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Leon Wieseltier
- I think that Bill Clinton will go to hell for taking two and a half years to get into Bosnia after not doing anything at all about Rwanda.
There are two questions, I think, that all of us have been pondering. The first one is why is the Bush Administration proposing to launch this war? The second question is, should this war be launched? Theyíre not the same question. Sometimes somebody that one admires does something that one cannot support. Sometimes someone that one does not admire does something that one can support. Iíd like to separate, at the outset, the question of the Bush Administration from the question of the merits of this war that they propose to fight in Iraq. Iím not here to defend the Bush Administration; I want to be perfectly clear about that. In most of its policies, I find it somewhere between offensive and odious. I have no enthusiasm for the heartlessness of its economic policy, for its indifference to the environment, for its non-democratic feelings about the transparency of government, for its religiosity, for its bloodlust in capital punishment executions. None of this arouses any enthusiasm in me. However, I cannot allow my analysis of what I believe to be a serious threat emanating from Saddam Hussein to be shut down by my opposition to the Bush Administration on other grounds. It is possible for sophisticated people in a democracy to support certain things and oppose other things. In any event, we only have one president at a time. I was a great supporter of American intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s, as was Mark; we were co-conspirators in this. I think that Bill Clinton will go to hell for taking two and a half years to get into Bosnia after not doing anything at all about Rwanda. I greatly admired Republican friends who despised Clinton, as much as some of us despise Bush, who were able to support the democratic intervention in the Balkans because they thought it was the right thing. The reason I support the war in Iraq is essentially this, and Iíll have to speak briefly and therefore crudely. I believe that there is such a thing as an international emergency that requires the international community ñ whatever on earth that is. Weíll have to deal with that at some point tonight: to act, to rise up and stop acts of such criminality, acts of violence against innocent men, women and children that simply constitute a fundamental violation, not only of the peace, but of the standards of a civilized international life. I do not believe that tyranny is one of those international emergencies; tyranny is as old as the hills, and it has to be fought indigenously. A true democracy needs indigenous roots, so force can sometimes help it along, as we discovered in Germany, Japan, Austria and other places. Nor do I believe that war itself constitutes such an international emergency, but there are two crimes, there are two heinous categories of acts, that I believe require, obligate, every civilized individual to oppose them, into doing something about them. They are genocide and the use of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The remarkable thing about Saddam Hussein (heís very distinguished in the field of evil) is that he has actually perpetrated both these international emergencies. He has used chemical weapons against soldiers; he has used chemical weapons against civilians. He started a war that lasted seven years that cost 1 million lives, at the end of which the border had not even changed. He invaded Kuwait. We now know, this is not speculation, that there are thousands, I repeat, thousands of tons of chemical agents in Iraq that are unaccounted for. We know, this is not speculation, that there are thousands of loiters of anthrax in Iraq that are unaccounted for. The United Nations ñ that is to say, the international community ñ quite correctly, 12 years ago, and then again in [U.N. Resolution] 1441 recently, demanded that he disarm. We sent inspectors and he turned the inspections into a scavenger hunt. The inspections were not supposed to be a scavenger hunt; what the international community required of this man was that he make a strategic decision to disarm. This is a decision that, not only has he consistently refused to make, but that his refusal to make has enabled him to actually use his weapons, either actually, or for the purpose of the threat of terrorizing various opposition groups and ethnic groups in other states and so on. Saddam Hussein is the only figure in the discussion of the weapons of mass destruction, about whom all the chilling theories of deterrence and all the ominous scenarios of game theory do not apply, because he has already used them. He has already used them; he is the only figure in contemporary history of whom that can be said. This is not a small thing. There are those who point out that the old scenarios of deterrence apply because he has never used them against people by whom he could be deterred. I will confess that that is attributing a little too much rationality after genocide, for my taste. In any event, even if Saddam Hussein is the rational actor that certain people who are opposed to the war think he is, he happens to have been a colossally, stupidly dangerous rational actor, who has committed two of the most extraordinary strategic miscalculations in modern history. The first one having to do with starting that ugly and unbelievable was with Iran, the second one having to do with the war with Kuwait. Let me say a word about terrorism. I do not believe this war is about terrorism; I do not believe there is any direct link that has been demonstrated between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. But I will tell you this. Everything we know about this man, about what he has done in the past and about what he is capable of doing in the future, does not lead me to believe that there is some part of his conscience that would make it impossible for him to cooperate with terrorist groups of all kinds. He has already cooperated with a variety of terrorist groups, and there are thousands of tons of chemical agents that are unaccounted for. A word about democratization: I do not believe, in the words of a famous folk singer in the 1960s, that we are the cops of the world. I do not think that democratization alone is a sufficient reason for the United States to launch a major war against a tyranny in the Middle East. But I do believe that the only real solution to the problem of proliferation is political development. That is to say, Saddam Hussein, I believe, for the sake of hundreds of thousands of innocent, not even necessarily American ones, because we are not the United States of America because we believe only in the welfare of ourselves. This is not just about the security of people who have an American passport; this is about the role that any large power, that claims to be a decent power and have a conscience, must play.
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