Posted 3:39 PM by Floyd

This is an essay on whether the United States should invade Iraq.

I have seen three viewpoints on the proposed war:

• The idiotarian anti-war position
  
• The non-idiotarian pro-war position
  
• The non-idiotarian anti-war position
  

I am not particularly interested in the idiotarian, well, idiocies.
Last weekend I was hanging out with a bunch of bridge players
and one of them made a snide reference to the Bush administration.
He used the term "corporate hegemony." I'm not sure what the
corporate hegemony is that profits from a return to toenail polish,
kite flying and music playing, and to overthrowing dictators who use
poison gas on minority groups, but if it exists I'm fuck-all for it.
I presume such a hegemony would consist of be Revlon, an evil syndicate
of kite manufacturers, and the RIAA selling music to Afghanis, and
then trying to hack into the casette players of those listening to
pirated music.

Back to reality. The pro-war side needs no introduction; it is
represented by many in the blogosphere, and you can find their
links at the left.

The anti-war side amongst pro-war bloggers has fewer adherents. One is Steven Chapman; another is Ken Layne, who penned this dissent. I will quote two excerpts:

I've been disgusted and bored by this War on Iraq
talk, because it's a scam. Saudi Arabia knocked
down the World Trade Center and bombed the
Pentagon with jetliners full of civilians and
tried to send another jetliner into the White
House or the Capitol.

...

I'll take Saddam's version of an Islamic state
over Saudi Arabia anytime. Saddam doesn't fund
Jew-hating mosques in Virginia and California ...
he just pays $25,000 to the families of suicide
bombers in Israel. No Iraqis crashed jets into
the WTC and Pentagon last September.

Yeah, Iraq shouldn't have nukes and chemical
weapons aimed at Kuwait or Israel. But the Sept.
11 killers came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Our
pals. Our buddies. Our nightmare.

Removing the Sting

At the same gathering of friends our hostess took issue with the
argument that it was necessary to remove Saddam's capability to
use weapons of mass destruction (hereafter abbreviated WMD). She
said that this is hypocritical because we had our own WMD.

This had occurred to me as well, but I think it is a flawed argument.
One should not treat nations as though they were individuals who
are equal under law. It is one thing to say that person X should be allowed
to carry a gun but that person Y may not. (Many of the elite who
propound gun control have armed bodyguards, which is obvious hypocricy.)
It is something else entirely to say that nation X may have WMD
while nation Y may not. The United States has its problems, but invading
its neighbors or using chemical weapons on its own citizens is not one
of them.

I think it is entirely reasonable of the United States to attack
Iraq before it obtains WMD.


Saddam Insane?

One argument made by many is that it is important to remove Saddam
from power because he is insane, and will use WMD once he obtains them
regardless of the consequences. I think this is silly, and is due
to chauvanism by American patriots; their implicit reasoning is that
Saddam crossed the US, and who but a lunatic would dare to do that?

Saddam's country suffered badly as a result of his attempt to seize
Kuwait. But Saddam himself seems to be doing just fine; he has his
power and his wealth. When he seized Kuwait he had a reasonable
expectation that no one would complain. The Gulf War must have represented
a worst-case scenario -- and as I have said, he personally has not suffered.

Saddam did toss some missiles at Israel during the first Gulf War,
and that has added to his reputation for all-around battiness.
But this too was rational; Saddam attempted to enlarge the conflict by getting
Israel involved, thus pulling other Arab states onto Iraq's side.
It was a manifestation of a maxim of Donald Rumsfeld that Den Beste has
approvingly cited: When a problem is intractible, expand the scope
of the problem. Is Rumsfeld insane?

While I said above that I think it is appropriate for the US to
attack Iraq, I do not think it is necessary because I believe Saddan
to be a rational actor who has better things to do with his time
than to be nuked to his atomic constituents.


Until You Clean the Bedroom of Every Boy in America, You Can't
Have a New GameBoy Cartridge

In passing I shall object to another argument I have heard contra war:

There are lots of awful governments in the world. Why is the US picking
on Iraq?

This is like saying that because I can't feed all the hungry people in
the world, it is immoral for me to try to feed one or two. Why shouldn't
the US pick and choose which evil it chooses to extirpate?


The Two Q's: Iraq and Al-Qaeda

I don't think it is necessary to take out Saddam to prevent
an Iraqi military strike. Butis it necessary to do so to strike at Al Qaeda?

