That was excellent, David.
Naturally, I have a few thoughts.
> Of course the war was fought over ideology: we believed that Saddam
> should not be in power. He believed that he should. Voil`a! an
> ideological war.
It's worth noting here that the U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq
goes back to 1998 and the Clinton Administration. Did any of you express
any reservations about it then?
> That fact is that the reasoning for the war breaks down for any of
> the stated reasons. Pulled together they resemble sufficient cause,
> but looked at individually, they hold no or little water. Let's look,
> shall we?
>
> Moral reasons/Liberating Iraq: Saddam is an evil man and horribly
> cruel to his people. We have a moral imperative to liberate his
> oppressed people! This is one of the big crowd-pleasers, but we
> clearly have no intentions of pursuing this course of action in any
> of the tens of other countries where abuses as bad or worse than
> Saddam's (Myanmar, Sierra Leone, etc.) are occurring. So at best,
> the "liberation" of the Iraqis is a fringe benefit and not part of
> any sustained ideological campaign to help oppressed peoples.
No one ever said it was anything other than a fringe benefit. But
if I were living in Iraq I'd be pretty happy about it. We had other
reasons as far as international law is concerned, but it's lovely
to make this kind of a difference in people's lives. If one counts
the victims in Saddam's two wars, he's killed over a million people.
And he has two sons who show every signs of continuing his legacy of
murder and torture. As fringe benefits go, liberating these people
was a damn good one.
> Weapons of mass destruction: Saddam has WMD and he has used them in
> the past, on his own people! We must go in and disarm him before he
> strikes again. Well, again there is no consistency. Other belligerent
> countries have WMD and have shown a penchant to use them or threaten
> to, but we're not lining up to invade China, North Korea, Syria,
> Pakistan, etc. Clearly, WMD are not enough to justify an invasion on
> their own (btw, personally, if there were evidence that Hussein was
> anywhere close to nuclear I would support much more aggressive
> measures than I would otherwise, but everything I've seen or heard on
> the nuclear front is extremely tenuous at best).
I don't support going in and starting a bloodbath (North Korea), or a
nuclear confrontation (China). Or using military force when diplomacy
might work better (Syria). Color me hypocritical, if it's hypocritical
to use common sense in working out which strategy to use with which
dictator.
And Saddam never abandoned his nuclear program; I truly do think he
was attempting to refine plutonium right up to the end.
Also--this guy has already started two wars, and is a master of
miscalculation.
He's not a predictable guy. It isn't like the North Koreans, who like
to talk tough, but don't do much: his aggressiveness is proven.
>But perhaps you are
> thinking that Iraq is diffrent. They signed a treaty with the UN that
> they would not develop WMD! That brings us to:
>
> We must enforce the UN-based treaty that Hussein signed at the end of
> Gulf War I! Otherwise, any state will feel it can make a mockery of
> the UN, no one will listen or obey! Well, here I think the UN should
> have stepped up to the plate more aggressively, but they didn't.
> Still, by stepping in the way we did, we did as much or more damage
> to the UN's relevance than they did to themselves.
After the first Gulf War, Saddam was allowed to stay in power, with
certain conditions, set by the international community. The U.N.
formalized these with a series of resolutions, which Iraq systematically
violated. Meeting these conditions was a precondition to ending the war;
therefore, the fact that they were not met means that the first Gulf
War never really ended (hostilities continued over the no-fly zone for
12 years).
The damage to U.N. prestige was self-inflicted. Unfortunately, the two
missions we'd all like the U.N. to succeed in are those at which it is
most laughably inept: promoting human rights, and ensuring security of
the global community. I'm hoping reforms may come about in these areas,
but I'm not holding my breath. If reforms occur, I'll be glad the U.S.
helped to bring them about: I'd love it if the U.N. did some soul-
searching.
> We certainly could
> not use flaunting of the UN's rules as justification for war without
> showing ourselves to be major hypocrites.
Why not? Because we didn't go to them and say "Mother may I go enforce
your resolutions for you"? Or: "Mother, may I go defend myself against
a threat"? We are not required to do that.
The "we needed the U.N.'s blessing" argument always knocks me out, partly
because it always comes from Democrats who had no problems with Clinton's
war in Kosovo--for which he didn't seek U.N. approval.
Nor did France ask for U.N. approval before it went into the Ivory Coast.
Where was the outrage then?
What--the U.N.'s blessing is only required if there's a chance the military
action might do some actual good? This "ya gotta ask first" rule appears
to have been invented in 2002. By Democrats to whom it had never before
occurred.
> But wait! Iraq was harboring and supporting terrorists, including Al-
> Qaeda! We're justified to go in! Firstly, the evidence here has been
> thin at best, but even allowing for it to be true, there are many
> other states that support or tolerate terrorists/terrorism within
> their borders (Pakistan, Indonesia, Ireland, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
> Somalia, Syria, etc.) -- are we going in to them next? Are we going
> to establish a single standard and abide by it? Until we do, it
> certainly cannot stand as a moral justification for war, and on
> strategic grounds, our primary concern with Iraq was never that they
> were in league with Al-Qaeda.
There is a difference in scale between a state that pays off the families
of suicide bombers and one that has a camp in which terrorists can practice
hijacking U.S. planes. Slight difference of scale. Their support for A.Q.
may not have been as dramatic as the Taliban's, but it didn't help their
case.
> Which brings us to the threat Hussein posed. We went to war in self
> defense and Hussein was an imminent threat. Or at least an imminent
> threat to the region. Well, the self-defense notion is laughable --
> we as a country could not be threatened by a weakened 3rd world
> nation.
