{"id":2161,"date":"2003-02-11T02:55:18","date_gmt":"2003-02-11T09:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2003\/02\/cross-blog-iraq-debate\/"},"modified":"2003-02-11T02:55:18","modified_gmt":"2003-02-11T09:55:18","slug":"cross-blog-iraq-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2003\/02\/11\/cross-blog-iraq-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Cross-blog Iraq debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tHere’s a set of answers to the questions the anti-war\/appeasement<\/a> crowd has assembled in its brilliance (see Stand Down: Opposing a Free Iraq<\/a>) to torture the minds of those of us who support regime change in Iraq:<\/p>\n

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?<\/i><\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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? <\/i><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in the Independent for details:<\/p>\n

\n

[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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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? <\/i><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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? <\/i><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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? <\/i><\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Beyond these findings, the evidence Colin Powell presented to the UN on Feb 5 is incontrovertible.<\/p>\n

If the question implies that Iraq has no prohibited weapons whatsoever, you would do well to examine the record a bit more closely.
\n—<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the responses from the pro-liberation side:
\nRichard Bennett<\/a>
\nAlex Knapp<\/a>
\nRobin Goodfellow<\/a>
\nMike Silverman<\/a>
\nDerek James<\/a>
\nJohn Tabin<\/a>
\nWylie Blog<\/a>
\nMaarten Schenk<\/a>
\nStephen Gordon<\/a>
\nDean Esmay<\/a>
\nJohn Moore<\/a>
\nMartin Devon<\/a>
\nJohn Hawkins<\/a>
\nJ. Belcher<\/a>
\nJason Verber<\/a>
\nThe Weigh In<\/a>
\nGiants and Dwarves<\/a>
\nCranky Hermit<\/a>
\nCharles (Little Green Footballs) Johnson<\/a>
\nJeff Lawson<\/a>
\nIncidental to the Question<\/a>
\nDave Himrich<\/a>
\nLegal Bean<\/a>
\nGlome<\/a>
\nCold Fury<\/a>
\nThe Lazy Pundit<\/a>
\nSasha and Andrew’s Roundtable<\/a>
\nMatt Johnson<\/a>
\nEric Simonson<\/a><\/p>\n

and from the pro-oppression side:
\nKarl-Friedrich Lenz<\/a>
\nGeorge Kysor<\/a>
\nAnonoblogger Dr. Slack<\/a>
\nAnonoblogger Leonard<\/a>
\nOutlandish Josh<\/a>
\nAugust Pollack<\/a>
\nFrankly, I’d rather not<\/a>
\nGeorge Paine<\/a>
\nA serving of Crow<\/a>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Cross-blog Iraq debate”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-yR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}