Iraqi Interrogatories, The usual questions about Iraq.
September 20, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Isn't going into Iraq just a bad idea?
Every war is a bad idea. When are there ever attractive options in risking soldiers in times of national crisis? The last good choice we had was in January 1991, when a huge and victorious American army had a clear road to Baghdad, with a good chance at eliminating a mass murderer who was on the verge of collapse and poised to exterminate innocents.
In contrast, our present dilemma involves something bad or much worse. Yet we must not forget that there still is a great moral difference between the depressing choice of invading and risking American lives, and the much worse policy of doing nothing and waiting to be blackmailed or attacked in the future. Preemption may be saner than reaction.
Does Saddam Hussein really pose a deadly or immediate threat to the United States — and how, as a democracy, in good conscience can we act preemptively?
Since September 11 there has no longer been a margin of safety — or error — allowing us a measure of absolute certainty before action. Long gone is the notion that American soil is inviolable or that enemies will not butcher thousands of civilians unexpectedly and in time of peace. All we need to know is that he broke the armistice agreements of the first war, violated the weapons-inspections accords, likes to attack other countries, dallies with terrorists, has nightmarish weapons, and has already fought us once. That he is a dictator, killed thousands of his own people, sought to assassinate a president of the United States, tried to destroy the ecology of Kuwait, and sent missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia are not misdemeanors.
In fact, consensual governments from Republican Rome in the Third Punic War through to the present have often struck first when their strategic or moral interests were felt to be at stake. In Grenada, Panama, Serbia, and Kosovo we preemptively attacked governments that had not directly assaulted us, because they posed perceived dangers to either our own interests or their own people. What discredits the idea of preemption is the combination of failure and amorality — as with the 1956 English-Israeli-French assault on Suez or the Arab attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In contrast, success and moral right make even the most audacious strikes less objectionable — as in Israel's much-deplored destruction of Saddam's bomb-making nuclear complex or its bombing of terrorist headquarters in Tunisia.
But won't we set a bad precedent? Maybe India or Russia will do the same?
This is the current conventional wisdom repeated ad nauseam. But Russia went into Chechnya regardless of our wishes or example. And India will make a decision to act on the basis of its own self-interest, not whether they can cite "precedent" on the part of the United States. Strong nations evaluate their options from calculations of self-preservation and morality — choices not necessarily predicated on what the United States must do to ensure its own security. The invasion of Iraq will have a deleterious effect on world peace only if it is seen as gratuitous or unnecessary — and neither presently happens to be true.
So the danger is not preemption per se, but bellicosity for no good reason. We must get away from stereotyped generalizations and look at specifics. Being inactive in the face of unprovoked attacks on Americans — the Iranian embassy takeover and the Marine barracks bombing are good examples — can establish precedents just as pernicious. In that regard, President Carter's restraint in 1980, in combination with a failed raid, was a far more dangerous act than President Reagan's bombing of Libya — and makes his present moral objections to preempting Saddam as disturbing as they are hypocritical.
If we are so worried about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, why aren't its immediate neighbors equally concerned?
What states profess publicly is often at odds with their private concerns. And it may be that, despite the appearance of Islamic or Arab solidarity, the autocracies of the Gulf secretly wish us to remove the Iraqi regime against their publicly expressed wishes. In addition, this new assault will be about not the containment, but the removal, of Saddam Hussein — and thus will be far more explosive, in a variety of ways, than the last war. A cynic would add that illegitimate regimes will worry as much about a democratic revolution on their borders as they will about the presence of autocrats. A humane, secular, democratic, and oil-producing Iraq may be as dangerous to the interests of the Saudi royal family as is Saddam Hussein. After all, our moderate despots in the region are not worried that Saddam is a dictator, only that he is a mad dictator.
And Europe? How can we ignore their worries?
We cannot ignore the Europeans, and must consult them. Still, in all honesty, we must also accept that once the EU had placed its national security in the hands of international accords and the U.N., its members could hardly publicly support us without undermining the very legitimacy of their new utopian protocols. Yet unilateralism is hardly a dirty word; the singular obstinacy of a single country has ended many of the world's great evils. The British took on the slave trade, and later faced Hitler alone for two years. Few thought the United States should station Pershing missiles in Europe to thwart the nuclear intimidation of the Soviets. Had the United States waited for European or United Nations approval last autumn, bin Laden and the Taliban would still rule Afghanistan. Again, the effort to view "unilateral" or "preemptory" as pejorative terms in order to deprecate the use of military force misses the point — it is the moral landscape in which such policies are undertaken, not the singular use of a first strike per se, that determines their legitimacy.
And the U.N.?
We need not enter into a long discussion about the morality of the United Nations, where murderous regimes like China or Libya adjudicate questions of human rights. Instead we can grant, first, that an international framework to air grievances is salutary. Therefore the fact that the United Nations has passed over a dozen resolutions concerning Iraq that have been ignored — and has had its inspectors expelled — suggests either its unconcern with or impotence in enforcing its own statutes. It is increasingly reminiscent of the League of Nations in the age of spreading fascism and totalitarianism. We must remember that present threats of American preemption — not the Europeans' lectures or General Assembly resolutions — alone are making Saddam Hussein give lip service to inspections.
Aren't we diverting our attention from al Qaeda?
No more so than B-29s were a diversion from B-17s, or than Okinawa can be said to have taken our minds away from the encirclement of Hitler's armies.