Yes, David. That's it: we thought Saddam was going to invade. Florida
was bracing for a landing on its beaches. (Come on, now. Buck up.
You can do better than that.)
>As far as the region goes, Hussein has behaved himself for 13
> years and shown no military ambitions, and his military complex (as
> we have now seen) was a shadow of what it was in '91 and we know what
> we did to it then.
Yes. An egotistical megalomaniac managed, for just over a decade (of his
30 years in power) to confine himself to occasional attacks on the Kurds.
Cold comfort.
The argument--and it's tangential to the case for war, but, hey: you
brought it up--is that, appearances to the contrary, dictatorships
are intrinsically destabilizing, particularly as practiced in the
Middle East. The Arab countries (plus Iran) continue to oppress
their people to varying degrees, and present the U.S. and Israel
to them as scapegoats. The situation is untenable, and a breeding
ground for terrorism large and small.
>Sure, he's been giving money to Palestinian
> terrorists, but find an Arab government that doesn't have any
> complicity there.
>The only threat to America is that he might have or
> develop WMD, sell them to terrorists, who then might use them on us.
> But does this possibility -- a reasonable assumption, but far from
> proven -- justify
Yes. It did. That "reasonable assumption" is the basis for this war,
in a nutshell. That was the risk. That's what we were being protected
against. Only the chance of having hundreds of thousands of Americans
(or other Westerners, but we're the preferred target) wiped out in one
day. Other than that petty concern, though . . .
>engaging in a preemptive war,
That is, resuming hostilities in a war that never really ended.
>killing
Many fewer people died this way than if Saddam had stayed in power for
another decade.
>and
> terrorizing Iraqi citizens (because I promise you that living in a
> city with bombers and missiles flying overhead for 45 days is being
> terrorized -- imagine living through that),
I like the fact that the civilian casualties were so low, you're now
having to talk about the stress of living through a war as "terrorism."
This was targeted bombing, here: we're not talking about living in
London during WWII.
And I'd rather live with the sound of bombs going off than have my tongue
cut out, or be fed to a plastic shredder. Maybe that's me.
>alienating most of the
> world's populace,
Many of whom, oddly enough, gave material support to this venture. (It's
been said before, but a coalition of 45 nations is almost at the level
of the support the allies had in WWII, which was around 52, as I recall.)
>and putting a fragile region into further political
> chaos?
Or finally stabilizing this fragile region, and giving its people their
first taste of real democracy. (This was, of course, my biggest misgiving
in the time I was making up my mind where I stood. The "it will destabilize
the Middle East" arguments seemed so good. But the "it will bring democracy
to the region" people sounded reasonable as well. I'll admit I wavered on
this one for a long time. It's clear where I finally came down. And history
will tell us.)
> So let's drop the pretentions of this being a moral war. The
> accumulation of all these factors is being used to justify a war we
> began for economic, political and strategic reasons, reasons which
> have not been made nearly as clear to us because they're much less
> pretty, and we like to think we're the good guys.
I really like that first one--the "Republicans are so greedy that they're
willing to sacrifice American lives to make money." It's always so charming.
After all, with the way the Prez and Vice Prez have to scrape by, I can see
why wealth would be so seductive that they'd abandon all morality to make
a few bucks . . . oh, wait. That doesn't work.
At least you threw in "political and strategic" concerns. Which I damned
well
hope these guys are taking into consideration: that's why we're paying them.
I *want* them to be thinking in "political and strategic" terms.
> Take a second and picture almost any other country doing what we just
> did for the reasons we gave (India into Pakistan, Israel into Syria,
> Russia into Kazakhstan, etc.). We would be outraged, or at least
> would do everything in our power to stop it. We would not abide
> another country taking unilateral action.
Funny. How come we were considered so stubborn for *not* holding
"unilateral"
talks with North Korea? Our attempts to be "multilateral" there brought
us all kinds of criticism.
Do what you need to in order to survive. And then let history judge. It
was so when the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981--which
the Reagan administration condemned--and it's so now, for us.
We put up with all kinds of stuff we don't approve of in terms of one
sovereign
nation occupying another. If I had a magic wand, I'd get the Chinese out of
Tibet in a minute. We "abide" a lot. But we can only do what we can. We
cannot
cure every ill--only a few.
>Yet we did it because we
> could. And that's why we need to be held to a higher moral standard --
> because we can.
That's why we did it how we did it. Never before has the "invading" army
been so assiduous in avoiding civilian casualties. And rarely have the
"defenders" shown so little regard for the lives of their own people. The
way this war was conducted, as much as anything, shows our motives. We
increased the risk to our own troops by conducting this the way we did.
I can't claim the coalition behaved perfectly, but I do feel it met the
"higher moral standard" standard.
Your partner in unemployment,
J
>
> --- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "7visions"
> <7visions_at_p...> wrote:
>> For the record, I do have a big problem with the lack of open and
>> competitive bidding for the rebuilding of Iraq. There is no change
> in my
>> position since before I became a vicious reactionary hawk.
>>
>> But more and more I feel that this war was fought over ideology and
> not just
>> oil and a few rich shareholders.... and I hate to quote trickle
> down, but
>> these contracts will help a lot of workers here ( not to mention in
> Iraq)
>> who did not grow up with the benefit to enjoy the fruits of being
> Westside
>> Intellectuals.
>
>
>
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Received on 2003-04-23 00:59:58