| Sunday,
July 3, 2005 A mixed bag and short
shrift given that the column is due
Subject: Saddam or not
Jerry,
My response to "R's" piece is that I have seen, or
heard of, many of those arguments posed, or alluded to, in serious debate of
the Iraq invasion.
Hence, not having the context of the original posting,
I had no indication that the author may have been speaking in intended
irony.
For example, I have no precise numbers on how many
peaceful Iraqi citizens died during and since the invasion, but even the
much aligned "mainstream press" seems to indicate that most citizens who
died and are dying have not done so as a result of American direct action,
but at the hands of the Saddam Loyalists and the Al-Qaida and other
insurgents who have entered Iraq to "chase America out." In other words,
these deaths should more properly be viewed as a continuation of Saddam's
horror and not as an American horror, and there becomes a valid debate
whether the rate of death and other casualties at present is greater or less
than the rate of death under Saddam (which seems to have been on the order
of 10,000 people per year on average for his entire regime).
STRATFOR maintains that the invasion of Iraq was
initiated because it was necessary for the Administration to do something
dramatic to impress upon the Saudi's the need to clean their own house
without destabilizing their regime, which (for economic more than
ideological reasons) is friendlier to the US than the population at large
(due to Wahabism). In other words, it was the best (and arguably the most
popular) of a lot of bad options -- remove someone who has the potential to
become a significant threat, while proving our resolve to pro-American
regimes in the area who still required prompting to act against terrorists
in their territory.
Which isn't to say (and STRATFOR doesn't claim) that
no mistakes have been made.
But with the debate in Congress not over how best to
resolve the situation on the ground, but between unquestioning support for
the administration vs. Democrats who compare soldiers on the ground to
Nazis, a situation which would be bad in any event has been made
progressively worse because the insurgent forces and foreign fighters
believe they can shatter American will to stay the course.
And if that happens -- there may be no way to end
Islamic terrorism except what several of my friends have said would be
necessary since about 10:30 AM Eastern time on 11 September 2001: a sea of
green glowing glass from Mecca to Islamabad, from Abu Dabi to Kurdistan.
Jim Woosley
Fair enough. Let's add to the ground rules here:
unless I make it pretty clear otherwise, I don't post stuff from idiots. I
may well put up things I don't agree with, particularly if it's something I
find puzzling but haven't either the time or the information to analyze; I
trust the readership to comment. On the other hand, a comment that consists
of "this is so stupid that I won't bother to refute it" does not get us very
far.
The STRATFOR "indirect approach" argument, invading
Iraq as warning to Saudi Arabia, may make sense to a certain cast of mind,
but I find it very dangerous. The best way to tell someone you disapprove of
them is to tell them so, not to beat the snot out of the one neighbor who
might be a threat to them and their way of life. The secular Baathists are
anathema to the Wahhabi clergy, and Saddam terrified the Saudis; why
removing him as a threat might be thought to make the Saudis more tractable
is not obvious to me.
I suspect that the invasion of Iraq was just what
it seemed to be, neo-Jacobinism fortified by the dreams of Chalabi and his
people; after all, if it were all true, it would be wonderful. Never
underestimate the ability of politicians to believe in theories that make no
sense other than that they will bring about results the politicians want.
Bush passionately wants stability in the mideast, and passionately believes
that everyone in the world truly wants freedom and democracy. I wish him to
be correct, but I have this set of nagging doubts about it.
On my side of the aisle there are a number of
people who were not always paleo conservatives and are new to the fold, and
they tend to contempt of their former neo-con colleagues.
What isn't conservative about the neo-cons, and
about liberals, and Trotskyites, and a very great many people is the belief
that "problems" can be "solved" and after a while all the problems are
solved and history ends since people are, after all, mostly alike and want
the same things and --
Well, you can continue that argument as well as I
can. Conservatives believe that left to themselves things go from bad
to worse, but most human effort has a very good chance of accelerating that
process. One intervenes carefully. And one approaches the defects of one's
country as one approaches the wounds of a father, not with joy about the
good one can do in solving problems...
But enough. I have columns to write. I put up that
rather extraordinary letter to see what it might generate. It has not
disappointed me.
===========
Subject: Oh, gee whiz
Jerry:
Perhaps the subject should be "No 'g' wiz" instead of
"Oh, gee whiz."
I think I've noted this before, but back when I taught
college physics labs in grad school and everyone did the traditional old
"measurement of g" experiment with the wax tape and meter stick, it always
used to astond students that I could look at their result and tell them
their percent error to a couple of significant figures just by lookign at
their result, using the old
E = (x - 982 cm/s/s) / (982 cm/s/s) x 100% rule.
