Should the U.S. Invade Iraq? Week 2
From: David Plotz
To: Slate writers
Subject: Make War, Help the Bourgeois
Posted: Thursday, October 3, 2002, at 7:56 AM PT
I've been avoiding this Slate "Dialogue" because while I support the war in Iraq, I haven't been able to explain to myself (much less anyone else) why I support it. A faint stink of dishonesty clings to most of the arguments for war. Evidence is absent for the claim that Saddam Hussein helps al-Qaida. Iraq doesn't seem remotely close to nuclear weapons. Saddam is too weak to seriously menace his neighbors or us.
And the arguments against war are compelling. We have succeeded in penning Iraq without war. The inspections regime, even when it's been sabotaged by Saddam, seems to limit his WMD programs enough to keep us safe. The no-fly zone protects the Kurds and permits the development of a proto-Kurdistan but doesn't create enough Kurdish autonomy to enrage Turkey. Israel is probably safer without war. There will be no oil shock without war. Etc.
So, why do I support the war? One reason that persuades me (and one that no one else has mentioned) is that toppling Saddam is the best way toward what should be our main goal: a bourgeois Middle East. We don't really expect the Arab and Muslim regimes of the region to be democratic. We don't really expect a Jeffersonian blossoming in the Euphrates Valley. And we don't really anticipate an East Asia style boom. But what we hope for is countries with reasonably stable governments that listen to their citizens, encourage capitalism, and offer enough opportunities to keep young men busy. Basically we'd be satisfied with a region of Jordans or Qatars.
Saddam's Most Terrifying Weapon
Conquering Iraq will inflame young Muslim and Arab men across the region with hatred against the United States. Some of them will join al-Qaida or Hamas or start their own terror outfits. But conquering Iraq may also produce the vaccine against that rage, because it should usher in better economic times for Iraqis and for Arabs in general. As long as Iraq is an unsteady thug, capital avoids the Middle East. The uncertainty of the area makes it an undesirable place to invest. Countries in the region spend too much on their militaries, trade isn't free, the best and brightest flee to Europe and the United States.
Iraq's commercial life has been destroyed by Saddam. But Iraq is the geographic heart of the Middle East. Its population is well educated. It has a strong tradition of entrepreneurship. It is a crossroads with lucrative trade opportunities east, west, south, and north. If the Iraqi economy is uncaged, the region will become more prosperous: Goods will flow back and forth with Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Iran. Toppling Saddam and ending the U.N. sanctions are the only way to liberate the economy and tempt capital back to Iraq. (Yes, there's some foreign capital in Iraq now, but the French and Russian investors are predators, extracting wealth, bribing off Saddam and his cronies, and doing nothing to build native Iraqi business.)
I'm not arguing we should make war to create free markets. I'm arguing that better economic conditions in the Middle East will inoculate against terror and constant instability, and war is the best way to create those better conditions. Economic growth is not a cure-all—Osama Bin Laden is proof enough that terrorists grow in rich soil as easily as poor—but it's the best solution to instability we are going to find. In Afghanistan, we are already seeing the renaissance of a bourgeois class. What will prevent another Taliban revolution? A lot of merchants who want to protect their assets, and enough jobs for angry men.
There's not enough propaganda in the world to soothe the Arab rage our war will create. But propaganda is not what we need. If we're lucky, a free Iraq—and a stable Middle East—will create enough opportunities that today's angry idle teenagers grow up into busy, greedy young men who have better things to do with their time than plot against America.
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From: Jeffrey Goldberg
To: Slate writers
Subject: Aflatoxin
Posted: Thursday, October 3, 2002, at 12:47 PM PT
David Plotz has offered a not-unconvincing argument for Saddam's removal, but let me offer a better one: aflatoxin.
In 1995, the government of Saddam Hussein admitted to United Nations weapons inspectors that its scientists had weaponized a biological agent called aflatoxin. Charles Duelfer, the former deputy executive chairman of the now-defunct UNSCOM, told me earlier this year that the Iraqi admission was startling because aflatoxin has no possible battlefield use. Aflatoxin, which is made from fungi that occur in moldy grains, does only one thing well: It causes liver cancer. In fact, it induces it particularly well in children. Its effects are far from immediate. The joke among weapons inspectors is that aflatoxin would stop a lieutenant from making colonel, but it would not stop soldiers from advancing across a battlefield.
I quoted Duelfer, in an article that appeared in The New Yorker, saying that "we kept pressing the Iraqis to discuss the concept of use for aflatoxin." They never came up with an adequate explanation, he said. They did admit, however, that they had loaded aflatoxin into two warheads capable of being fitted onto Scud missiles.
