EARLY in 2007, as the American presidential campaign started to gather momentum, critics of Pres. George W. Bush’s War on Terror invented a scheme that allowed them to oppose the administration’s strategy while dodging charges of appeasement. Under that scheme, Iraq was presented as “the bad war” or, according to Sen. Barack Obama, “the wrong war, at the wrong time, and in the wrong place.” In contrast, Afghanistan was presented as “the good war,” the “just war,” or even “the necessary war.”
The argument was that the war in Iraq was wrong because it had not been explicitly approved by the United Nations, while the invasion of Afghanistan had been. That argument ignored the fact that the U.N. Security Council had passed 14 resolutions about Iraq, all of them implicitly allowing the use of force against the Baathist regime. The fact that of all the wars in the world since 1945 the U.N. had ordered only three explicitly did not prevent critics from singling out the liberation of Iraq as a violation of international law. Those critics also ignored the fact that the U.S. Congress had overwhelmingly approved the use of force against Saddam Hussein, thus providing the legal basis that they claimed was lacking.
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