I do not find the evidence linking Al-Qaeda and Iraq to be convincing.
From what I have seen it consists of the following:

• An Iraqi intelligence official met Mohammed Atta in the Czech
  Republic.
  
  
  I don't find this convincing because it is a single visit. Maybe
  Atta asked for assistance and got turned down. If Atta met with
  Iraqis multiple times, or can be shown to have received money from
  them, that would be different.
  
  
• Iraq was training operatives to hijack planes (this from Indepundit. But in the same article we read
  
  

  
  None of the defectors were able to identify the "Islamic militants"
  specifically as members of Usama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization
  

  
  
  

Then we have this statement, also from Indepundit's article.

But Prague wasn't the only opportunity for Atta to meet with Iraqi agents.
Atta also visited Syria several times between 1994 and 1999. It would not
have been difficult for him to make contact with Iraqi agents during that period.

It would not have been difficult for Atta to make contact with ... Syria.
Shall we therefore go to war with Syria?

All of this evidence is circumstantial. I have no problem with circumstantial
evidence in this context, because there is no practical way of obtaining
prrof of the strength necessary to convict a person of a felony in
an American trial. But -- Iraq is not a likely collaborator with fundamentalist
Islamic groups. It is a secular totalitarian society. Islam cannot
be used to strenghten Saddam's grip on power. So the circumstancial evidence
would have to be stronger to convince me.


The Axis of Evil

President Bush made a famous speech in which he stated that the US
would oppose countries which fostered terrorism, and he named three
nations specifically as an "Axis of Evil": Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
At the time I thought, "kick ass." I was afraid that the US response
would be hobbled by legalistic objections and multicultural sensistivity,
so any pro-war speech made me happy.

But now that I think about the Axis of Evil, I think that while the
idea is sound, the implementation is lacking. In fact it was the
precise opposite of what was needed. If you want to make a list of
fundamentalism Islamic countries that have prodided money and bodies
for anti-Western terrorism, it's not hard: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran.
The list proffered by Bush shows that he and his team are not interested
in making hard choices or offending anyone.

Why is Iraq on the list? Habit; they have been an American enemy before,
so why not now?

Why North Korea? In a sane world, one would try to imagine the name of the
country that Bush was mispronouncing. In our world it is an affirmative
action placement. Never mind that North Korea is viciously atheist
and probably knows less about Islam than someone who watched "Lawrence
of Arabia." North Korea is a thorn in the South's side, but free Korea
has twice as many people and about fifty times as much wealth; they
can handle it. But Bush can't offend people by making war on only Islamic
States -- note the immediate dropping of the word "Crusade" last September
when someone whined about how any Arabs who were alive in the year 1096
would be alarmed -- so North Korea was admitted in spite of their low SAT scores.


The Road to Riyadh?

I think Iraq is the wrong target, and would prefer to see the US go after
Saudi Arabia. Many bloggers have said that attacking Iraq is the first
step; once we have an oil source and an armed enemy out of the way, the
next step is the house of Saud. This will never happen. It is a
fantasy constructed by people who are pro-Bush and don't want to admit
to themselves that Bush has no interest in an Arabian regime change.

In the abstract, Iraq is an important step in a campaign in the Arabian
Peninsula. In a wargame, that is what the US player would do. But life
is not a wargame, and operations against Saudi Arabia will not take place
in a vaccuum. Saudi Arabia has been America's ally. Bush has given no
indication that this has changed.

Nations do not stab their allies in the back -- not by invading them
militarily anyway. The exception is when Hitler attacked Russia, and
even then he had spent twenty years foaming at the mouth about Bolshevism,
and two years in a partnership of spoils. Bush is not as ruthless as
Hitler; no democratically elected leader of a free country could possibly
be.

And even if it were somehow possible for Bush to attack Saudi Arabia, it
would be wrong. If we have a problem with the Saudis, then we need to
tell them that. And that is what Bush and his administration should have
been doing as soon as the Taliban collapsed. They needed to beat the drum
about the $200 million in Saudi money that went to Al Qaeda, about the
15 of 19 hijackers who were Saudis, about the hundreds of Saudis being
held at Guantanamo.

Instead George W wants to go to war with yesterday's news, and fellates
a Saudi prince at his ranch every month. This is not the road to Riyadh
-- or to victory over terrorism.