Thursday, January 06, 2005
Article from Feb 2003 - Is war intuitively right or intuitively wrong?
Here is a piece I wrote in February 2003 before the invasion of Iraq.
IS WAR INTUITIVELY RIGHT OR INTUITIVELY WRONG? In the pantheon of living evil-doers Saddam Hussein yields top spot only to Osama bin Laden. Idi Amin of Uganda, long sent to a sandy Saudi pasture is a distant memory. Slobodan Milosevich, now begins the second year of conducting his own defense at his war crimes trial, in relentless confirmation of the adage that he who represents himself has a fool for a client. When the President promised to take the number one evil-doer Osama bin Laden down, to bring him to justice, or to bring justice to him, yea to get him "Dead or Alive" we were not troubled by his Texas Ranger bravado, we welcomed it.Yet, when it comes to taking Saddam Hussein out by force, there seems to be a disquiet about whether war is the right way to do it, at this time. Protests around the world against the impending war, a fracture in the seams of our carefully nurtured alliance with post-war western Europe, and questions about whether the United Nations is truly behind an American led adventure with support from Tony Blair and a handful of small European nations, have served only to confuse many Americans about whether they should support the President or not.How did this come about? In no small measure, the Bush Administration, starting with the President is responsible for sowing the seeds of confusion and leaving us with no clear answers as to whether this war is intuitively right or intuitively wrong.For starters, most Americans want to support the President and our troops, particularly our troops. To be sure, there are many who will always be opposed to any form of military action. It is easy to dismiss them as pacifists but many of those opposed to war as an instrument of foreign policy focus on the suffering of innocent civilians as well as the social and economic costs of armed conflict as the raison d’etre of their position. Then there are those who will say that it is about time America flexed its muscle as far as Iraq is concerned. Some of these Americans are concerned that we do not do enough to silence those who would attack American interests and promote terrorism against our country.A large segment of our populace, however, remains unconvinced, ambivalent or confused. This group is far too large and diverse for the President to ignore. A war said to be in the national interest must demonstrably be shown to the people to be in the national interest. An administration that fails to rally unequivocal national support from the majority, risks falling into the kind of alienation we saw arising from the Vietnam war.When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait, President Bush, the elder, declared: "This will not stand." America stood with him. The world came to stand with him. A similar stirring call to deal with Saddam Hussein by force has not been articulated … at least, not so far. Efforts to place him in the number one spot among evil-doers have not worked. He has not displaced Osama bin Laden.Now, almost a dozen years later, President George W. Bush has declared that it is time for Saddam Hussein to disarm or to be forcibly disarmed. There has been no explanation of why, after some eleven years of containment, this man should be considered an imminent threat. The Administration’s failure to make a case for urgent action on disarmament might be explained by the fact that its initially stated goal was to bring about "regime change," not simply to disarm Saddam. Americans, brought up to believe that regime change should take place by the democratic process of elections, recoil at the thought that we as a country would use military force to bring about regime change. There is something fundamentally antithetical to the idiom of American political thought in such a concept.Secretary of State Colin Powell, apparently urging the President to take his case to the United Nations, at first appeared to be a voice of moderation in the Administration. This was surely wise counsel. The threat that the United States would go it alone – with Tony Blair in tow – seemed to suggest that the Administration was ready to make Iraq the first target of its newly announced policy of preemptive action. Strictly speaking, that was not the case since the new policy was never officially linked to a contemplated action against Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the preemption doctrine was not even officially in place when President Bush went to the United Nations.Nevertheless, the perception of the United States as an arrogant bully and the President as a cowboy seems to have stuck both abroad and at home. Just last week, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia in a speech on the Senate floor declared that this nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine of preemption, the idea that we can legitimately attack a nation that is not an imminent threat but may be a future threat. He went so far as to declare this doctrine a contravention of international law and of the UN charter.The Administration’s case need not, however, have been so complicated. More simply stated, the case is this: Saddam Hussein wrongfully – and in contravention of international law and the UN Charter – attacked Kuwait. The