THE BEST CASE: I've been trying to understand better the groundswell of anxiety about the coming war. Leaving aside the extremists, it seems to me that the undecideds simply hold an assumption I don't share. The assumption is that 9/11 was an isolated event that portended nothing more than itself and only legitimized a police operation in self-defense targeted precisely at the group that perpetrated it. If that's your position, then I can see your point about Iraq. It must be baffling to see the U.S. subsequently (and simultaneously) pursuing a target apparently unrelated to that awful event. I think one of the key points the president must therefore make tomorrow night has to relate to this assumption. He should say: look, there are two ways to approach this problem of international terrorism. The first is roughly the strategy of the 1990s: you tackle groups that specifically attack you. You play defense. You take one group at a time. You don't go after the governments behind them. You try and soothe feelings of resentment around the world and stay out of trouble. You don't go around stirring up hornets' nests of state-sponsored terror. The occasional cruise missile attack or covert operation, combined with a hefty increase in domestic security and tightening of civil liberties, is enough.
THE ALTERNATIVE: The other strategy is to take 9/11 not as an isolated event but as a stark warning. Defense alone won't work. These groups are guided by a philosophy that is not amenable to suasion or deterrence. And they are aided by a complex network of allies - governments and non-governments - throughout the Middle East that share at least some of the same ideology and a lot of the same methods. Worse, new technology means that these groups could very soon perform their evil with weapons far more powerful than anything we have experienced before. 9/11 is therefore best understood as an early tremor before a real earthquake. So the best defense is offense. We cannot wait for catastrophe to strike again. No one disputes Saddam's malign intentions or brutality. No one seriously doubts he has weapons of mass destruction, and may at some point get nuclear weapons if we don't do more than we have done to stop him. The point of remembering 9/11 is not to prove that Saddam did it; but to remind ourselves that some combination of Saddam and others could do far worse in the future. So what should we do? Wait and hope we can keep this thing under control by a series of defensive actions? Or go on the offensive and do what we can to stop, deter and reverse this threat?
TWO BAD OPTIONS: Neither option is without risks. The calm today is deceptive. The risk tomorrow is greater than most of us can imagine. If we do nothing - or worse, we do nothing that looks like something, i.e. fruitless U.N. inspections ad infinitum - then the worst could happen. If we do something, the worst could also happen - the use of such weapons in Iraq, a growing conflict in the Middle East. But by going in, we also stand a chance of seizing our own destiny and changing the equation in the Middle East toward values we actually believe in: the rule of law, the absence of wanton cruelty, the dignity of women, the right to self-determination for Arabs and Jews. We also have a chance to end an evil in its own right: the barbarous regime in Baghdad. We choose Iraq not just because it is uniquely dangerous but because the world has already decided that its weapons must be destroyed. We go in to defend ourselves and our freedoms but also the integrity of the countless U.N. resolutions that mandate Saddam's disarmament. Our unilateralism, if that is what is eventually needed, will therefore not be a result of our impetuous flouting of global norms. It will be because only the U.S. and the U.K. and a few others are prepared to risk lives and limb to enforce global norms. Far greater damage will be done to the United Nations if we do nothing than if we do what we have an absolute responsibility to do.
BUSH'S TERRIBLE BURDEN: And I'm frankly sick of the cheap vitriol directed at this president at this time. God knows the pressure he must be under. To see the shallow and self-interested jockeying in Paris and Berlin at a moment of grave international crisis is to observe politics at its worst. I'm not saying that opposition to Bush and the war policy is illegitimate. Of course not. Much of it is important and helpful. But the coarseness of some of it is truly awful. In some conversations I've had with people who strongly oppose war, I keep hearing this personal demonization of Bush as if he - and not the threat we face as a civilization - were somehow the issue. You hear it echoed in the callow obliviousness of a Maureen Dowd or the brutal lies of Michael Moore or the cheap condescension of the intelligentsia. You see it in the poisonous symbolism of some of the anti-war demonstrators. I keep thinking that this obsession with Bush is a way of avoiding the awful choices in front of us. But the choices are still there. And Bush's speech tomorrow night represents his terrible duty to lead us to the right one.
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