Richard Spertzel, who was the chief biological weapons inspector for UNSCOM, told me that aflatoxin is "a devilish weapon. From a moral standpoint, aflatoxin is the cruelest weapon—it means watching children die slowly of liver cancer."
Spertzel went on to say that, to his knowledge, Iraq is the only country ever to weaponize aflatoxin.
In an advertisement that appeared in the New York Times on Tuesday, a group of worthies called upon the American people to summon the courage to question the war plans of President Bush. The advertisement, which was sponsored by Common Cause, asks, in reference to the Saddam regime, "Of all the repugnant dictatorships, why this one?"
I do not want, in this space, to rehearse the arguments for invasion; Jacob Weisberg and Anne Applebaum have done a better job of that than I could, and they have also explained why multilateralism and congressional sanction are not the highest moral values known to man. There is not sufficient space, as well, for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected). I will try, instead, to return to the essential issues: the moral challenge posed by the deeds of the Iraqi regime; and the particular dangers the regime poses to America and its allies. Everything else, to my mind, is commentary.
There are, of course, many repugnant dictators in the world; a dozen or so in the Middle East alone. But Saddam Hussein is a figure of singular repugnance, and singular danger. To review: There is no dictator in power anywhere in the world who has, so far in his career, invaded two neighboring countries; fired ballistic missiles at the civilians of two other neighboring countries; tried to have assassinated an ex-president of the United States; harbored al-Qaida fugitives (this is, by the way, beyond doubt, despite David Plotz's assertion to the contrary); attacked civilians with chemical weapons; attacked the soldiers of an enemy country with chemical weapons; conducted biological weapons experiments on human subjects; committed genocide; and then there is, of course, the matter of the weaponized aflatoxin, a tool of mass murder and nothing else.
I do not know how any thinking person could believe that Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill dictator. No one else comes close—not the mullahs in Iran, not the Burmese SLORC, not the North Koreans—to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence.
Earlier this year, while traveling across northern Iraq, I interviewed more than 100 survivors of Saddam's campaign of chemical genocide. I will not recite the statistics, or recount the horror stories here, except to say that I met enough barren and cancer-ridden women in Iraqi Kurdistan to last me several lifetimes.
So: Saddam Hussein is uniquely evil, the only ruler in power today—and the first one since Hitler—to commit chemical genocide. Is that enough of a reason to remove him from power? I would say yes, if "never again" is in fact actually to mean "never again."
But at a panel this past weekend on Iraq held as part of the New Yorker festival, Richard Holbrooke scolded me for making the suggestion that genocide was reason enough for the international community to act against Saddam. Holbrooke, who favors regime change, said the best practical argument for Saddam's removal is the danger posed by his weapons programs. He is right, though the weapons argument, separated from Saddam's real-life record of grotesque aggression, loses its urgency. Because Saddam is a man without any moral limits is why it is so important to keep nuclear weapons from his hands.
On the subject of Saddam's weapons programs, let me quote once more the Common Cause advertisement: "Do we have new information suggesting he has obtained or is about to obtain weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear warheads) and the capacity to deliver them over long distances?," it reads.
Yes, actually. There is consensus belief now that Saddam could have an atomic bomb within months of acquiring fissile material. This is not unlikely, since the international community, despite Kate Taylor's assertion, is incapable in the long run of stopping a determined and wealthy dictator from acquiring the things he needs. It is believed now that Saddam's scientists could make the fuel he needs in as little as three years (the chief of German intelligence, August Hanning, told me one year ago that he believed it would take Saddam three years to go nuclear).
The argument by opponents of invasion that Saddam poses no "imminent threat" (they never actually define "imminent," of course) strikes me as particularly foolhardy. If you believe he is trying to acquire an atomic bomb, and if you believe that he is a monstrous person, than why would you possibly advocate waiting until the last possible second to disarm him?
After returning from Iraq, I dug out an old New York Times editorial, which I recommend people read in full. It was published on June 9, 1981 under the headline, "Israel's Illusion."
"Israel's sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression," the editorial states. "Even assuming that Iraq was hellbent to divert enriched uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, it would have been working toward a capacity that Israel itself acquired long ago."
Israel absorbed the world's hatred and scorn for its attack on the Osirak reactor in 1981. Today, it is accepted as fact by most arms-control experts that, had Israel not destroyed Osirak, Saddam Hussein's Iraq would have been a nuclear power by 1990, when his forces pillaged their way across Kuwait.
The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.
—Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to Slate.
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