This of course works because, cancelling units and
expanding the denominator,
E = (x - 982 ) / 1000 x (1 - 18/1000) x 100% +
O(.018)^2
= 0.1 * (x - 982 ) - 0.0018 * (x - 982)
~ 0.1 * (x - 982) - 2% x (0.1*(x - 982) )
The point is NOT that in this case I got away with
approximating g = 1000 cm/s (which only worked because I was computing an
error and not a physical quantity) but that dealing with 982 is NOT a big
deal, particularly when everyone has calculators.
This isn't quite as bad as the pi = 3 thing, but it's
bad enough.
Jim Woosley
=============
Statistical analysis of the cause of Global Warming:
When you actually run the numbers, it becomes obvious
that pirates prevent global warming. Western Civilization as almost
completely driven piracy to extinction...
The link forwarded to me is of the graph as printed on
a CafePress mug. I assume that there's a page somewhere on the net
explaining it. To me, the graph is self-explanatory.
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.25066629
Greg Goss
I love it!
==
a climatology blog
Jerry, thanks for the postings from England
An ice core specialist friend suggested
www.realclimate.org as a spot
where the comments of other scientists offer a sort of immediate peer review
of the postings.
Hope to see your Outlook resource consumption
discoveries soon.
I set up a friend's HP Pavillion Media PC with equally
cryptic heiroglyphic rebus writing "quickstart" pages. Never quite certain
about various on-screen caveats that arose.
Joe O'Laughlin
=========
Subject: Mangled Latin
Your correspondent "David" said (currentmail, Friday 1
July) > As the ancient maxim has it, "Qui tacet consentire." ("He who is
silent > gives consent.") If he is going to throw Latin around, he should
make some attempt to have it make sense. There seem to be two plausible
forms of this floating about: "Qui tacet consentit" = "He who is silent
gives consent" "Qui tacet consentire videtur" = "He who is silent is
considered to give consent".
While on this subject, may I ask you to get Mr St.Onge
to do some Latin revision too? His misquotation of Cato doesn't parse
either.
Yours grumpily, FB
=================
From: Stephen M. St. Onge
Subject: Neanderthals http://www.fatsteve.blogspot.com/
saintonge@hotmail.com
Dear Jerry:
On the subject of Neanderthals,
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail368.html#Thursday , the big
question is, were they even a real subtype?
I saw an article in Science or Nature once, which
noted that the skeletons of "Neanderthals" looked a lot like the skeletons
of members of H. Sapiens with rickets. It also noted that Neanderthals had
been found in Europe during an ice age, and that the tools from the time
didn't show fish hooks or spears. So, Vitamin D deficiency would have been
easy.
I don't know if the person is right, but it's the kind
of thing I'd like to see investigated.
Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
================
Students lagging in US history
Dr. P,
Not that we didn't know about the sad state of public
school education, but I thought you might be interested in this Globe
article (free registration req'd).
***********
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/
articles/2005/07/01/students_lagging_in_american_history/
Students lagging in American history By Kaitlin Bell,
Boston Globe Correspondent | July 1, 2005
"National history and civics assessments show that
most fourth-graders can't identify the opening passage of the Declaration of
Independence, and that most high school seniors can't explain the
checks-and-balances theory behind the three branches of the US government.
Testifying in favor of proposed legislation, the history specialists --
including renowned historian David McCullough -- told a Senate education
subcommittee that most of the country's schoolchildren lack sufficient
knowledge to become informed voters and don't understand why they enjoy
rights like free speech and freedom of religion."
************
I watched David McCullough on Tim Russert's talk show
this weekend, plugging his new book "1776" -- but also commenting on the
state of history education in the US. McCullough mentioned one of my
favorite Harry S. Truman quotations:
The only thing new is the history you don't know.
Best wishes for a safe and happy 4th. Cheer, -JR
My friend Greg Cochran would argue that it has
always been this bad and you can't prove otherwise, but I don't recall such.
I remember a different time and world. Alas, Babylon.
==============
Northern Ireland and Iraq. A comparison of
insurgencies.
Jerry,
In the early seventies the low-level struggle in
Ulster between the IRA and the ruling Protestant majority flared up and
forced the Westminster government to pay serious attention to the Province.
Amongst other measures army units from the mainland were sent to help to
restore order. Ironically, their initial task was to protect the Catholic
population from whom the IRA drew its recruits, from attack by the IRA's
Protestant counterpart.
