The case for war comes with a caveat
By DAVID M. SHRIBMAN
Op-Ed Columns
published Wednesday, February 12, 2003
toledoblade.com
In this winter of worry, woe, and, perhaps, war, President Bush faces two challenges - first to force Saddam Hussein to disarm and then to win congressional approval of an economic plan that includes an end to the taxation of corporate dividends.
The passion for both struggles springs from the President’s deepest instincts. But the intellectual basis of both can be traced to quiet figures whose names and faces are all but unknown beyond the whispery inner circles of the capital’s theory class, inhabited by thinkers who never surface on the Sunday interview shows and who are courted by neither lawmakers nor lobbyists.
The man at the center of the tax plan is R. Glenn Hubbard, a retiring economist with the sizzling manner and colorful profile of, well, a Columbia professor who gets his fingernails dirty with the details of the tax code.
He’s been pushing to end the double taxation of dividends for more than a decade, and now that his ideas are at the middle of the Washington debate, he’s decamping to Manhattan.
Playing the Hubbard role in the Iraq debate is a man so anonymous that, until now, he was known more for his wife (Andrea Koppel, the CNN diplomatic correspondent) than for his ideas, a figure so unobtrusive that he could share a back fence with a political columnist (that would be me) for years without showing his face except for a shy "hi" through the leland cypress trees one Sunday afternoon two or three autumns ago.
Now, however, Kenneth M. Pollack’s ideas are not only in the ascendancy, they are holding the capital, country, and world in their thrall. His The Threatening Storm is on every night table in diplomatic Washington - and elsewhere. When, for example, Cardinal Bernard Law flew back to Boston from his resignation trip to Rome this winter, he was sighted on a jetliner reading Mr. Pollack’s book, which carries the subtitle "The Case for Invading Iraq."
The conservative Weekly Standard called the Pollack book "a legal brief for why now is the time for the United States to invade Iraq." The remarkable thing about Mr. Pollack’s role in the Iraq debate is Mr. Pollack’s lineage in the foreign-policy world. The man whose ideas are fueling the Bush Administration’s drive against Baghdad held a high policy position in the Clinton administration.
The theorist advocating an invasion of Iraq came of age intellectually at Yale in the post-Vietnam era, not exactly a hotbed of military adventurism. Indeed, he went from New Haven to the safe haven of the CIA, a path well trod in the late 1940s but thoroughly grown over by the late 1980s.
Once inside the CIA, he drifted toward the Middle East for the same reason Willie Sutton succumbed to the lure of banks: that was where the wars were.
He predicted Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He told the first President Bush and the National Security Council that Iraq would fire Scuds at Israel (it did).
Now he’s advocating another war, though in truth he never suspected that an administration that viewed him warily because of his Clinton ties would embrace his notion quite so enthusiastically. Later would have been fine. ("I’d be happier if we went to war next year or even the year after," he said in a crowded study at the Brookings Institution.)
But the prospect of Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons is scary enough for Mr. Pollack to put aside his timetable. This month, or next, will have to do. "We’re so far down the line that we can’t walk away now," he says. "If we don’t go to war with Saddam Hussein this year, we can’t do it."
Not everyone agrees. In the latest Foreign Policy magazine, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt argue that the "belief that Saddam’s past behavior shows he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and faulty logic." A slew of Democratic presidential contenders think that military force may be too much, too soon.
Mr. Pollack worries that he has made more of the case for war than the administration has. (The State Department has put him on more than 20 hours’ worth of foreign media video conferences, beamed to more than two dozen nations.) He knows that so much can go wrong. (Chemical or biological weapons could be used against U.S. troops, Israel can get hit by Iraqi missiles and might retaliate, bringing on a wider war.)
Plus this: There is no fog quite so impenetrable as the kind that comes with war.
So while the administration operates, quite literally, by the book, let it be warned: Mr. Pollack’s advocacy comes with a caveat. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has leafed through the volume but it isn’t clear whether he or his colleagues have reached page 415.
The third sentence of the first paragraph reads: "If the United States is unwilling to commit the forces necessary to ensure success and the resources necessary to rebuild a stable, prosperous Iraq afterward, it has no business trying to bring about Saddam’s overthrow."
Tough sentence.
Tough world.
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David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. |
