THE NEW REPUBLIC VS. THE EVIL EMPIRE
Mephisto,
Take a peek at this week's The New Republic. A couple of good articles and a cover that says it all. "Democracy and Deception".
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"The First Casualty" -- cover article:
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"Here They Go Again" -- TRB FROM WASHINGTON by Peter Beinart Issue date 06.30.03
Think the Bush administration is chastened by the growing scandal over its exaggeration of the Iraq threat? Think again. Thus far, the White House has responded in three ways--all dishonest and all true to form.... [[Article is premium content...]]
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TNR Editorial: "Reality Check"
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Reality Check by the Editors Issue date: 06.30.03
This week's special report by Spencer Ackerman and John B. Judis leaves little doubt that the Bush administration systematically exaggerated the Iraqi threat (see "The First Casualty," page 14). Which raises an unavoidable question: Absent White House misinformation, was there a compelling case for war? That question will remain even if the United States finds biological and chemical weapons in Iraq. The Bush administration never justified war solely on the basis of Saddam Hussein's unaccounted-for chemical and biological arms. After all, several dictatorships have such stockpiles (Syria has a huge one) and yet are not serious candidates for U.S. invasion. Instead, the administration lumped chemical and biological weapons together with nuclear ones as "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD), making the former appear more menacing through their association with the only weapons that would instantly change the balance of power in the Middle East. Then Iraq's WMD were linked to Al Qaeda in an effort to convince Americans that Baghdad might engineer another September 11.
This magazine's argument for war was different. It criticized the administration's unconvincing claims about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda and argued that, absent a clear terrorist link, it was Iraq's nuclear ambitions, not its biological and chemical stockpiles, that justified U.S. invasion. Those ambitions could perhaps have been restrained by the inspections regime that emerged late last year, but the magazine saw those inspections not as an alternative to the Bush administration's saber-rattling but as the result of it. Historical experience showed that once the United States rescinded its threat of war, Saddam would have ended the inspections and recreated the conditions that prevailed between 1998 and 2002, when he was free to pursue a nuclear capability with relative impunity. It was this pessimism about the world's--particularly Europe's--willingness to indefinitely contain Saddam that had led TNR to call for his overthrow in 1991, 1996, and 1998. And the behavior of France, Germany, and Russia in the run-up to war only confirmed that belief.
Saddam's history clearly suggested that, absent inspections, he would seek a nuclear bomb. The magazine cast doubt before the war on President Bush's claims that Iraq had sought enriched uranium from Africa and aluminum tubes designed for nuclear centrifuge, but it assumed the administration's lack of public evidence of Iraq's nuclear program was the result of America's general lack of intelligence on Iraq since 1998, when the inspectors were thrown out. And it was not assuaged by the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) sanguine assessment of Iraq's nuclear program, given that defectors had contradicted the IAEA in the past. TNR believed, in other words, that once Saddam fell the U.S. would find evidence of a reconstituted nuclear program. The postwar claims of Iraqi scientists now suggest we may not. Why Saddam would have abandoned his nuclear program, and why, if he did, he would not have proved it by granting the IAEA full access to Iraqi nuclear scientists this spring, remains a mystery. And, yet, that program may indeed have been dormant. Which, in hindsight, undermines one of the magazine's central rationales for war.
But not the only rationale. In Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and (unsuccessfully) Rwanda, TNR supported military action in cases of moral emergency. Clearly, Saddam's ongoing crimes--which, we have argued in these pages, were worse than Slobodan Milosevic's--met that standard. Yes, the moral case for invasion would have been stronger in 1988, when Saddam was gassing the Kurds, or in 1991, when he was slaughtering the Shia. But it was compelling even at a time of "normal" oppression, particularly given that the alternative was endless sanctions, which, combined with Saddam's refusal to spend his oil revenue humanely, left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.
And the case for ending Saddam's tyranny was not merely moral: It assumed that, as in the Balkans, democracy in the Arab world would follow U.S. power and that Arab democracy would provide the best long-term protection against terrorism. That argument is not undermined by the Bush administration's past dishonesty. It can be undermined only by its future lack of resolve. A decent Iraq with a liberalizing effect on its neighbors would, in the end, justify this war even if the United States never found an unconventional weapon. But supporters of the war have a special responsibility to ensure that the United States builds such a state--whatever the costs. This war, whose deceitful promotion has undermined democracy at home, can still bring democracy to the corner of the world that needs it most. We have not won, and we have not lost. The war for Iraq continues. |
