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Check this out: Dean’s World: Postwar Iraq Blueprint

FYI, here’s UN Security Council Resolution 687, ordering Iraq to disarm. It’s dated 3 April, 1991. The wheels of justice move slowly.

The Washington Post has a surprisingly harsh editorial today, lambasting France and Germany for Standing With Saddam and weakening NATO and the UN:

FRANCE AND GERMANY have finally responded to Iraq’s flagrant violation of United Nations disarmament orders by mounting an offensive. Yet the target of their campaign is not Saddam Hussein but the United States — and the proximate casualties look to be not the power structures of a rogue dictator but the international institutions that have anchored European and global security.

The behavior of these two states is so extreme that it’s prompted Greece to advocate arming its long-time nemesis, Turkey.

Time is clearly running out for France, Germany, and Iraq.

link via Eric Alterman, whose knickers are abunch, reflexively.

Link via Jeff Jarvis.

Here’s a set of answers to the questions the anti-war/appeasement crowd has assembled in its brilliance (see Stand Down: Opposing a Free Iraq) to torture the minds of those of us who support regime change in Iraq:

1. Attacking Iraq has been publicly called a “pre-emption” of a threat from Saddam Hussein’s regime, whose sins include launching regional wars of aggression. Do you think there is a clear and reliable difference between pre-emptive and aggressive warfare, and if so, what is it?

By whom has it been called a war of pre-emption other than those trying to weasel out of fighting it? Your passive construction is at best ambiguous.

The reasons the US, the UK, Australia, 17 continental European democracies, and a half-dozen of Iraq’s neighbors are preparing to remove Saddam Hussein from power have been best articulated in the seventeen UN Security Council Resolutions passed since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait ordering Iraq to disarm. As no other nation has been the subject of such a barrage of UN paperwork, we can reasonably conclude that Iraq has a unique status among nations, justifying special treatment.

As to the threshold justifying war as enforcement of international edict vs. war as simple aggression (a good example of a contemporary aggressive war is France’s incursion into Ivory Coast), it’s hard to say exactly how many UN resolutions are required: perhaps five, or possibly ten, maybe fifteen in an extreme case, but seventeen seems like a nice, round number. Some hard-liners might even say a single UN Resolution ordering an aggressive nation to disarm should be sufficient, but such people are clearly idealists and not to be taken seriously.

2. What do you feel are the prospects that an invasion of Iraq will succeed in a) maintaining it as a stable entity and b) in turning it into a democracy? Are there any precedents in the past 50 years that influence your answer?

Is Iraq a “stable entity” today? Saddam Hussein rose to power twenty years ago through the device of publicly executing 50 members of his party to signify his arrival. As one of the hallmarks of stability is the orderly transfer of power, this indicates Iraq is lacking in this department. While twenty years is a rather long time for a single genocidal tyrant to remain in power (neither Hitler nor Idi Amin lasted nearly that long), Iraq in its present configuration is no more stable than Saddam Hussein is personally, and that’s not much. Sixty percent of Iraqis depend on the government for food, and most of that is purchased through the UN Oil-for-Food program; given that Iraq’s relations with the UN are somewhat strained at the moment, this doesn’t demonstrate much in the way of stability either. So your premise is faulty.

As to the second part, we needn’t speculate about the prospects for bringing democracy to Iraq, because there is already a working example in the Kurdistan area of Northern Iraq, where military protection by the US and the UK have allowed elected government, free speech, and universal education to flourish since the Gulf War. See Johann Hari’s article in the Independent for details:

[Kurdistan] is a self-determining democracy. It elects, freely, its own leaders. It has freedom of speech and of the press (in Sulaymaniyah alone, there are 138 media outlets, including literary magazines and radio channels). It lives under the rule of law, upheld by both male and female judges.

As Barham Salih, the prime minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government in Sulaymaniyah, explained recently: “In 1991, we had 804 schools. Today we have 2,705. We started with one university in Arbil in 1991; today we have three. In 10 years of self-government, we built twice as many hospitals as was built for us in seven decades. Then we had 548 doctors. Today we have 1,870 doctors. I’m not going to tell you that everything is rosy… but it’s remarkable what we have achieved.”

3. How successful do you think the military operations and “regime change” in Afghanistan have been in achieving their stated objectives? Does this example affect your feelings about war in Iraq in any way?

