President Bush has given a speech on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq intervention. Here is the full text.

Of course all sorts of people think that this intervention has been nothing but a Disaster which needs all the adjectives from Dave Spart’s thesaurus to describe it. Here’s an example from the Guardian website. One can almost feel the writer’s fingers skidding on the keyboard amidst the flecks of foam. But the site also gives this fair-minded piece by Michael White.

One striking thing about the intervention has been the historically low casualty rates on the Allies’ side. This fascinating document describes in some detail US military casualty figures over many years – see for example the consistently high numbers of people lost every year through accidents. It shows just how well US forces in Iraq have done in dealing with the military problems they faced. 

Of course Iraqi civilian deaths since the intervention have been far higher, but most of those have been caused by the activities of terrorists and psychotic political forces of different varieties. What do we think would happen if these people actually prevailed and took over Iraq? Back to the good old days?

How to take a view on whether an intervention is ‘worth it’?

The Korean War is hardly ever mentioned these days. Yet it was a major set-piece military confrontation with a pro-democracy UN force led by the Americans (and including eg Belgium and Luxembourg) clashing head-on with Communist Chinese forces and a large Korean pro-communist force.

Total Allied losses were some 40,000 soldiers. The war ended in a messy stalemate which has persisted ever since. Korea has stayed divided between North (communist) and South (Asian pluralist).

This situation is in fact the greatest social science experiment in human history. How have the two parts of Korea fared under such different management styles for over fifty years?

Well, North Korea is achieving fine results in not using power and contributing to global warming. Otherwise its total economy is now about the size of the market value of South Korea’s largest bank.

What this means in practice is that millions of North Koreans live and die in conditions of brutalised destitution, if not downright starvation. For no reason other than the selfish ideological vanity of its tiny leadership clique. A deliberate waste of human life on a scale which is almost impossible to grasp.

Had the UN forces not stood firm against the communists’ onslaught, albeit at the heavy cost of 40,000 Western lives, the whole of Korea would have been taken over by those lunatics. Thanks directly to us, many millions of South Korean lives have been saved from the consequences of communism and made worthwhile. 

Is it really so impossible to imagine that in fifty years Iraq will be doing pretty well in some sort of sui generis Arab pluralist way, directly thanks to what we did to throw out the Saddam regime and the sacrifices made by the Allies and Iraqi people alike as a result?