Category: Networks

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.

Johann Hari shows the likely state of Iraq after the war:

Following the Gulf War, northern Iraq — where the Kurds were sheltering in the mountains from Saddam’s thugs — was not handed back to Baghdad. It became an independent statelet guarded by, yes, US and British military might.

What does it look like 10 years later? Is it governed by another mini-Saddam circa 1980, a cheap pro-American puppet? No. It 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.”

If it were not for US military power, this democratic entity would not have existed for the last 10 years. Without US military power, it will not be extended throughout Iraq. Of course, it would be far better if we could establish a democratic Iraq without a war that will kill many thousands of innocent people. War is horrendous, but a small number of things are even worse: Saddam’s tyranny is one. Has the left really forgotten the fundamental principle that it is worth fighting to free 23 million people from tyranny and to help them to build democracy? What has become of us?

The Iraqi exile leaders gathering in London late last year ? disparate and fractured though they are ? agreed that northern Iraq must be the model for post-Saddam democracy.

Link via Dr. Frank.

Talking Points Memo points out that Saddam’s recent behavior belies the claims that he’s a rational actor who wouldn’t use a nuke irresponsibly:

We’re about to go to war with Iraq. It may be a terrible idea. It may go badly for us. We may get bogged down there for years. But one thing is absolutely certain: it will go terribly for Saddam Hussein.

That’s right, he could prevent the invasion by cooperating with Blix, but he steadfastly refuses. The fact that he also insisted on invading Kuwait when a gigantic global coalition told him not to should have been the tipoff.

The editorial pages of California’s major dailies were unanimous in their declaration that Sec. Powell made a convincing case against Saddam before the UN Wednesday, proving that the dictator has thwarted the UN inspections program and that he has significant, illegal weapons programs going on with no intent to disarm, but they’re divided about the next step.

The LA Times says: U.N. — Time for a Deadline

First, it must set an inviolate deadline. Hussein has smirked at and dodged U.N. resolutions for more than a decade. The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, reported last month that Iraq remained recalcitrant. They will be back in Baghdad on Saturday and will report their latest findings to the Security Council on Feb. 14.

The United Nations must then give Hussein one final chance to avoid war — by complying or fleeing — and be ready to launch missiles, planes and troops if he again disregards or disrespects the world’s clear disarmament demands.

The Frisco Chronicle agrees that Powell made a strong case for Saddam’s wickedness, but they prefer to follow the lead of France and Germany and do nothing about him:

Many Americans remain to be persuaded that Iraq poses a clear and present danger that would merit a rush to war — as opposed to the indisputable case that Hussein must be deterred and contained. Powell’s presentation, for all its detail, left far more to interpretation than Adlai Stevenson’s 1962 “smoking gun” photos of a Soviet missile buildup in Cuba.

The Orange County Register cloaks itself in isolationism and parrots the Chronicle’s rhetoric:

The case for a preventive strike to forestall a potential threat – not a pre-emptive strike, which would presuppose an imminent and visible threat of an obvious launch or massing troops for an invasion – would be stronger if links between al-Qaida or other terrorist groups and the Iraqi regime could be documented.

The issue before the UN, of course, wasn’t the details of Saddam’s next move with his weapons, it was whether he’s cooperated with the inspectors. This is the case because there are only two remaining options for the enforcement of UNSCR 1441: disarm through inspection or disarm by force. Proving that the inspection route is not going to work makes the latter inevitable.

The Contra Costa Times understands the options, and is sharply critical of those nations, like France, who want to play obstructionist:

If the United Nations is to remain a viable organization, it must enforce its resolutions or they will be meaningless. If some nations on the Security Council do not have the foresight to force Iraq to disarm, they can always abstain from any further U.N. resolutions. They need not decimate the credibility of the world body by using their veto power.

At the very least the Security Council should demand that Saddam allow scientists and their families to leave Iraq to talk with inspectors. He also must allow reconnaissance aircraft to patrol all of Iraq.

Saddam must be forthcoming about what he has done with chemical and biological weapons and what progress Iraq has made on developing nuclear weapons.

Saddam must do all of the above completely and immediately. If he does not, the United Nations must sanction military action to remove Saddam from power. The credibility of the world body is at stake. So is the peace of the region.

The Sacrameno Bee believes that Saddam could easily avoid war, but probably doesn’t want to:

The evidence laid out by Powell gives the U.N. inspectors more guidance for intensifying their efforts and forcing Iraq to show — now — that the U.S. case is bogus. If that were the case, Iraq should have no trouble proving it. Instead, its initial response to Powell’s brief was to call it a pack of lies and fabrications. But as always, more attention should be paid to Iraqi actions than its overheated rhetoric.

Saddam still has a small chance to avoid war. Will he take it?

The San Diego Tribune says the presentation was compelling, and now expects the Security Council to act. They also point out that the fence-sitting California senator had a change of heart:

One lawmaker who has been critical of the Bush administration’s approach, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., stated yesterday: “I no longer think that inspections are going to work.” The question Blix now must address honestly is whether his inspectors ever can accomplish their mission in the face of Iraq’s intransigence.

The silly San Jose Mercury News rewrites history in its attempt to duck the inevitable conclusion that force is now necessary:

Those are the reasons pre-emptive, full-scale military actions to remove even despised regimes have never been part of American policy. They shouldn’t become so now.

Actually, the vast majority of America’s military campaigns have been “pre-emptive” according to the first-attack doctrine, including Bosnia, Kosovo, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Korea, Germany under Hitler, Germany under the Kaiser, Cuba, the Confederacy, and King George’s England; some of these nations had already attacked our allies, such as Hitler, but we were never in danger of attack here on our shores before we moved in with our military.

So here we are: the Security Council has already declared that Iraq must be disarmed, and gave them one last chance. Iraq continues to defy the UN, and is demonstrably not disarming. Is there any alternative to military force for enforcing 1441? I certainly don’t see it, unless Saddam has a Road-to-Damascus moment.