They’ve been quite successful, which is remarkable considering the state Afghanistan was in after the communist occupation and ten years of Taliban rule. The regime change was accomplished with minimal loss of civilian life – less than 1,000 casualties – and the present regime selected by a committee of tribal leaders and special interests has done a remarkable job of normalizing life in a war-torn country. Millions of Afghans who fled the communist and Taliban rule have returned, and rebuilding proceeds apace.

Given that Iraq has considerably better infrastructure, and six million well-educated refugees, there is every reason to believe that extension of the Kurdistan model to the rest of country will be successful.

4. As a basis for war, the Bush Administration accuses Iraq of trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear), supporting terrorism, and brutalizing their own people. Since Iraq is not the only country engaged in these actions, under what circumstances should the US go to war with other such nations, in addition to going to war with Iraq?

The US should go to war with any country that has been sanctioned by the UN and ordered to disarm in at least five or ten resolutions. How many such countries can you name? That’s what I thought.

5. The Bush Administration has issued numerous allegations about the threat represented by Iraq, many of which have been criticized in some quarters as hearsay, speculation or misstatements. Which of the Administration’s allegations do you feel stand up best to those criticisms?

The United Nations found that Iraq had well-developed programs of chemical and biological warfare five years ago, and a budding nuclear program. These findings were not hearsay, but supported by direct evidence, not the least of which was the chemical weapons Iraq used against Iran, the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and the coalition forces in the Gulf War.

Beyond these findings, the evidence Colin Powell presented to the UN on Feb 5 is incontrovertible.

If the question implies that Iraq has no prohibited weapons whatsoever, you would do well to examine the record a bit more closely.
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Now it’s pretty evident that the main concern of the Stand Downers is this whole pre-emption thing, which I paid short shrift because it’s not really necessary to invoke it against Iraq given that nation’s history. It seems to me that pre-emption is basically prudence in a world of WMDs and suicidal terrorists, as the traditional concept of self-defense simply doesn’t apply against an enemy who doesn’t value his own life, let alone yours, and the loss of life in a first strike by a rogue nation is too severe for us just to sit back and wait for it to happen.

Pre-emption is a tricky notion when you don’t trust your government, or, as is the case with the German pacifists, you don’t trust any government to accurately and disinterestedly determine when the conditions exist that justify pre-emptive action. But not trusting the Bush government doesn’t mean that Saddam Hussein doesn’t constitute an unacceptable threat to world peace and stability, any more than being paranoid doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get you. So the real chore for the peaceniks is to examine the evidence and decide whether the threat is there independent of what the Bush Administration is saying.

That’s why I invoke the UN, but there’s a danger in doing that, as the UN seems to be a lot more interested in passing resolutions and pushing paper than it is in enforcement, and there’s the rub.

Here are some of the responses from the pro-liberation side:
Richard Bennett
Alex Knapp
Robin Goodfellow
Mike Silverman
Derek James
John Tabin
Wylie Blog
Maarten Schenk
Stephen Gordon
Dean Esmay
John Moore
Martin Devon
John Hawkins
J. Belcher
Jason Verber
The Weigh In
Giants and Dwarves
Cranky Hermit
Charles (Little Green Footballs) Johnson
Jeff Lawson
Incidental to the Question
Dave Himrich
Legal Bean
Glome
Cold Fury
The Lazy Pundit
Sasha and Andrew’s Roundtable
Matt Johnson
Eric Simonson

and from the pro-oppression side:
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
George Kysor
Anonoblogger Dr. Slack
Anonoblogger Leonard
Outlandish Josh
August Pollack
Frankly, I’d rather not
George Paine
A serving of Crow

Reynolds found this piece (U.N. Inspectors Fail to Win Key Iraq Concessions) in the WaPo, indicating that Iraq is still jerking the UN inspectors around:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 9 — The top U.N. arms experts said tonight that they were unable to reach agreement with Saddam Hussein’s government on several key issues they had traveled here to resolve in a bid to build support for continuing weapons inspections.

They did make concessions on minor points, and I hope that’s not enough to fuel the Franco-German scam to keep Saddam in power.

Via Fredrik K.R. Norman, the Quote of the week: “Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind.” (Jed Babbin, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense). Heard on Fox News Sunday.

