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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (148552)	11/24/2005 1:08:06 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793597

There was a lot of discussion, and a 14 month runup to war, which is far from precipitous. Their intentions were clear to me from Feb 2002 on, and if I could see it, so could everybody else. If we had gone in in 2002, we would have have given Saddam much less time to prepare the funds, havens and arms of the insurgency. What there never was (on both sides) was an open and honest discussion of the reasons. The pro-war camp seized on the WMD case, which everybody believed, as the most usable and most persuasive at the UN. That left mostly unarticulated (except by the neocon punditry) the core reason: that the Middle East was the in the grip of failed autocratic states and unable to initiate positive change on its own. The only hope of winning the ideological battle between democracy and free markets on the one side and Islamist totalitarianism on the other was to force change somewhere. Saddam's Iraq, which was already in a 12 year state of war with the US, whose population hated him, and who was quite openly financing and offering asylum to the nastiest terrorists in the Middle East, was the obvious place to try. The current situation there was breaking down rapidly - sanctions were crumbling - and the US would be soon faced with the choice of either backing down to a triumphant Great Arab Leader Saddam (who had become openly Islamist himself) or going to war against him. They chose preemptive war. I agree they should have made the argument better, but you can see their difficulty. It's hard to argue that the UN sanctions regime was corrupt, subverted, and breaking down rapidly (all true), at the same time that you are trying to get UNSC cooperation on new resolutions. Arguing that certain UNSC members didn't want Saddam to fall because of what would be exposed in his government's papers (also true) wouldn't work so well either. So they stuck to the WMD argument, which they thought was safer. The level of argument certainly wasn't aided by the mostly nature of the most of the anti-war arguments I heard. The only arguments that seemed adult were from the 'realist' camp, which amounted to: "Don't kick the hornet's nest. Better the devil you know." There was prudence in this, whether you agreed or not. The arguments of the anti-war machers seemed to boil down to "War is bad. The US is bad. Any US war is bad. The situation is fine. Sanctions are working. The UN is good. The US only wants war for Oiiiiillll." I think in fairness that it is very difficult to respond effectively to such puerile and unrealistic arguments.