy and impose our version of social and political modernization on a country because it happens to be in the same region and speak the same language as a group of individuals who launched a terrorist attack on us.

Aside from all that ethical mumbo-jumbo, the primary practical problem with Kopstein's reason for invasion has now become too obvious even for him to ignore:

"Needless to say, things have not worked out as expected. We now know that a forced opening of the Arab world, or even creating regimes that do not view their own people in instrumental terms - something far short of democracy - is fraught with all kinds of difficulties."

We now know?????

[sarcasm alert]
Yeah, who could have predicted this would be fraught with difficulties. Good thing we went through this learning experience. We'll have to keep this in mind for next time. This is coming from a professor of political science?

Anyway, at least Kopstein acknowledges that this plan isn't working, so what does he propose? Well, nothing really. His main point seems to be a warning to people who opposed the war that they shouldn't be happy that the needless, destructive, invasion and occupation of Iraq which has cost so many lives might be coming to an end. Why not? Because the root problem of terrorism hasn't gone away and the next 'solution' the U.S. comes up with is likely to be to turn itself into a torture tolerating police state and we're not going to like that either.

I can certainly agree that I don't want the U.S. to become a torture tolerating police state and I also agree that, if there are more terrorist attacks there, this could well start to happen, but I don't really see how this is in any way connected to being happy if the U.S. starts making plans towards removing itself from Iraq.

Maybe Kopstein just doesn't like hearing 'I told you so' and this 'you wont be so happy when they start torturing people' rebuttal is the best thing he could think of to keep people quiet. But since his rebuttal has no connection to his problem, this argument isn't likely to be any more successful than the war was (on the plus side, it won't kill as many people).