Costs of war already coming in
Posted: February 19, 2003
Patrick J Buchanan
Had President Bush never used all that barstool
bellicosity about an Axis of Evil, "pre-emptive
strike," "regime change" and "weeks, not months,"
he could now claim victory in his showdown with
Saddam.
For it is only through Bush's resolute leadership
that U.N. arms inspectors are back in Iraq. With
steady pressure, Bush could have hundreds more
swarming all over that country, to where it would
be inconceivable that Saddam could mount an
assault on his neighbors.
Without war, Saddam could be back in his box.
But Bush set the bar for himself too high. Now,
though war is not necessary to contain Iraq, Bush
cannot pull back from it. To send 200,000 troops
to the Gulf, then bring them home with Saddam
still in power, would cripple U.S. credibility.
One wonders if the president ever asks himself:
Who got me into this? Who persuaded me to
surrender my freedom of action?
While the war has not yet begun, the costs are
already coming in. Europe is bitterly divided and
increasingly anti-American. NATO is split. Tony
Blair, a loyal ally, is in a hellish spot.
Polls show only one-in-10 Britons favor war
without a new U.N. resolution, and France will
veto any new resolution. And as the winter
window for war closes, France's position is
unlikely to change. For the anti-Bush posture of
Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister,
Dominique de Villepin, is wildly popular on the
continent.
Belgium, France and Germany may be isolated
inside NATO, but most Europeans back Paris,
Berlin and Brussels in the clash with Washington.
And with animosity toward Bush soaring on the
continent and across the Arab and Islamic world,
the U.S. ability to lead through suasion is being
lost. The drive for hegemony is isolating America.
How can a new world order rooted in American
values be erected now, with George W. Bush as
architect? Not in recent memory has an American
president been so reviled abroad.
While this caricature is grossly unjust and in large
measure the work of anti-Americans abroad, the
president, his War Cabinet and the War Party
have contributed to America's isolation. For this
year-long campaign to paint Saddam Hussein as
the new Hitler – a mortal peril to the Middle East,
America, the world, even civilization itself,
according to John McCain – with George W. Bush
cast in the role of Churchill, is just not believable.
Sustaining this fiction is taking a heavy toll on our
credibility.
First, there remains not a fiber of evidence Saddam
was involved in 9/11. Despite the Stakhanovite
efforts of our war propagandists, the "Prague
connection" between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi
intelligence proved nonexistent. Colin Powell's
indictment of Saddam's arms violations now
appears to have been overdrawn. The British
paper he cited was hyped and plagiarized from
academic scribblings. The al-Qaida cell in Iraq
seems to be in territory controlled by our Kurdish
allies, not Saddam.
As for the tape in which bin Laden calls on Iraqis
to launch suicide attacks on invading Americans,
the White House claims this conclusively ties
Saddam to Osama. It does no such thing. On the
tape, bin Laden uses terms such as infidel,
apostate and socialist to describe Saddam, for
whom his affection is comparable to that of the
late Ayatollah Khomeini for the novelist Salman
Rushdie.
When it comes to aiding terrorists, Saddam is not
even in a league with Iran or Syria. His missile
capacity is inconsequential alongside that of Iran
or North Korea. His nuclear program has been
moribund for years, while Iran is mining uranium
and building reactors, and North Korea is
producing fissile material. North Korea is the
rogue state proliferator of missiles, Pakistan the
proliferator of nuclear technology. Nor is Iraq the
reason F-16s over-fly our homes each night here in
Washington and we drive by Stinger missile
batteries on the way to work.
Nevertheless, it is Iraq against whom we are going
to war, and few in this city think the president –
having sent all those troops to the Gulf – can now
simply declare victory and get out. No way.
Delenda est Iraq. Iraq has to be destroyed.
Yet, there is a sense here that this invasion of a
country that never sought war with us will bring
an end to the post-Cold world we knew and vault
us into a new era, the outlines of which we cannot
see.
Most of us, however, look to it with greater
foreboding than those neoconservatives who now
anticipate with wild surmise the war for empire
they have finally got.
wnd.com |