United States, as part of a force sanctioned by the UN Security Council, drove him out of Iraq. He sued for peace and, among the conditions of his remaining in power, was that he would destroy all existing weapons of mass destruction under verification of UN inspectors. Thus, as Prime Minister Tony Blair has explained, UN inspections are not meant to be a hide-and-seek game with the inspectors looking for weapons. Rather, they are intended to be an exercise conducted with the full cooperation of the Iraqi government as it affirmatively demonstrates that it has indeed destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and precursors used for their production, and that it is not pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.The Administration’s contention, backed at least to that extent by Hans Blix, is that the Iraqi regime has not been cooperative and that it has failed to account for significant quantities of chemical and biological agents. "Significant quantities" means tons, not isolated samples, and enough to cause massive injuries and loss of life. The Iraqi regime’s 12,000 page Declaration of what happened to its weapons of mass destruction, does not explain adequately where its stockpiles have gone. The Iraqis continue to claim that they simply do not have such weapons. They cannot explain, however, what happened to them. Against this backdrop, there is the disconcerting dissonance of Iraqi troops being ordered to take precautions against chemical agents on the battlefield.Seeking a UN Security Council resolution did much to mitigate the idea that the entire Iraq adventure was the first strike in the new American policy of preemptive action. However, American reluctance to get a second UN resolution and threats to go it alone send exactly the opposite message. To the extent that the U. S. and Britain seek to foster the notion that they are acting under the mantle of the UN Charter and the sanctions imposed on Iraq for its ill-fated excursion into Kuwait, it is counter intuitive to shy away from a UN resolution now. Rather than making the obvious case that the necessary resolution has already been passed, the Administration waffles on the subject stating that a new resolution would be welcome. It seems much more consistent to reiterate the point previously made that if the UN is to have any meaning as a force for world peace and world order, it must back up its resolutions with force where necessary.It takes no great feat of analysis or logic to conclude that if Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction, he is not likely to suddenly declare where they are simply because UN inspectors have more time to spend in Iraq. Despite this, the French and German position that inspectors should be allowed more time, rests on the premise that, mirabile dictu, Saddam Hussein will come clean in due course.The logical inconsistency in the Franco-German position is that those countries do not deny that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. That seems to be a given. If so, disarmament would be the logical approach – if Iraq will not do it voluntarily, a coalition of the willing, as the Administration calls it, will do it forcibly. The French and Germans say that we should give diplomacy more time, a laudable approach in the abstract but likely to have no effect in the circumstances at hand. There is no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein will suddenly declare that he has been lying to us all along.Yet, it is precisely here that the Bush Administration’s position also faces its weakest logical link. The fact that the inspectors have not found weapons of mass destruction at least raises the possibility that Iraq has none. If so, military action would be unjustified and futile, at least in terms of disarmament. But it would likely bring about regime change. This inherent logical inconsistency, not explained by the Administration leads Americans to wonder whether the real goal is, after all, regime change and nothing more.It is here that the Administration has simply failed to connect the dots for the American people and to show why, despite the lack of objective evidence from the UN inspectors, there is a compelling case for military action. Until that case is made, the American President comes across as hell bent on doing it his way – the classic world picture of America as Imperialist. In fact, a prolonged period of observation by UN inspectors backed by a UN peacekeeping force may well be a sufficient check on Saddam Hussein, a check that will avoid an American led war, devastation of what remains of Iraq’s infrastructure, and civilian casualties. The case has not been made why this is not a better solution.In its effort to deal with the logical inconsistencies and lack of reasonable explanations, the Administration has proffered two ill-conceived responses. The first approach was to try and link the Iraqi regime to Al Qaeda. After September 11th it no longer is a matter of debate that preemption, at least when applied to terrorists is a valid, indeed the only sensible, approach. Our Secretary of State announced the impending broadcast, on Al Jazeera, of the alleged audiotape statement by Osama bin Laden as showing a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The connection was so tenuous as to be virtually nonexistent. Colin Powell probably lost more