Won't Saddam's removal destabilize the region?
Haven't we heard this before? The question assumes that the region is stable now. Yet even if it were, such flux might still represent an improvement over the last 15 years. A worse scenario would be the creation of an Islamic theocracy, the rise of another dictator, or chaos. Yet we have handled all three before — in Iran, Libya, and Afghanistan and Algeria. And in none of those cases were weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. an issue, as it is now. In postbellum Iraq we seek something like the new government in Afghanistan, the Kurdish nascent efforts at republicanism, perhaps the reformist movement in Qatar, or ideally a secularized democracy such as is found in Turkey. We must be prepared to promote some foundations for eventual democracy, with the awareness that even if it fails, we will still be better off than we are with the monster there now.
Won't the Islamic world turn on us?
That constant refrain has now joined the annals of conventional ignorance alongside "the Arab street," "a Ramadan ceasefire," "universal jihad," etc. We should have learned by now that anti-American fundamentalists find resonance with their countrymen only when they are not in power and can distort the people's frustrations with autocrats. When they rule, they fail miserably, and incur hatred for themselves.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are an interesting pair of antitheses, are they not? The former has a hostile regime and a friendly populace; the latter has a purportedly friendly government and a hostile citizenry. Democrats are on the move against fundamentalists in Iran; fundamentalists are on the move against autocrats in Saudi Arabia. Surely that should tell us something — that fundamentalists like autocracy and hate democracy. Dictatorial Pakistan has an Islamic fundamentalist problem; democratic India, with its larger Muslim population, less so. The end of the Cold War, the rise of westernized Arabs, the spread of democracy, and instantaneous global communications all suggest that we may well be successful in crafting consensual government in Iraq — which could prove the most revolutionary act of the last 30 years. Should this war be couched in terms of the liberation of the Iraqi people, Iraqis may well react in jubilation, as did the Afghans — sending a message that we really are on the side of the region's disenfranchised, and not of cabals like those of Arafat, the Saudi sheiks, or the Egyptian strongmen who have looted their countries and jailed and killed dissidents.
But didn't we back Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran?
That is often alleged, but the record suggests that our amorality was more a question of hoping that both sides would wear each other out. Recall that the Iranians had just seized our embassy, taken hostages, and pledged death to Americans; under such circumstances, why wouldn't we gain psychological satisfaction at seeing our enemies attacked, even if by equally odious thugs? Allying ourselves in 1941 with the Soviet Union — a regime that had just killed 20 million of its own people — to stop Hitler was a far greater moral quandary. Giving a third of a million trucks to the architect of the Great Terror and the Gulag seems as morally ambiguous as providing some helicopter training for Iraqi pilots. In war you rarely find allies with clean hands; and so, again, conflict is always a matter of bad and worse choices.
Won't Saddam gas our troops, hit Israel, or send agents to blow up cities in America?
Why not envision even more terrifying situations, since doomsday-forecasting is an endless exercise? We should remember instead Grant's dictum that he didn't want to hear what the enemy would do to him, only what he was going to do to the enemy. I suggest that Baghdad in the next few months will be a much more unsafe place than New York or Tel Aviv. More specially, our military is already preparing for worst-case scenarios — gas, nerve agents, urban warfare — as are the Israelis, our own FBI and CIA, and our allies in the region.
But how can you be so sure that it will be easy or right to remove Saddam Hussein?
We can't assume anything, since war guarantees nothing — except that many plans go wrong somewhere, at some time, when the shooting breaks out. All we can rely on is the excellence of our troops, the morale of our citizenry, and the principled case of removing fascists with deadly weapons and a track record of aggression — and then hope for the best. War is fraught with peril, but in this case inaction is the far more dangerous option — if not for us, then surely for our children, who will have to live with the nuclear-armed epigones of Saddam Hussein. Our record against Islamic or Arab armies — in the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, or the no-fly zone — is not undistinguished, and gives cause for more confidence than despair on the battlefield. And let us hope that, unlike in the first Gulf War, we stay on to ensure the safety and democratic aspirations of Kurds and dissidents, and show that our sacrifice can include causes beyond oil and security.
But why do we have to fight the Iraqi people, who are innocent?
We seek to harm them as little as possible; but we are also not naïve. Either through design, laxity, or fear, they allowed their country to be hijacked by a madman who threatens non-Iraqis. They are as guilty or as innocent as were the Germans under Hitler or the Japanese when Tojo ruled — to be warred against under despots and then immediately aided when liberated. Moreover, human nature being what it is, had Hitler taken Moscow and obliterated London, few Germans would have rebelled, but would more likely have flocked into Nuremberg for huge victory rallies. Had their forces won at Midway and slaughtered us on Guadalcanal, the Japanese people would have held massive thank-you demonstrations for their military leaders.
So it is with Iraq: Should we fail, we can assume that there will be spontaneous celebrations in which the Iraq "street" will drag around American bodies and cheer — without any prompting on the part of Saddam Hussein. We need not embrace the idea of collective punishment to accept the truth that sometimes entire peoples can go off the deep end and require military defeat to be brought back out of their trance.
Why pick on Iraq when there are also other members of the axis of evil?
Well, why not worry also about China, Cuba, world hunger, a new AIDS epidemic, West Nile virus, fatty fast food, and…
hughhewitt.com |
