No Choice but War?
By Paul Starr
The American Prospect
Issue Date: 10.7.02
prospect.org
I should be among the supporters of an invasion of Iraq. A decade ago, after Iraq seized Kuwait, I agreed with the decision to go to war and wrote in The New Republic, at the start of the conflict, that allied forces should go all the way to Baghdad. My view was that Saddam Hussein had forfeited the legitimacy of his regime, and, having resolved not to let his aggression stand, we ought to deny him any chance for revenge. When the first President Bush called off our attack, I was bitterly disappointed.
Eleven years later, I have no doubt that Saddam is a menace, but the circumstances are different today. Then, Iraq violated the sovereignty of another state, and our response affirmed the framework of international law and security. Now, we would be violating Iraq's sovereignty without clear provocation, undertaking a preemptive war that is itself a destabilizing threat to international security.
Then, we had overwhelming international support; now, we face overwhelming opposition. Then, the Iraqi army was exposed and vulnerable in the desert and, after the air phase of the war, could offer no effective resistance. Now, the Iraqi military has had plenty of advance warning, will likely hole up in cities and may employ civilians as shields while using chemical and biological weapons against our troops (as well as Israel).
Now, engaged in a struggle against terrorist networks, we have an urgent need for cooperation in the Middle East and Europe and risk losing more in our new battle than we gain from finishing our old one.
Still, if some things were different, I could imagine supporting a war on Iraq -- and so, I suspect, could a good many other liberals.
If the Bush administration had proceeded differently -- if it had established a legal basis for military action, perhaps by working through the United Nations; if it had built allied support; if it had genuinely pursued alternatives to forcible "regime change" -- war might have emerged, by general agreement here and abroad, as a necessary final resort.
The administration is belatedly trying to do some of these things, but its unseemly haste to reach a foreordained result raises doubts about its bona fides. By prematurely declaring an intent to remove Saddam by force, George W. Bush has undercut the credibility of his claim that there is no other option.
But there are at least two others. One is to renew UN inspections and sanctions, under threat of force, to thwart Iraq's potential for weapons and war. An Iraqi refusal to comply would change the picture.
The second alternative is to revert to the strategy that worked under similar circumstances before. After World War II, some in the United States argued in favor of a preemptive war against the Soviet Union before it could acquire nuclear weapons. We can only imagine the casualties such a war would have produced if wiser heads had not successfully argued for deterrence.
Deterrence was never an easy theory to accept because it entailed enormous risk in the event of miscalculation. Sooner or later, however, we are going to face another adversary with nuclear weapons -- if not Saddam's Iraq tomorrow, then another regime the day after tomorrow. Preemptive war in all such cases would exhaust even so great a power as the United States.
A war in Iraq will have fateful consequences. Americans will have to do the fighting and then occupy and govern Iraq, perhaps for years to come. We may hope it is an isolated case. But once we opt for preemptive war, we could find ourselves entangled in a new phase of colonialism aimed at liquidating potential threats to us even in the most remote corners of the world. We ought to do everything possible to avoid getting into that position.
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Paul Starr co-founded The American Prospect in 1990, and has been co-editor (with Robert Kuttner) of the magazine ever since. Starr ran the Prospect's office for the first two years of its existence, when the magazine was published out of Princeton, New Jersey, where Paul has been a professor of sociology at the university since 1985.
Before joining the Princeton faculty, Starr held a position in the sociology department at Harvard and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. Though he has published extensively in academic journals (particularly on health care), he has written even more widely for a general audience. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among other publications; he has written or co-written six books, including The Social Transformation of American Medicine, which won the C. Wright Mills award, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. In great demand as an expert on health care (The Chicago Tribune called him "health care's Tom Paine"), Starr took a brief leave from the Prospect in 1993 in order to serve as an adviser to the White House on health policy.
Starr, whom The Washington Post has described as "a prolific writer and meticulous editor" known for his "blend of idealism and pragmatism," writes a regular column for The American Prospect, and is currently working on a new book about the politics of information in the digital age. He lives in Princeton with his four children. |