credibility by that ill-advised stretch than he gained by his forceful earlier presentation at the UN when he made a strong, if not compelling, case for military action.The second approach by the Administration is an exercise in the perverse. It hinges on justifying military action by emphasizing the risk that American and allied troops will face from Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. After all, if American troops are exposed to chemical or biological weapons during an offensive on Iraqi troops, we will have proved the point that Iraq actually has such weapons, won’t we?This particular effort started early with plans to vaccinate American troops. After all, if the Administration did not have reason to fear a smallpox attack, why would it have ordered hundreds of thousands of troops vaccinated? Why, the President himself was vaccinated against smallpox. Then the Administration in a show more of bluster than common sense, attempted to communicate to Iraqi soldiers and commanders in the field that if they followed orders to use chemical or biological weapons, they would be subject to trial as war criminals. This public relations effort continues. Now the Administration and the Pentagon have started to focus the media on the risk to American troops of being exposed to Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. Articles appear in the press about the new willingness of the Administration and Pentagon to discuss the risks associated with the contemplated military action.The Bush Administration, with the able assistance of an articulate British Prime Minister, has tried to make the case that Saddam Hussein is a threat, that he is a terrible despot, that he has already used weapons of mass destruction and, indeed, that the world would be better off without him.The real problem is that the Bush Administration has not done enough to counter the superficial logic of the Franco-German position that seductively urges more time for diplomacy to work. The Bush Administration, has failed to explain that more time will not accomplish anything since diplomacy has not worked with Iraq and there is no reason to suppose it will work. Whatever minor efforts have been made along those lines have been camouflaged by the rhetoric of belligerence and saber rattling coming out of Washington.Nor has the Administration done anything to help Americans and the rest of the world focus on the important question: "What if President Bush is correct that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction that he will either use or put in the hands of terrorists?"It is not until the Administration can do this that Americans will feel the war is intuitively right. Until then, they will question whether it is intuitively wrong.
Copyright © 2003 BwB
IS WAR INTUITIVELY RIGHT OR INTUITIVELY WRONG? In the pantheon of living evil-doers Saddam Hussein yields top spot only to Osama bin Laden. Idi Amin of Uganda, long sent to a sandy Saudi pasture is a distant memory. Slobodan Milosevich, now begins the second year of conducting his own defense at his war crimes trial, in relentless confirmation of the adage that he who represents himself has a fool for a client. When the President promised to take the number one evil-doer Osama bin Laden down, to bring him to justice, or to bring justice to him, yea to get him "Dead or Alive" we were not troubled by his Texas Ranger bravado, we welcomed it.Yet, when it comes to taking Saddam Hussein out by force, there seems to be a disquiet about whether war is the right way to do it, at this time. Protests around the world against the impending war, a fracture in the seams of our carefully nurtured alliance with post-war western Europe, and questions about whether the United Nations is truly behind an American led adventure with support from Tony Blair and a handful of small European nations, have served only to confuse many Americans about whether they should support the President or not.How did this come about? In no small measure, the Bush Administration, starting with the President is responsible for sowing the seeds of confusion and leaving us with no clear answers as to whether this war is intuitively right or intuitively wrong.For starters, most Americans want to support the President and our troops, particularly our troops. To be sure, there are many who will always be opposed to any form of military action. It is easy to dismiss them as pacifists but many of those opposed to war as an instrument of foreign policy focus on the suffering of innocent civilians as well as the social and economic costs of armed conflict as the raison d’etre of their position. Then there are those who will say that it is about time America flexed its muscle as far as Iraq is concerned. Some of these Americans are concerned that we do not do enough to silence those who would attack American interests and promote terrorism against our country.A large segment of our populace, however, remains unconvinced, ambivalent or confused. This group is far too large and diverse for the President to ignore. A war said to be in the national interest must demonstrably be shown to the people to be in the national interest. An administration that fails to rally unequivocal national support from the majority, risks falling into the kind of alienation we saw arising from the Vietnam war.When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait, President