Middle East democracy is a false hope
By HUBERT G. LOCKE*
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Thursday, March 20, 2003
seattlepi.nwsource.com
<<...As to costs, quite beyond the several hundred billions of dollars taxpayers will have to shell out, this war will have cost us the respect and good will of countless millions of people across this globe. When this war is over, America will be remembered for the sheer arrogance with which we launched this military venture. We will be remembered for the hypocrisy with which the president of this country announced that Iraq's generals should "clearly understand that if they take innocent life . . . they will be held to account as war criminals" while American bombs fell on Iraqi civilians repeatedly and relentlessly. And this president will be remembered for not having the good sense of his father who, five years ago, wrote of his decision not to carry the war in Kuwait further into Iraq:
"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have . . . incurred incalculable human and political costs . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, to rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other Allies pulling out as well . . . Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post cold-war world. . . . Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different and perhaps barren outcome" (George H.W. Bush and Brent Scrowcroft, "A World Transformed")...>>
*Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. |