The IRA faced grave difficulties. They were dealing
with a police who knew the ground as only those who had grown up on it do.
They were dealing with an army that had vast experience of dealing with
insurgent groups that was gained as Britain dismantled her empire. The IRA
had no ready source of arms, ammunition, and explosives. The money had to be
found for these and arms had to be bought on the international market and
smuggled into the country. Lastly, all the parties spoke a common language
and shared a very similar culture. In spite of this it took fourty years for
some sort of peace to be established.
In Iraq there are no police as we understand the term.
The United States has a fighting army that is second to none but much of its
technology and training is irrelevant in its current role. It lacks the
cardinal advantage of the British in that the senior officers issuing the
orders are the same people who twenty years before actually confronted
insurgents on the ground. Iraq is awash with weapons and explosive of all
kinds, (except WMD's), so the insurgents have no difficulty of supply and
Iraq's borders are wholly porous which means that specialists and specialist
equipment can be brought in at need without particular difficulty. The
inability of most Americans to speak the local language is a grave handicap.
I have a mental picture of a smiling Iraqi shaking a US soldier's hand while
assuring him that his mother was a pig and his father a camel. The only
glimmer of hope that I can see is that the fighting qualities of the typical
Irishman have never been excelled so perhaps the opposition in Iraq will be
less formidable than it was in Ulster.
None of this suggests that an early withdrawal is
possible on any terms that would leave the USA better off than they are now.
A possible exit strategy would be to divide the country into Kurdish, Shia
and Sunni enclaves in a way that would minimize ethnic cleansing and let
each rule itself as it saw fit. Even then there would still need to be a US
presence to deter fighting between the three groups and to protect them from
external attack. Oil revenue would have to be paid into a properly audited
external account at the World Bank, not the UN or other international
kleptocracy, and divided between the groups. I can see grave difficulties in
adopting this course, not least with the bordering countries.
All in all I can see certain advantages for the United
States in having an overwhelming military presence in the middle of the
world's major source of oil. Not just to fuel that absurdity called the SUV
but to produce the food that we all need. It is not always realised how much
oil has to be consumed to feed a western household.
Regards
John Edwards
Thank you. Much the same things were said at the
conference I recently attended. The Irish situation was much helped by the
explosion of wealth in the Republic...
==============
Another interchange from another conference:
Jim wrote:
>Peter,
> >As with Chris Hitchens, I too am mystified by how
anyone could wish
> >Saddam Hussein was still in power.
You are misrepresenting the anti-war position.
The argument is simple: We did not derive a /net/ benefit from overthrowing
Saddam. You keep trying to get away from a serious assessment of all the
costs and benefits.
Here are some costs:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m12270&l=i&size=1&hd=0
According to Pentagon statistics, approximately 6
percent of the more than 12,000 troops wounded by bombs or bullets in Iraq
or Afghanistan have required amputation--three times the rate in Vietnam.
About 20 percent have head or neck injuries, and many more have suffered
breathing and eating impairments, blindness or severe disfiguration. Dr. Roy
Aaron of Brown Medical School in Rhode Island told the Boston Globe in
December that the Veterans Affairs system "literally cannot handle the load"
of amputees.
Why make a bunch of American GIs and their families
pay such a high price for a bunch of ungrateful Iraqis?
RnP
=========
Charles Krauthammer: The Neoconservative
Convergence
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12001023_1
The post-cold-war era has seen a remarkable
ideological experiment: over the last fifteen years, each of the three major
American schools of foreign policy-realism, liberal internationalism, and
neoconservatism-has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school,
isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor
and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no
chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from
this unusual and unplanned experiment.
The era began with the senior George Bush and a
classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without
Kissinger-although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Lawrence Eagleburger
filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe
its vision-the New World Order-captured the core idea: an orderly world with
orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.
The elder Bush had two enormous achievements to
his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically
undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which
maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his
administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure
of imagination. Bush brilliantly managed the reconstitution of Germany and
the restoration of the independence of the East European states, but he
could not see far enough to the liberation of the Soviet peoples themselves.
His notorious "chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, warning Ukrainians against
"suicidal nationalism," seemed to prefer Soviet stability to the risk of
fifteen free and independent states.
But we must not be retrospectively too severe.
Democracy in Ukraine was hard to envision even a few years ago, let alone in
the early 1990's, and Bush's hesitancy did not stop the march of liberation
in the Soviet sphere. It was the failure of imagination in Bush's other area
of triumph-Iraq-that had truly stark, even tragic, consequences.
