Actually, everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey, I believe.
Getting rid of Saddam and destroying the Iraqi ability to make or disseminate chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear weapons is a laudable goal, but it’s the means to that end, and the presumed need for urgency, that’s at dispute. No one likes Saddam, least of all his own people or his neighbors. There are two big issues to decide, though, involving any decision to settle the issue right now by overwhelming force.
One is the law of unintended consequences. True, you never know for sure what might happen in a war, but it seems to me that the administration is making the same sort of leaps of faith the German high command did prior to Barbarossa. Then, the Germans had little intelligence about the USSR and its capabilities, and what they did had didn’t fit their preconceptions so they in effect ignored it. Here, we know the Iraqis can’t stand up to us–that’s not in dispute–but we have pretty much zero knowledge of what the consequences of such an attack might be. There are many indications, from our allies, regional powers, and others, that a US occupation of Iraq would destabilize the region even further, inflame areas that are as of yet only nominally resentful of the USA, and make cooperation on a host of issues very difficult in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet the Bush administration dismisses all of this, because it doesn’t fit the concept of a war of liberation for the Iraqis and the glorious spread of democracy (which, btw, won’t happen–democracy in most Arab or Mulsim countries these days would mean Islamic fundamentalist rule; just look at Algeria and the elections that were rejected when they revealed the people actually wanted the radicals in charge).
Also part of the risk of unforseen consequences is the possibility that Saddam, a man who wants nothing so much as to stay alive and in charge, might actually use what NBC capability he has in a “use it or lose it (and everything else)” scenario. He’s made it no secret that he’s likely to draw Israel in in the event of a US attack, and we shouldn’t blithely dismiss that threat just because we know the Israelis would wreak havoc on the Iraqis. Saddam has demonstrated that he’d gladly trade Iraqi lives and wealth for the prestige of being the great Arab martyr in the war against the infidels and Zionists. Whereas I think the last 11 years have shown that Baghdad isn’t likely to do much as long as they know the consequences would be devastating to Hussein’s tenure as dictator, if we present them with a fait accompli where his ouster is guaranteed, there’s little to stop Saddam from pushing whatever buttons he can cobble together.
Then, there’s the issue of unilateralism. For fifty years or more the foundation of US foreign policy has been multilateralism. It won the Cold War, built a free world alliance that has proven remarkably resilient, and has helped create a world where, despite constant low-level conflict, really big wars are extremely rare. It’s the Leviathan that keeps the nasty and brutal state of nature that Hobbes wrote about from becoming the norm. Now we’re casting that away in favor of a doctrine that essentially supports a policy of preemption based on assumptions of threat. Leaving aside the generally abysmal record of our intelligence services from the Korean War onward in predicting threats, this new unilateralist policy has a lot of problems. For one, we’ve always reserved this right of preemption; every nation does. They just don’t trumpet it as the first choice, but let it be understood as a last resort. This is to make sure the world handles things in a more or less civilized fashion, because form does matter as much as function–even if you are going to fight someone, it makes sense and mitigates the aftermath if you go through procedures. Second, it does, contrary to the administration’s protestations, establish a precedent of what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If we can do it, so can anyone else from China to India to Russia to Iran. The only way you can argue that this isn’t so is to postulate that the US is somehow sui generis, a thing unique to itself. While we may personally believe that the US represents the best in the world–and personally I tend to think it does–it’s hardly reasonable to expect everyone else in the world to agree. And that’s what we’re doing with this policy, asking the world to accept that because we’re the good guys they have nothing to fear.
No, the twin problems of unilateralism and unintended consequences bother me a bit. I have no problem with the current Iraqi regime vanishing into the desert, nor with the idea of military action to accomplish this per se. But the current administration seems to have read too many Tom Clancy novels, and seems enamored of a very scary supermacho vision of the world. It’s as if the folks who always hated the UN and always wanted us to act as the new Roman Empire–after all if they’re going to hate us why not do the things we want and get the benefits of being a real imperialist power–have finally gained the means to implement their ideas. In their eyes, multilateralism is a weakness, unilateral exercise of military power means strength, and there are no problems that smart bombs and Delta Force can’t handle.
Every empire has faded over time; ours probably will too. But more importantly, what goes around comes around. If we want a world where violence will eventually fade and order prevail, we need to go about our own application of violence and disorder with some circumspection. War is sometimes the only way to get things done, but I’m not at all sure that this is the right war at the right time. It’s more like, having failed to get Bin Laden and failed to resolve the war with Al Quaida, we’ve turned to a much more locatable and destructible foe. Kind of like when in Somalia we decided that Addid was the Ultimate Bad Guy when we couldn’t puzzle out how Somalia really worked.
It will, I’m sure, be very interesting in the coming months.