Bush, the elder, declared: "This will not stand." America stood with him. The world came to stand with him. A similar stirring call to deal with Saddam Hussein by force has not been articulated … at least, not so far. Efforts to place him in the number one spot among evil-doers have not worked. He has not displaced Osama bin Laden.Now, almost a dozen years later, President George W. Bush has declared that it is time for Saddam Hussein to disarm or to be forcibly disarmed. There has been no explanation of why, after some eleven years of containment, this man should be considered an imminent threat. The Administration’s failure to make a case for urgent action on disarmament might be explained by the fact that its initially stated goal was to bring about "regime change," not simply to disarm Saddam. Americans, brought up to believe that regime change should take place by the democratic process of elections, recoil at the thought that we as a country would use military force to bring about regime change. There is something fundamentally antithetical to the idiom of American political thought in such a concept.Secretary of State Colin Powell, apparently urging the President to take his case to the United Nations, at first appeared to be a voice of moderation in the Administration. This was surely wise counsel. The threat that the United States would go it alone – with Tony Blair in tow – seemed to suggest that the Administration was ready to make Iraq the first target of its newly announced policy of preemptive action. Strictly speaking, that was not the case since the new policy was never officially linked to a contemplated action against Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the preemption doctrine was not even officially in place when President Bush went to the United Nations.Nevertheless, the perception of the United States as an arrogant bully and the President as a cowboy seems to have stuck both abroad and at home. Just last week, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia in a speech on the Senate floor declared that this nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine of preemption, the idea that we can legitimately attack a nation that is not an imminent threat but may be a future threat. He went so far as to declare this doctrine a contravention of international law and of the UN charter.The Administration’s case need not, however, have been so complicated. More simply stated, the case is this: Saddam Hussein wrongfully – and in contravention of international law and the UN Charter – attacked Kuwait. The United States, as part of a force sanctioned by the UN Security Council, drove him out of Iraq. He sued for peace and, among the conditions of his remaining in power, was that he would destroy all existing weapons of mass destruction under verification of UN inspectors. Thus, as Prime Minister Tony Blair has explained, UN inspections are not meant to be a hide-and-seek game with the inspectors looking for weapons. Rather, they are intended to be an exercise conducted with the full cooperation of the Iraqi government as it affirmatively demonstrates that it has indeed destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and precursors used for their production, and that it is not pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.The Administration’s contention, backed at least to that extent by Hans Blix, is that the Iraqi regime has not been cooperative and that it has failed to account for significant quantities of chemical and biological agents. "Significant quantities" means tons, not isolated samples, and enough to cause massive injuries and loss of life. The Iraqi regime’s 12,000 page Declaration of what happened to its weapons of mass destruction, does not explain adequately where its stockpiles have gone. The Iraqis continue to claim that they simply do not have such weapons. They cannot explain, however, what happened to them. Against this backdrop, there is the disconcerting dissonance of Iraqi troops being ordered to take precautions against chemical agents on the battlefield.Seeking a UN Security Council resolution did much to mitigate the idea that the entire Iraq adventure was the first strike in the new American policy of preemptive action. However, American reluctance to get a second UN resolution and threats to go it alone send exactly the opposite message. To the extent that the U. S. and Britain seek to foster the notion that they are acting under the mantle of the UN Charter and the sanctions imposed on Iraq for its ill-fated excursion into Kuwait, it is counter intuitive to shy away from a UN resolution now. Rather than making the obvious case that the necessary resolution has already been passed, the Administration waffles on the subject stating that a new resolution would be welcome. It seems much more consistent to reiterate the point previously made that if the UN is to have any meaning as a force for world peace and world order, it must back up its resolutions with force where necessary.It takes no great feat of analysis or logic to conclude that if Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction, he is not likely to suddenly declare where they are simply because UN inspectors have more time to spend in Iraq. Despite this, the French and German position that inspectors should be allowed more time, rests