Posted on 08/01/2003 11:09:07 AM PDT by yonif
It's getting to the point where I'm beginning to hope weapons of mass destruction are not found in Iraq. Maybe then we can have a half-way decent argument about the war.
So far that's not happening. Among those who opposed the war, views range from the syllogistically incompetent to the morally fatuous. Let's see:
1. WMD were not used during the war and have not been found since: Therefore, they did not exist. (This according Lord Denis Healey, chancellor of the exchequer in James Callaghan's illustrious government.)
2. The American president, in his State of the Union address, correctly cited a British dossier which itself made a possibly false claim about uranium flowing from Niger to Iraq. Therefore, the president took the country to war on false pretenses. Meanwhile, a British scientist alleged to have claimed that the government "sexed up" its claims on Iraqi WMD committed suicide. Therefore, Tony Blair must resign.
3. Saddam Hussein is a secular Ba'athist; Osama bin Laden is a religious crank. Therefore, they could not have cooperated or colluded.
4. The US has yet to stop the civil war in Liberia or invade North Korea. Therefore, the Bush administration is not interested in spreading democracy, sparing innocents, or stopping arms proliferation. It only wants oil.
5. US soldiers failed to prevent the looting of Iraq's archeological treasures and haven't got the electricity grid running yet. Therefore, the US is a poor steward of a country desperately crying out for the firm and capable hands of the UN.
And so on. As Maureen Dowd put the case in her New York Times column Wednesday, "Brazening out the failure to find the Saddam-Qaeda links and WMD the administration aggrandized before the war, [it] has simply done an Orwellian fan dance, covering the lack of concrete ties to the 9/11 terrorists with feathery assertions that securing 'the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror.'"
THEN AGAIN, the other side - my side - hasn't done much better in this debate. The ease with which coalition forces took Baghdad suggests that the Iraqi regime, whatever it's capabilities 20 years ago, posed no great threat to anyone except Iraqis themselves. The failure so far to find WMD probably means they were, at the least, not in a position to be readily deployed. Qaida-affiliated groups clearly had some kind of presence in Iraq, but the administration may have overstated the links.
And while it's certainly true, as Blair put it this week in a news conference, that "the security threat of the 21st century" is the marriage of terrorism to WMD, it's also fair to wonder whether Iraq's weapons aren't more of a threat to us now than they were prior to the war.
The upshot is that Bush and Blair find themselves on the defensive just as they ought to be feasting on their victory. It's a needless setback of their own contriving. As US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged in a Vanity Fair interview, the administration's reasons for going to war were several, including Saddam's support for terrorism and his "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people." It settled on WMD "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy."
One wonders why this need have been the case. For most Americans the reason for war was always plain: 9/11. Of course the date symbolizes many things, not least the terrible damage a handful of men can do with a bit of skill and a few thousand dollars. But for the purposes of fashioning US policy, there are just two ways to look at the event.
First, America was attacked because it is free.
Second, America was attacked because it was weak.
In the aftermath of September 11, the president often dwelled on the former. "Americans are asking: Why do they hate us?" said the president in his address to the joint Congress on September 20. "They hate what we see right here in this chamber - a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self appointed. They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
According to this analysis, then, an attack on America by the enemies of freedom required, at some level, a response that would involve the spread of freedom. "Freedom and fear," said the president, "have always been at war." Thus it would not be enough to destroy al-Qaida's hideouts in Afghanistan; Afghanistan would itself have to be remade. Nor would it do to effect a regime change, by surgical means, in Baghdad; the whole country would have to be made to join the family of free nations.
Tony Blair is a partisan of this view. "What amazes me is how happy people are for Saddam to stay," he is reported to have remarked. "They ask me why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should."
This is an honorable and defensible view. It is also, in its essence, an implicit call for the Western powers to remake the world, and therefore a kind of new White Man's Burden. It would entail great financial strain and an even greater expenditure of lives; it would also require a certainty of moral purpose not seen since the days of Gladstone. And it would run the risk of falling apart, just like the West's last colonialist experience did, into a stew of vicious new nationalisms.
Which brings us to the second view: America as a victim of its own weakness. September 11 was a tragedy, a crime, and an act of war. But it was also a humiliation, which in turn stemmed from a failure of what Richard Nixon might have called (to the hoots of his detractors) credibility. Restoring America's credibility as a fearsome power was, quite properly, President Bush's most essential task.
This may sound like an emotional point - something out of the Just nuke 'em school of diplomacy. But it is also a feature of international relations going back at least to the Peloponnesian War. Bin Laden's well-publicized claim is that the US can be struck with impunity. Saddam's 12-year, spit-in-the-eye defiance of UN sanctions and American military threats was proof of this, as was the Clinton administration's withdrawal of US troops from Mogadishu and its flabby responses to the bombings of US embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Aden.
Whether or not Saddam and bin Laden actually colluded is therefore beside the point. They served one another as mutually reinforcing symbols of Arab defiance. The same went for Hizbullah, whose successful defiance of Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon served as inspiration for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas in the current intifada.
What matters according to this analysis, then, isn't whether Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Zimbabwe or a prospective Palestine enjoy the blessings of civil rights and democratic representation. Simply put, these countries merely need to know who's boss. "Not long ago, al-Qaida's leader dismissed America as a paper tiger," said Bush at the Norfolk Navy Yard on the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. "That's before the tiger roared." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush also constantly emphasized the need for the UN to prove a credible venue for international security by enforcing its own resolutions.
Again, such a course has its virtues. It is an inexpensive form of insurance against future attack, provided America has the stomach for Kissingerian amoralism. Historically, the US never has. America's engagement with the world has, mainly, been couched in moral terms; the colder calculations of realpolitik have never had any grip on America's sense of self. Just as Wilsonianism runs the risk of imperial overstretch, then, Kissingerianism invites isolationism.
SO, SHOULD the US administration pursue a policy that stresses the credibility of its deterrent or the purity of its principles? For the moment, President Bush, a la Yogi Berra, has reached the fork in the road and taken it. And for the moment, the policy makes sense. There can be no serious debate about the fact that Saddam's defiance of UN resolutions made an intolerable mockery of the US. He had to go. Nor is there any serious debate that Iraqis deserve, and the Mideast would benefit from, a democratic regime in Baghdad.
But as American warships steam towards Liberia, and American policy makers continue to debate what to do with them once they've arrived on that Godforsaken and easily forgotten shore, a choice will have to be made. I know this is an old debate. It remains the debate America, and the world, now needs to have.
bret@jpost.co.il
So far that's not happening. Among those who opposed the war, views range from the syllogistically incompetent to the morally fatuous. Let's see:
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