- In London Tuesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared
with fanfare that Saddam Hussein's Iraq has chemical and biological weapons,
is ready to use them against other nations, and soon will have nukes as
well. In Washington, a reporter asked President Bush why Blair offered
no new evidence to explain his newfound conviction on these matters.
-
- THE PRESIDENT: He explained why.
-
- Q: Pardon me, sir?
-
- THE PRESIDENT: Explained why he didn't put new information
- to protect sources.
-
- That's a good joke on journalists - "protecting
sources" is our religion - and not a bad point on the merits. Much
of what our leaders know about Iraq's military capacities and intentions
can't be revealed, and how they know it must be secret as well. So, how
is a citizen of a democracy supposed to decide the most important question
any nation must decide: Should we go to war?
-
- In this case the issues are mainly factual. That is not
always so. In Vietnam, though there were factual disputes, the big disagreements
were about moral and strategic issues on which the government's policy
had no home-team advantage. With Iraq, by contrast there would be almost
no opposition to imposing what is being called, with comic delicacy, a
"regime change" if Blair and Bush are right that Western nations
are in imminent peril. But this turns on facts and analysis that ordinary
citizens must take on trust.
-
- The official U.S. government message on how citizens
should decide about going to war is, "Don't worry your pretty little
heads about it." Last week the White House issued a sort of Official
Souvenir Guide to the Bush administration's national security policy, and
it is full of rhetoric about democracy. Yet that policy itself, including
at least one likely war, has been imposed on the country entirely without
benefit of democracy. George W.'s war on Iraq will be the reductio ad absurdum
of America's long, slow abandonment of any pretense that the people have
any say in the question of whether their government will send some of them
far away to kill and die.
-
- Add it up. You may not agree that the Bush family actually
stole the presidency for George W., but you cannot deny that the other
guy got more votes. Once installed as president, Bush asserted (as they
all do) the right to start any war he wants. Members of Congress can pass
a resolution of support if they would like - in fact, he dares them not
to - but the lack of one is not going to stop him. You may not agree that
this is flagrantly unconstitutional, but you cannot deny that this makes
any discussion of the pros and cons outside of the White House largely
pointless. Finally, it's already clear that Bush will copy his father's
innovation of rigorously controlling what journalists covering the war
can see and report. You may not agree that the obvious purpose of this
is to protect official propaganda and lies from exposure, but you cannot
deny that such will be the convenient effect.
-
- Democracy will be especially missed if "pre-emption"
- the hot concept in Bush's national security policy - takes off as his
advisers hope. (The Bushies hail pre-emption as a brilliant innovation
by The Man, except when they're downplaying it as nothing new to worry
about.) If the United States is going to feel free to attack any countries
that might attack us, without the inconvenience of waiting to see if they
actually do, then putting that decision in one individual's power seems
especially reckless. And most of the reasons people give to explain why
the Constitution doesn't really mean what it says about Congress having
the power to declare war involve things like responding to surprise attacks.
These concerns seem especially out of place if America's future wars are
going to be chosen off the a la carte menu and then stewed for months or
years before they are actually served up.
-
- But let's pretend we actually do have some role in deciding
whether our nation goes to war. How should we go about it when our leaders
don't come PR-ratified by democracy and when crucial information for an
independent decision is unavailable to us? We aren't capable of answering
the actual questions at hand: Is Saddam Hussein an imminent threat to our
national and personal security, and is a war to remove him from power the
only way to end that threat? So, we must do with a surrogate question:
Based on information we do have and issues we are capable of judging, should
we trust the leaders who are urging war upon us?
-
- The answer to that last one is easy. The Bush administration
campaign for war against Iraq has been an extravaganza of disingenuousness.
The arguments come and go. Allegations are taken up, held until discredited,
and then replaced. All the entrances and exits are chronicled by leaks
to the Washington Post. Two overarching concepts - "terrorism"
and "weapons of mass destruction" (or "WMD" as the
new national security document jauntily acronymizes) - are drained of whatever
intellectual validity they may have had and put to work bridging huge gaps
in evidence and logic.
-
- The arguments have been so phony and so fleeting that
it's hard to know what Bush's real motive is. The Freudian/Oedipal theorizing
about finishing the job his father left undone is entertaining but silly.
So is "Wag the Dog" speculation that Bush is staging a war for
political reasons: The political risk of a bloody disaster surely outweighs
any short-term patriotic boost. The lack of any obvious ulterior motive,
in fact, is the strongest argument for taking Bush at his word.
-
- But it's not strong enough. A quick recap. Knocking off
Saddam became a top priority shortly after 9/11. It was part of the "war
on terror," though the logical or factual connection between the events
of 9/11 and Saddam's depredations was never explained. The administration
pounced on suggestions that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi
agents in Prague - as if discovery of this one meeting retroactively justified
the whole hoo-ha - then dropped the allegation (though not the rhetorical
connection) when it turned out to be made-up. Bush and aides continue to
talk ominously about meetings and connections between Iraqis and al-Qaida,
continue to supply no details, and continue their relative indifference
to greater al-Qaida links with other countries.
-
- According to the 2000 edition of the State Department's
annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, issued in April
2001, Iraq has ties to various terrorist groups and does terrible things
to dissidents, but, "The regime has not attempted an anti-Western
terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President
Bush in 1993 in Kuwait." To be sure, for George W., that is a special
case. But is it special enough to single out Iraq and ignore other nations
that have actually committed successful terrorist acts against the West
in the past decade? According to the 2001 State Department terrorism report,
issued this past spring, the most enthusiastic state sponsor of terrorism
is Iran÷an enemy of Iraq that we're now trying to patch things up
with.
-
- Iraq's use of poison gas in the Iran-Iraq War of the
1980s is one example always offered to prove Iraq's ability and willingness
to use "weapons of mass destruction." The other is the gassing
of a Kurdish town called Halabja in 1988. The fact that these episodes
happened years ago does not diminish their horror, and there is certainly
no reason to think that Saddam has become kinder or gentler over the years.
But it does raise the question why now, years later, they are suddenly
a casus belli.
-
- "Weapons of mass destruction," like "terrorism,"
is supposed to convey the idea that certain ways of fighting a war are
illegitimate no matter how righteous the cause you are fighting for. It's
a problematic notion in any event. The weapons the United States used against
Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War were about as horrific as those Iraq used
against Iran. What makes the pretense of moral outrage in 2002 especially
dubious, though, is the American attitude while and right after these horrors
occurred in 1982-1988.
-
- There is controversy over whether the United States actually
supplied ingredients for the gas, or merely supplied helicopters and other
useful equipment, or did nothing more than smother the odd unfriendly U.N.
resolution. But there is no question that we knew all about it and looked
the other way. The administration of the time included some of the same
people as the current administration, or their father. Any indignation
on this subject that comes without a fairly abject apology is worthless.
-
- But at the time, you see, Iran was our enemy, so we wanted
to help Iraq. Now Iraq is the enemy, so we are nuzzling Iran a bit. All
very Kissinger and geopolitical and neorealist (or is that a movie genre,
not a foreign policy posture?), but hard to reconcile with high dudgeon
about terror.
-
- To be sure, the fatuous hypocrisy of the Bush case for
war is no reason to let Saddam Hussein drop a nuclear bomb on your head.
Iraq may be an imminent menace to the United States even though George
W. Bush says it is. You would think that if honest and persuasive arguments
were available, the administration would offer them. But maybe not.
-
- http://slate.msn.com/?id=2071538
|