on the premise that, mirabile dictu, Saddam Hussein will come clean in due course.The logical inconsistency in the Franco-German position is that those countries do not deny that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. That seems to be a given. If so, disarmament would be the logical approach – if Iraq will not do it voluntarily, a coalition of the willing, as the Administration calls it, will do it forcibly. The French and Germans say that we should give diplomacy more time, a laudable approach in the abstract but likely to have no effect in the circumstances at hand. There is no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein will suddenly declare that he has been lying to us all along.Yet, it is precisely here that the Bush Administration’s position also faces its weakest logical link. The fact that the inspectors have not found weapons of mass destruction at least raises the possibility that Iraq has none. If so, military action would be unjustified and futile, at least in terms of disarmament. But it would likely bring about regime change. This inherent logical inconsistency, not explained by the Administration leads Americans to wonder whether the real goal is, after all, regime change and nothing more.It is here that the Administration has simply failed to connect the dots for the American people and to show why, despite the lack of objective evidence from the UN inspectors, there is a compelling case for military action. Until that case is made, the American President comes across as hell bent on doing it his way – the classic world picture of America as Imperialist. In fact, a prolonged period of observation by UN inspectors backed by a UN peacekeeping force may well be a sufficient check on Saddam Hussein, a check that will avoid an American led war, devastation of what remains of Iraq’s infrastructure, and civilian casualties. The case has not been made why this is not a better solution.In its effort to deal with the logical inconsistencies and lack of reasonable explanations, the Administration has proffered two ill-conceived responses. The first approach was to try and link the Iraqi regime to Al Qaeda. After September 11th it no longer is a matter of debate that preemption, at least when applied to terrorists is a valid, indeed the only sensible, approach. Our Secretary of State announced the impending broadcast, on Al Jazeera, of the alleged audiotape statement by Osama bin Laden as showing a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The connection was so tenuous as to be virtually nonexistent. Colin Powell probably lost more credibility by that ill-advised stretch than he gained by his forceful earlier presentation at the UN when he made a strong, if not compelling, case for military action.The second approach by the Administration is an exercise in the perverse. It hinges on justifying military action by emphasizing the risk that American and allied troops will face from Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. After all, if American troops are exposed to chemical or biological weapons during an offensive on Iraqi troops, we will have proved the point that Iraq actually has such weapons, won’t we?This particular effort started early with plans to vaccinate American troops. After all, if the Administration did not have reason to fear a smallpox attack, why would it have ordered hundreds of thousands of troops vaccinated? Why, the President himself was vaccinated against smallpox. Then the Administration in a show more of bluster than common sense, attempted to communicate to Iraqi soldiers and commanders in the field that if they followed orders to use chemical or biological weapons, they would be subject to trial as war criminals. This public relations effort continues. Now the Administration and the Pentagon have started to focus the media on the risk to American troops of being exposed to Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. Articles appear in the press about the new willingness of the Administration and Pentagon to discuss the risks associated with the contemplated military action.The Bush Administration, with the able assistance of an articulate British Prime Minister, has tried to make the case that Saddam Hussein is a threat, that he is a terrible despot, that he has already used weapons of mass destruction and, indeed, that the world would be better off without him.The real problem is that the Bush Administration has not done enough to counter the superficial logic of the Franco-German position that seductively urges more time for diplomacy to work. The Bush Administration, has failed to explain that more time will not accomplish anything since diplomacy has not worked with Iraq and there is no reason to suppose it will work. Whatever minor efforts have been made along those lines have been camouflaged by the rhetoric of belligerence and saber rattling coming out of Washington.Nor has the Administration done anything to help Americans and the rest of the world focus on the important question: "What if President Bush is correct that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction that he will either use or put in the hands of terrorists?"It is not until the Administration can do this that Americans will feel the war is intuitively right. Until then, they will question whether it is intuitively wrong.
Copyright © 2003 BwB
