2003-01-30 - 6:13 p.m.
I was going to write about something else today, but then I spent way too much time this afternoon composing the following for a listserv I'm on, so I decided to post a (slightly edited) version of it here. If you're on that listserv and you're reading this, feel free to skip the rest and come back tomorrow.
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A friend of mine here, who has no love for either George W. Bush or Saddam Hussein, had this to say about Iraq the other day: "If the war goes well, Hussein is gone. And if it goes badly, Dubya will be gone in 2004. So hey, bring it on."
Tempting as it is to adopt my friend's position, it's way too cynical, even for me.
I've been mildly to moderately hawkish for most of my political life. In 1991 I supported the use of military force to push Iraq out of Kuwait and I still think we could have gone on to Baghdad right then. After 9/11 I supported going into Afghanistan to take out al-Qaeda and the Taliban (and while we might never know for sure, I'm about 75 percent convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead). As I recall, a lot of liberals and leftists felt the same way about it. Most of the ones who didn't, and the ones marching in demonstrations against war in Iraq now, are either knee-jerk America-haters and neo-Trotskyist ANSWER nutjobs or soft pacifists of the "War is bad, mmmkay?" variety, and my respect for them is about zero.
Nor do I give much more than half a shit what the French, the Germans, or the "world community" thinks. The world community sat around with its communal thumb up its ass while Milosevic's genocide was going on, and it took more or less unilateral action by the U.S. to stop him. In Somalia, the U.S. went in on what started out as a humanitarian mission, but then let itself be manipulated by the UN Secretary-General into supporting one group of thugs against another and got a bunch of American soldiers killed in the process. Basically, when it comes to use of its military power, the U.S. is always damned when it does and damned when it doesn't. If it intervenes militarily anywhere, it gets denounced for imperialism; if it fails to intervene, it gets denounced for inaction and neglect.
So, I'm hardly a squishy leftist appeaser when it comes to this subject.
But I'm not on board with this war.
I'm against it because the U.S. has a long history of not waging aggressive war. (You can quibble over the reality of it, but that's how the U.S. idealistically regards its foreign policy.) However you slice it, this is an aggressive, preemptive war against a country that hasn't attacked the U.S. or any of its neighbors in 10 years or more. I'm willing to be persuaded that Hussein poses an immediate and urgent threat and that such a war is necessary, but its going to take more than specious invocations of 9/11 or fevered images of Saddam Hussein nuking Los Angeles in 10 years to talk me into flushing two centuries' worth of foreign-policy tradition down the toilet. Because the situation is so unique historically, and because the drive for war is being spearheaded by an administration I frankly don't trust worth a damn, the burden of proof is even higher than it would be otherwise.
If the goal is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, there are less labor-intensive ways to do so. They're nasty and secretive, and they're just as likely to earn the U.S. lots of frowny-faces in Noam Chomsky's next book, but they're also more likely to be effective and I'm not especially squeamish about the idea of using them. They're also far less likely to get lots of U.S. soldiers and innocent civilians killed. But of course, they'd also deprive the Shrubbies of the chance to dance publicly on Hussein's grave, so I'm guessing these options aren't terribly popular with them.
If the goal is to keep Hussein from acquiring and/or using WMDs, I don't what the big deal is over letting the UN inspectors do their job. By all accounts Iraq is far weaker militarily than it was in 1991. If the inspectors are saying that Iraq is in noncompliance but that they need more time to do a through inspection and analysis, why not let them have that time? It seems to me that an ongoing weapons-inspection process is the surest way to keep Hussein's WMD acquisition in check. For Bush to yell, "Time's up!" before Blix et al have finished the job we sent them there to do is ... a lot like pulling the plug on the Florida recount before finding out how the vote actually went, IYKWIM. It's as if they don't want the process to go on simply because they're afraid it won't tell them what they want to hear.
If what we really want is to liberate the Iraqi people, I'm ok with that. But our follow-through in such matters since WWII is beyond pathetic. We hung the Kurds and the Iraqi opposition out to dry in 1991, and we've assumed a position of benign-but-armed neglect in Afghanistan. My sense about Dubya is that when he's done playing with his toys, he drops them and lets others pick up the mess. And I get no reassuring sense whatsoever that he, or anyone in his administration except possibly Colin Powell, gives a damn about the oppressed Iraqi people except as rhetorical devices.
Once all of the above has been separated out, the only reason I can see that the administration wants a war right now is to take possession of Iraqi oil and teach the rest of the world not to mess with Texas. (It also dovetails quite nicely with Ashcroft's desire for more police-state powers and with certain elements of the Christian right's impatience to get Armageddon rolling so Jesus will get off the stick and return.) The neo-cons in the administration, academia and the media - Wolfowitz, Perle, et al - are on record saying that the ultimate goal is to remake the Middle East to (what they believe is) America's liking. Some people seem to think that kind of power-grab is just peachy. I'm afraid it will cost America its soul.
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