Our Fears Are Not A Reason For War
By Harold Meyerson
Sunday, October 13, 2002; Page B01
Did ever a declaration of war (or its functional equivalent) spring from a more dampered debate? It's not that there weren't impassioned speeches of opposition in both the Senate and House chambers this past week as Congress gave President Bush the unilateral authority he wants to wage war against Iraq. Critics of the administration's policy raised doubts about the Iraqi threat, the distraction from our war against al Qaeda, and the wisdom and propriety of preemption itself. Old Robert Byrd of West Virginia did a pretty fair imitation of Frank Capra's young Mr. Smith.
But there's an emotional undercurrent to the Iraq debate that was largely missing from this nation's earlier deliberations on war and peace, and that most certainly played no part in the wrangling over Vietnam. That emotion is fear -- in the Congress, but more important, in the nation as a whole. And the president has done a masterful job of exploiting it.
He tapped into that fear right at the outset of his much-anticipated speech Monday night laying out his case against Saddam Hussein's regime. "On September the 11th, 2001," he said, "America felt its vulnerability even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth." The bulk of his speech was devoted to demonstrating why Iraq was one of those threats, and he returned more than once to the al Qaeda attack to bolster his argument.
"Why do we need to confront [the Iraqi threat] now?" the president asked, raising the very question that his administration had so far failed to address. "There's a reason. We have experienced the horror of September the 11th."
The president's point was that if al Qaeda could commit those atrocities, so could Iraq, which has weapons of mass destruction, and is trying to get more, and is harboring terrorist groups, and has some al Qaeda members knocking around Baghdad, and . . . As you can see, the president had lots of points. He needed lots of points, because he lacked the one point that could prove that Iraq actually poses an imminent danger to the United States or to its Middle Eastern neighbors. As the CIA assessment that was declassified last week made clear, Saddam Hussein has shown little inclination or capacity to do the things we are determined to stop him from doing -- unless we attack to stop him from doing them.
So it's not the Iraqi threat that has changed that much since Sept. 11 -- Hussein's still a monster, and still containable. It's the United States that has changed, into a nation that no longer feels immune. Now, when we think of our national security, the collapse of the Twin Towers automatically replays in our national psyche. It has become a permanent nightmare whose potential recurrence informs -- or, in this case, clouds -- our judgment of the present.
In particular, Sept. 11 has made it more difficult for opponents of the administration's policy to argue that Iraq can be contained and deterred -- not because of the merits of the case, but because it is easy to make the containment argument look like the new-age version of Munich-like appeasement. And never mind that after 45 years of containment, the Soviet Union was appeased into collapse. Never mind that Iraq is not a terrorist group that can flee to the hills: It is a nation-state, it is the hills. It could suffer assured destruction just as the Soviet Union could have, and it wouldn't be mutual. Never mind, too, that inspection of suspected sites of Iraqi weapons production can be greatly stepped up. (Former Clinton State Department official Morton Halperin has suggested aerial bombing of any facilities from which the Iraqi government bars U.N. arms inspectors.)
So opponents of the Bush resolution largely steered clear of one of their strongest arguments -- that Iraq has been and can be contained. If opponents had had the CIA assessment of Iraqi capacities and intention at an earlier point, the debate might have taken a different course. But to question the magnitude of the Iraqi threat, even though there was ample evidence that Hussein's military force had degraded since the Gulf War, doubtless seemed too reckless without testimony such as the CIA's 11th-hour admission.
In the end, however, Bush's failure to make a convincing case gave rank-and-file House Democrats more freedom to vote their conscience and their judgment than anyone had anticipated. (Fully 61 percent of them opposed the resolution, as well as 21 of the 50 Democratic senators.) The spectacle of so many legislators voting counter to the collective wisdom of their political consultants, who had counseled them to stick with the president no matter what, was a heartening sight. The question in the months ahead is whether these maverick legislators will have the gumption to stay so discordantly off-message.
The Democratic leadership wasn't exactly champing to go into opposition to the Bush administration even before the White House started beating war drums this summer. Both House leader Dick Gephardt and Senate leader Tom Daschle had already decreed that the war and the Bush tax cut were distractions, and that the November campaign would center on preserving Social Security -- a poll-tested winner, particularly if nobody under 65 turned out to vote.
The irony is that while the Republican right has already tossed in the towel on repealing Franklin Roosevelt's domestic legacy, the administration is now waging a sudden and all-out attack on FDR'S foreign-policy legacy: the institutions and the standards of liberal internationalism that were set in place at the end of World War II. The National Security Strategy of the United States, which the administration unveiled almost simultaneously with the initial draft of its war resolution, proclaims a world order much newer than the one put forth by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. It is a world in which the United States is the model, arbiter and enforcer for the rest of the planet, in which America arrogates to itself the right to intervene preventively against any power it deems a threat.
There's probably little in the National Security Strategy that administration neo-cons such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Iraqi hawk Richard Perle haven't believed for years. But it's hard to imagine the administration daring to produce such a document absent the attacks of Sept. 11 and the sense of deep vulnerability they engendered. Certainly, the dismissal of deterrence as last century's defense doctrine is the direct result of the al Qaeda attacks -- though why deterrence should not still work against nations is left unexplained.
A full-scale debate on Bush's radical vision of foreign policy -- really, a debate over America's sense of itself -- is a matter of some urgency. Indeed, the administration's view of the world -- a dark, Hobbesian place in which only U.S. power casts a light -- requires the Democrats to either restate or reformulate some first principles.
Few things other than wars provoke such fundamental discourse. The Spanish-American War was accompanied by an impassioned national discussion of the propriety of our acquiring colonies and of how we differed from the European colonial powers. The debate over the Mexican War was part of the decades-long dispute between North and South. The division caused by Vietnam is ever present in our national consciousness.
The difference between those debates and the current one is the insecurity the nation feels at this moment. But if vulnerability to terrorism becomes a pretext for the projection of American power into states that may not be aggressors or don't pose imminent threats, we will have become something like the empire that our adversaries have long contended we are. No matter what happens in the months ahead, those who have opposed the war resolution (and some, I suspect, who have supported it) will now have to battle for a world ruled by something more politically, economically and morally sturdy -- and less vulnerable -- than American power alone.
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of the American Prospect, a biweekly journal of liberal opinion and analysis.
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