Disagreement, Respect

By Crispin Sartwell

George Bush has said, repeatedly, that he will go to war with Iraq without regard to domestic polling numbers and with or without support from other nations. And though I oppose the war, I respect those positions.

First of all, as I have said since the beginning, the attempt to "assemble an alliance" has been massively counter-productive. For a almost a year and a half, we have been berating and bullying nations all over the world, including nations that have enough sense of themselves not to allow themselves to be bullied. We have not, in fact, been assembling an alliance or going through UN procedures; we have been twisting arms and trying to make the UN the instrument of our own foreign policy objectives; we've been gutting its function as a congress of independent states.

If we intended to attack Iraq, we could indeed have asked for help; we could have shared intelligence; we could have tried persuasion. All of that should have taken a few days. Then we needed simply to acknowledge that these folks aren't with us. The interminable arm-twisting has fractured the world in a way that a quick unilateral strike would not have. Even had France, Germany, Russia, and China agreed to participate, they would have been seething with resentment. That is not an alliance; it's an assertion of world hegemony.

As for domestic opinion, I'm one of many people who despised the Clinton administration for governing by polls. No doubt, we live in a democracy, where public opinion - manipulated or not - ultimately shapes the government. But the idea that someone could make serious decisions regarding life and death according to a few whimsical percentage points was obscene.

People who make decisions that way are gutless, unworthy of a moment's respect, slavish, rudderless, despicable; their actions are the reverse of leadership. If Bush really believes that Iraq presents an immediate threat to peace or an immediate threat of terrorist action, then he is morally obliged to take action, even if not a single American supports him.

On the other hand, Bush has luridly failed to make that case, which is why public opinion is equivocal and allies have jumped ship. The most I've seen is that Saddam has missiles (which he is in the process of destroying) which "may" have a range of more than 93 miles. In his news conference last week, Bush has said that Iraq poses an immediate threat to the United States. As far as I can see, that assertion is absurd.

Those who support war often draw an analogy between Saddam and Hitler, but where Hitler in the thirties was engaged in massive military buildup which motivated an allied policy of appeasement, Saddam is one of a couple of dozen impotent third-world dictators who are lucky to project force effectively within their own borders.

In fact, North Korea obviously, obviously provides a much greater threat, which is why we're engaged in a policy of...appeasement.

In the days immediately following 9.11, the Bush administration declared war. But they couldn't really find anyone to fight, al Qaeda being a small amorphous band of semi-autonomous cells. So they resolved to do "something." Saddam is a plausible target precisely because he's weak, and - if you'll excuse my saying so - because Iraqis are Arabs and so were the 9.11 terrorists.

And so the administration resolved on war with Iraq immediately, and nothing - absolutely nothing - that Iraq or the rest of the world could do was going to stop them.

That, in my view, is a sad, stupid reason and way to go to war. But though I wish Bush wasn't waving around his guns, I grudgingly admire him for sticking to them.