Leaving Saddam in place, and declining to
support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the first Gulf war,
begat more than a decade of Iraqi suffering, rancor among our war allies,
diplomatic isolation for the U.S., and a crumbling regime of UN sanctions.
All this led ultimately and inevitably to a second war that could have been
fought far more easily-and with the enthusiastic support of Iraq's Shiites,
who to this day remain suspicious of our intentions-in 1991. One recalls
with dismay that the first two of Osama bin Laden's announced justifications
for his declaration of war on America were the garrisoning of the holy
places (i.e., Saudi Arabia) by crusader (i.e., American) soldiers and the
suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. Both were a direct result of the
inconclusive end to the first Gulf war.
Still, the achievements of the elder Bush far
outweigh the failures. <snip>
The rest is worth reading.
Note that I am not endorsing this: I said it is
worth reading. If you detect considerable mixed feelings on my part about
this war, you are correct. I didn't want us in there. I do not think pouring
money into the sand is a good idea; I'd rather spend that money on nuclear
power plants and space resources in the US. Having said that, if the
President's bold plans work to implant actual liberal democracy in Iraq the
world is a different place; and if there is any chance of success, I don't
want to be part of the crowd preventing that success from happening.
THEN SEE MONTY on Ideology .
======================
The Following is a result of a
number of exchanges of letters with David. It is long, but I invited that: I
said that if he so greatly disagreed with the views put in the original
letter, he should say why, not merely condemn. He has done so, and this is
the reply, which I present unedited, as is my usual practice (I generally do
ask that long letters be shortened, but I tend to rely on the writer to do
that).
He has also chosen to append some remarks about
this site that I do not think are true, but are still worth thinking about.
First of all, let's start with a macro point. You are
committed to a view of American interests and American foreign policy (both
historically and present-day) which I think is fundamentally
unrepresentative both of the actual history and of our interests generally.
This view is embodied in your JQA quote which you brandish more or less
regularly, on the subject of monsters abroad.
Let us be clear that this POV represents only one of
at least three or four strands of historical American foreign policy, and
one that has gotten less and less possible to execute, inasmuch as the
"monsters abroad" have developed both the intent and the capability of
coming here. However, it is the default position of the American people, for
better or worse: as with all of the major conflicts we have been involved
with, from the Revo through the Civil War to WW1, WW2, the Cold War and now
the GWOT (no, I don't like it either, but it's a name), most Americans would
much prefer to be left alone and tend their own gardens, but when it becomes
obvious this is no longer a viable option, they are more than willing to
engage. Of course they want the engagement to be relatively quick and to the
point: no one in this country enjoys the notion of wars that drag on for
ages, as I assume you observed during the Cold War.
So--just at the very start--it appears somewhat
disingenuous to me to act as if the JQA school of foreign policy were either
the norm or even the dominant school of US foreign policy. The fact is (to
borrow the quadripartite typology outlined by Walter Russell Mead in his
seminal article on the subject [http://denbeste.nu/external/Mead01.html]),
our foreign policy has always blended elements of Hamiltonian commercial
realism, Wilsonian idealism, Jeffersonian pacifism, and Jacksonian
aggressive response. Obviously, at various times, different elements have
been in the ascendancy: but none of the four strands can plausibly be called
normative, since they each serve their purposes, and some better than
others. To argue that one strand should be privileged above the others is
the equivalent of Maslow's famous line that to the man whose only tool is a
hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
We therefore begin with substantially different
assumptions about what is normative in the conduct of our foreign policy. I
need hardly add that to dismiss those who disagree with epithets is hardly
conducive to the sort of truth-seeking collective dialogue you imagine we
are engaged in. You use the derogatory epithet "neo-con" to describe those
who believe in a foreign policy in which Jacksonian and Wilsonian strands
predominate, and suggest that--since many of its advocates are former
Trotskyites--its advocates are somehow suspect. Apparently you have
forgotten that many of President Reagan's foreign policy team--Jeane
Kirkpatrick, John Lehman, indeed, Reagan himself--also held these views. You
dismiss those who believe that all human beings aspire to freedom as
neo-Jacobins: I find this baffling, as the argument collapses of its own
weight (if the desire for freedom is unique to the West or even--as you
sometimes imply--to Anglo-Americans, how did we get it in the first place?
And if the sources of our aspiring to freedom are historical and cultural
rather than genetic, isn't it possible that others can "get the bug" also?).