Den Beste is plenty worried about the French counter-offensive, and so am I, while many others seem to think it’s not going to amount to much. The problem with the French (and German) plan is that it only has to muddy the waters for six weeks or so to make an invasion impractical for another year; the weather in Iraq starts to get too hot for soldiers in bio-hazard suits in March. And the plan, code-named Mirage, could certainly create enough confusion about the nature of the UN impasse with Saddam to fill up that much time. As Powell said, it’s not a lack of inspectors that’s the problem, it’s a lack of cooperation, and the only way to make Saddam cooperate is to hold a gun to his head, and I mean a loaded gun that you intend to shoot, not a baby-blue UN gun that has no bullets in it.

Why France and Germany want to do this is clear enough: they’ve both violated the arms embargo and don’t want to get caught, so it’s mandatory for both of them to leave Saddam in power. That also keeps France and Russia’s sweet oil contracts in place. That’s the only way I can characterize their motives, because I don’t see that the plan has snowball’s chance of forcing Saddam to disarm, and I want to see not only that but a regime change.

This maneuvering by the French underscores the importance of Tom Friedman’s desire to replace them with India as permanent member of the Security Council, thus depriving them of the veto:

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world’s biggest democracy, the world’s largest Hindu nation and the world’s second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it’s become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can’t see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.

How long has it been since France was a significant, let alone constructive player in global politics? A hundred years, at least.

Silicon Valley is a deeply liberal-Democratic, without a single Republican or moderate Democrat in elected office. It’s been described as Ground Zero for America’s feminist political movement, and it shows all the symptoms of Progressive politics in falling-down schools, a dysfunctional traffic infrastructure, SUVs festooned with “Save the Whales” bumper stickers, maniac gun control, and schoolteacher politicians like Mike Honda who say Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution.

The local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, has relentlessly pounded the drums of appeasement on both its editorial and news pages, but I don’t sense that the spirit of mindless acceptance of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime is at all strong here. For one thing, the Valley is home to several major defense contractors, such as Lockheed, whose latest contribution to the defense arsenal is a bomb that can loiter over a target area looking for prime targets before attacking:

The Small Diameter Bomb range is classified but expected to be extended by pop-out wings and the speed and altitude of the aircraft using it. A Phase 3 version may have the ability to loiter or autonomously seek out targets. The Small Diameter Bomb is considered one of the most significant programs on the books because it will dramatically increase the strike capability of every combat aircraft in the inventory.

During the Gulf War, I worked with a couple of Lockheed alumni who watched the CNN coverage we had going on an in-house TV set with propietary interest, eager to know if the systems they’d worked on were going to work in real-world circumstances, and jubilant when they did.

One measure of sentiment on Iraq is the letters column of the Mercury News, where today’s selection has three letters in favor of regime change to two in favor of appeasement. One of the good ones was mine:

YOUR statement (Opinion, Feb. 6) that “clear and imminent danger” has always been the precondition to U.S. military action does violence to the historical record. Our military attacked Bosnia, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Korea, Germany under Hitler, Germany under the Kaiser, Cuba under Spain, the Confederacy, and King George’s England without a first strike by the other side.

While we can argue the wisdom of these wars on their various merits, the fact that we struck the first blow isn’t disputable. The time has come to retire the rhetoric of pre-emption to the same trash can where the empty rhetoric of unilateralism was sent by the letters of support from 20 European democracies in the past week.

The U.N. Security Council gave Saddam Hussein two options in Resolution 1441: Disarm voluntarily by cooperating with the inspectors, or face disarmament by force. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation showed, in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s words, that “the inspections are not going to work.” Only one course of action remains.

Richard Bennett
Santa Clara

Even liberals and progressives can be sensible, so as time goes by I predict that Silicon Valley will come to support regime change in Iraq, if it doesn’t already.

The Frisco Chronicle gushes with praise for Move On, the organization that sponsored the derivative TV ad featuring daises, children, and patchouli oil recently. Move On’s founders seek to downplay their Berkeleyness, falsely portraying themselves as citizens of Silicon Valley:

Mindful of their broad appeal, the couple shy away from identifying their Berkeley connection, calling themselves “Silicon Valley entrepreneurs” on their Web site and press statements. “Berkeley has been typecast,” Blades explained. They said the city is perceived as “fringey,” a word that cannot be applied to their own politics.

Whether the part about the fringeyness of Move On’s politics is true is best left to your judgment. Move On has a discussion board where they tout Scott Ritter as the ultimate authority on Iraq, steadfastly claiming that Saddam has no nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.

This doesn’t sound mainstream to me.