Good editorial
Small Talk
by Peter Beinart
Post date 08.08.02 | Issue date 08.19.02
It has been more than six months since President Bush began hinting that the United States would attack Iraq. And the Democrats have finally come up with a response: They are in favor of debate. The United States needs "a national dialogue," explained Senator Joseph Biden. A "national dialogue," echoed a spokesman for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt. In a Washington Post op-ed, former Bill Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger called for an "honest discussion with the American people." As of this writing, the anti-honest-discussion lobby has yet to respond.
There's nothing wrong with all these calls for dialogue. But it's hard to have a useful discussion when only one side knows what it thinks. And right now only one side does. Bush and most Republicans are arguing that the United States should go to war against Iraq; most Democrats are arguing that we should argue about it.
Some Democrats seem to regard their uncertainty as a sign of judiciousness--rather than rushing to judgment, they are waiting for the facts to come in. But the facts won't tell Democrats what to think. Discussing Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, Biden said last month, "My attitude is we should be like the Missourians: Show me." But the experts who testified before his Foreign Relations Committee stressed how little anyone knows about Iraq's weapons programs. As Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham admitted in early July after touring the Middle East, "[The] central reality is uncertainty."
And Saddam's motivations are even more impervious to empirical analysis than are his capabilities. Let's assume--summarizing an extremely murky conventional wisdom--that Saddam is unlikely to give his weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who might sneak across our borders. But if he is left alone for the next few years he'll likely do something aggressive closer to home--against Israel, the Kurds, or maybe Saudi Arabia--and use his weapons of mass destruction as blackmail to keep the United States from responding.
Is it worth risking American casualties to make sure that doesn't happen? Expert testimony can't answer that. For that matter, neither can national dialogue. After all, the United States dialogued for five months before the Gulf war; in the end the Senate voted almost exactly as you would have predicted on the day Saddam invaded Kuwait. The Democrats don't need more information about war with Iraq. What they need is a theory about how post-September 11 international relations work.
Bush has a theory: preemption. His idea is that containment--the first hallmark of cold war U.S. foreign policy--won't work against terrorists and mad dictators who want to wreak havoc at least as much as they want to capture territory. And that deterrence--the second hallmark--won't work against fanatics who aren't fazed by the prospect of massive retaliation. So the United States must destroy them before they destroy us.
So far Democrats have quibbled with the details of Bush's Iraq strategy, but, because they haven't addressed the preemption theory that underlies it, those quibbles haven't been very compelling. Al Gore recently said, "If the rest of the world does not see what it regards as a sufficient provocation to justify an invasion by the United States, then the diplomatic cost would be extremely high." But "the rest of the world" (i.e., our European and Arab allies) doesn't see "sufficient provocation" because it thinks the old rules still apply, that you don't preemptively attack bad regimes just because they could threaten you down the road. If Gore agrees, then that--and not French and Egyptian opposition--is the reason not to go to war. And if he doesn't--if he thinks the cold war rules have changed--then allied opposition, while unfortunate, isn't reason to hold off. Making international opposition the primary rationale for opposing war with Iraq is essentially a way for Democrats to outsource the moral and strategic thinking they need to do themselves.
The Democrats' other objections also miss the larger point. They worry that Iraq might respond to a U.S. attack by launching chemical weapons. But we can't know whether it will or not. If you agree with Bush--that Saddam will eventually launch those weapons anyway--it's a risk worth taking. If you don't, it's not. Similarly, Biden has suggested that the United States shouldn't go to war without giving the weapons inspectors another chance. But it's a virtual certainty that even if Saddam were to let the inspectors back in, he would eventually place roadblocks in their path. Which would just raise the question of war once again.
I think Bush is right about preemption. For one thing, we aren't containing Saddam now--he's been free to build up his chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal for almost four years now. And given the improbability of Saddam's allowing weapons inspectors free rein, not to mention the waning international support for Iraqi sanctions, it's unlikely we can contain him any better in the future. It's impossible to predict Saddam's behavior, but his history with Iran, Kuwait, and the Kurds suggests there's a pretty good chance he'll use whatever weapons he develops to try to dominate his neighbors. And while he might be deterred by the threat of American retaliation, the whole point of acting now is that once Saddam has, say, a nuclear bomb, he'll also be able to deter us.
What makes the Democrats hesitate, I suspect, is a sense that the Bush team's political isolationism will ultimately undo whatever good its military internationalism achieves--leaving the United States more isolated and ultimately weaker. But the answer isn't for Democrats to mimic Europe's support for a containment that no longer contains. It's to advocate what might be called "preemption plus." The premise would be that if we want our war with Iraq to leave the United States more respected in the world, rather than merely more feared, it must be accompanied by a corresponding political intervention--i.e., nation-building. The Bush administration talks about building a showcase Muslim democracy in post-Saddam Iraq, but its track record on nation-building and democratization is awful. In Afghanistan its opposition to a nationwide peacekeeping force has weakened Hamid Karzai's fledgling government. And in Pakistan the Bushies have watched approvingly as Pervez Musharraf has betrayed his democratic promises, leaving himself--and the United States--more and more isolated.
Focusing on the political corollary to military intervention in Iraq would draw attention to the lingering GOP isolationism and relativism that undermine the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It would also serve as the logical moral successor to liberal anti-communism, which stressed the role of development and human rights in containing Soviet expansion. And it would ensure that Democrats are not bystanders as the United States marches to war. A national dialogue on Iraq is all well and good. But first the Democrats must have something to say.
Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR.
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