So: with this as prologue, let us then discuss your
correspondent, "Mr. R". He appears to advance several propositions, none of
which appear to me to be arguments, so much as assertions:
1. Sure, Saddam was a bad man, but others have been
worse (um, there's nothing much we can do about Clemenceau and the Kaiser
now).
2. Sure, Saddam killed a lot of people, but he wasn't the worst (still
nothing we can do about those other guys, one way or t'other).
3. Sure, Saddam killed a lot of people, but we killed as many or more
during the invasion and as a result of our sanctions [a number of
quantitative assertions are made here which are characterized as "highly
credible", but for which no support is given: I happen to know that most of
these "highly credible" numbers are in fact highly suspect and have been
debunked by other studies and reports] (even if the assertions about how
many were killed by us, does this mean that now we should go back and try
Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay, in addition to the Kaiser, Clemenceau, /e
tutti quanti/?).
4. BTW, the numbers that Saddam supposedly killed are "highly suspect"
inasmuch as they were provided by the same "pathological liars" who made
claims about WMD (I guess "R" denies the existence of the mass graves that
have revealed over 300,000 victims of Saddam's regime so far: or perhaps he
implies that we fabricated them? I've heard these arguments before from
Holocaust deniers: they're just as vile here) (And as far as WMD goes, if
there's anyone on the planet who could convincingly demonstrate *before the
invasion*--including Saddam himself--that he didn't have WMD, let him come
forward).
OK, so far we have
(1) some quantitative comparisons that--if followed literally--would have
precluded us from fighting the Civil War (after all, the half-million or so
dead in that conflict vastly exceeded the numbers of blacks that were killed
by the slave system, or lynched, or what have you), World War Two (I think
it safe to say that the civilian deaths our bombing caused in both Germany
and Japan far exceeded our own casualties) (and of course, Hitler was a
piker compared to Stalin: so we should probably have thrown in our lot with
Hitler rather than Stalin early in the war), Korea and Vietnam (surely our
attempts to shore up those governments caused many deaths that would have
been avoided had they been "peacefully" taken over by their respective
Northern adversaries...and besides, Syngman Rhee and Ngo Dinh Diem were
pretty unsavory characters, hardly worth our sullying our hands with);
(2) some unsubstantiated and--frankly--debunked figures about how many
caualties we have caused among the Iraqis, and
(3) some implications that we, the US, fabricated our data anyhow.
We then have arguments about what "ordinary Iraqis"
think (again, completely unsourced and unsubstantiated) which happen to fly
in the face of many other reports, including broad-based polling data
conducted by independent, reputable observers. Even if the assertions made
were correct, I can't help but ask: what did the average German or Japanese
think about all this, in 1947? To ask the question is to reveal the
meretriciousness of the argument: you can't rebuild Baghdad in a day, and to
suggest that our failure to do so indicates a broader failure is...silly.
Finally, we conclude--and, yes, this is the part I
took on, but in reality it's merely the straw that broke my back--by a
vicious, anti-Semitic diatribe against those who might disagree with the
writer, including an "ironic" suggestion--ha, ha!--that they should be taken
out and shot.
I am not Jewish myself: my father was born Jewish, but
converted before I was born. But I did grow up in New York, and many of my
friends even now are Jewish. I knew people when I was little who had their
number tattooed on their forearm. So I'm a bit sensitive--perhaps overly
so--to any hint of collective killing of the Jews: you'll have to indulge
me.
Now: you may argue that I should have instantly
recognized this as "irony". But--perhaps you need your memory refreshed--you
yourself advocated paving over the cities of those who either were
responsible of 9/11 or cheered it on. Was that, also, irony? It certainly
didn't seem so at the time. Anyhow, "irony" is the lazy man's way of
avoiding saying he's sorry: it's tantamount to thinking you can get away
with saying anything you like, and if anyone gets insulted, you just throw
up your hands and say "Geez, fella, lighten up! I was only kiddin'!"
Frankly, it is the sensibility that has led to the ever-greater coarsening
of political dialogue in this country, and I for one would have hoped that
you'd have put a brake on it, especially in light of your (seemingly
authentic) commitment to the truth.
You say--quite correctly--that dismissing R's letter
as stupid or monstrous serves no useful purpose. Of course, you are right.
So, ask yourself this question: what purpose did putting it up in the first
place serve? All I ever said to you was a paraphrase of one of Niven's Laws:
"Don't stand next to a man who is throwing shit at other people." I don't
like having shit thrown at me: if I respond by throwing some back, how is
that wrong? Hey, I was just being ironic, right?
