IRAQ - Written 2003

I am deeply concerned that the United States, under the apparently tunnel-visioned direction of President Bush, is about to take the unprecedented step of launching an all-out war on a sovereign nation which has not attacked us or our allies-by-treaty.  Historically, we have held the moral high ground precisely because we have never done such a thing, and I am troubled that we now risk sacrificing this enviable and unique standing in the world community for no very clear purpose.

I am firmly convinced that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a bully of the first order, but I am equally convinced that this is precisely why we do not need to worry about his attacking us.  He went adventuring in the Middle East several years ago and was all but annihilated by us.  He has remained very quiet ever since.  Like most bullies, he only seeks fights he can win.  He is not a religious fanatic like Osama bin Laden.  Indeed, there is little to suggest that he has any religious beliefs whatever.  He is a tyrant who oppresses his own people and sells oil to us and our allies to support his regime.  He does not want to harm his best customers, especially knowing we can turn his capitol into a sheet of trinitite any time we feel the need.

I am all for enforcing the UN’s weapons inspections with all the force required.  I am all for destroying anything we can reasonably identify as an arms manufactory.  And if our intelligence resources are all President Bush would have us believe, we shouldn’t have much trouble doing exactly that.

But we are not going to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy by killing Saddam Hussein, and if we did it would only create another sphere of active conflict which, like Israel, we would feel honor-bound to defend while it progressively antagonized its more “traditional” neighbors.

To date, our standing in the Middle East has been founded on our role as peacemakers and our historic tendency to bring a voice of reason to situations of international chaos.  Now we are proclaiming our intention to invade Iraq, not because they are producing “weapons of mass destruction” (North Korea, Pakistan, China, India, France, Israel and ourselves are also doing so), but because President Bush has a private feud with Saddam Hussein.  We claim we are doing this to bring peace to the region, but the only party threatening to start a war in the Middle East is George Bush.

There are doubtless good reasons for depriving Iraq of their weapons of mass destruction, but the United Nations and a worldwide cooperative process of methodical identification and surgical removal is the way to go if it can be done.  Otherwise, we convince even moderate middle-easterners that we are exactly as Osama bin Laden has painted us, we will have alienated our traditional allies, we will have killed and lost thousands of human beings, burdened our struggling economy with enormous costs, and we will not have achieved a thing that cannot be undone in another ten years.  Even if we manage to kill Saddam Hussein, which we have no right to do either under international law or our own traditional policies, this will merely create a lot of antagonism and a power vacuum in Iraq which, by a natural process we have seen in action a hundred times, will ultimately be filled by whoever is brutal and unscrupulous enough to take over.

War against Iraq, as President Bush would have it, is stupidity of the worst sort and is exactly why a majority of American voters did not want Bush to be president.  He is immature, ego-challenged, impulsive, historically naïve, and not very bright.  No doubt he means well after his fashion, but he is sending our country into a violent morass of unimaginable complexity and ramification, and he seems to be doing it because he feels humiliated over the events of 9/11/01 and not because it is the right thing to do.