Here's the deal: if believing in a muscular foreign
policy that sometimes involves squashing our adversaries before they have a
chance to annoy us makes me a "neo-con", so be it. If believing that we
should have a foreign policy that blends realism and idealism by recognizing
that expanding the frontiers of freedom is good for the US makes me a
neo-Jacobin, then so be it. I'll even go so far as to say that if believing
that we have both a principled and a pragmatic interest in supporting
Israel's continued existence in the Middle East makes me a tool of the Jews,
so be it. I'm done being intimidated by epithets.
You claim that you want your web page to be a forum
for truth-seeking, but the rhetoric you deploy, and--through many of the
letters you print--endorse, suggests that your view of the arena in which
truth may be sought is far narrower than it is in reality. The fact of the
matter is, your web page has turned into an advocacy page for a particular
view of foreign (and indeed domestic) policy which is decreasingly receptive
to dissent. You need to try and understand this.
Now that the anti-Semitism accusation has been
made, rational discourse ceases; but since both David and R are of Jewish
descent it would not seem appropriate here. More let us be clear about
something: opposition to policies endorsed by people some of whom are of
Jewish descent is not opposition to Jews in general. Even were all neo-cons
Jewish (and they certainly are not) opposition to neo-conservatism would
hardly equate to opposition to all Jews; and if the writer were serious in
contending that neo-cons, having got us into a war we ought not be in, were
traitors and ought to be jailed or executed that is STILL not advocating
"collecting killing of Jews." I don't have the statistics to hand, but it is
my understanding that most Jewish precincts in the US vote Democrat, not
neo-conservative.
It is not my practice to break people's thoughts
into tiny segments and comment on each, and this discussion has gone on long
enough anyway: but I will answer the one question, why post that letter at
all? Because it put forth a rather extreme point of view that is still
defensible (absent the suggestion that political opponents ought to be shot;
but even if one were to take that seriously, it is an accusation of treason,
not a racial accusation). I contend that we ought not be in Iraq, but now
that we are there we may have no choice but to see this through and test the
assumptions of the neo-conservatives and Jacobins. There are other views.
They are not often put forth by articulate and intelligent people. Perhaps
it is harmful to expose such views to discussion, but I do not think so. I
put that letter up to see if it would generate rational replies.
As to Realism in foreign policy: were I to have
chosen a source of threat in the Middle East, it would not be Saddam's Iraq
which was secular and ruled by a minority and thus concerned about holding
on to power. The US encouraged Saddam to oppose Iran which we did consider a
real threat; but so long as Saddam did not acquire nuclear weapons he was no
real threat to anyone other than his own people. He was certainly no threat
to us, and while he may have chosen on occasion to cooperate with Al Qaeda,
Islamic fundamentalism was his enemy, not his friend. Those who wish to
establish a new Caliphate do not have Saddam in mind.
Pre-emptive war is one weapon in the arsenal of
democracy; but surely it is not the only weapon, and surely pre-emptive war
is not the first policy one ought to employ to neutralize a threat?
Particularly if the threat is already deterred.
David refers to my early suggestion that the US
ought, in the immediate wake of 9-11, to go to those cities were the news
was treated as occasion for rejoicing, and build monument: rubble of the
dimensions of Ground Zero in each of those cities. I suggested this be done
by Marines giving the inhabitants the chance to escape with their lives; and
that the monuments be maintained as memorials and reminders that attacking
the US and killing our citizens will have consequences. I wasn't entirely
sure I was serious, but I do note that the casualties resulting from
implementing that would be smaller than the civilian casualties that have
resulted from our operations in Iraq; and I am not sure to this moment that
those monuments would not be as effective in deterring future attacks
against us as our Iraqi experiment has been.
And that is the point: Mr. Bush hopes to implant a
democratic Islamic ally in the midst of the Middle East. I wish him well of
it, and I do not doubt that if that could be done it would make for an
interesting world. The cost will be high; it is already higher than the
Administration expected (although not higher than I predicted; I said $300
billion at the time. Alas, I may have underestimated the costs).
The alternative to building friends through
thoroughgoing reforms in the Middle East is deterrence. I would have thought
that is the central debate. There are those who believe that the aims of the
invasion could never have been realized, and that those who induced us to go
into Iraq had other agendas. Surely those views are not beyond the pale of
discussion?
And that, I think, is quite enough on this subject.
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