Quasi
an outlet for writers
March 10, 2003
Volume 2, Issue 1
Second go Round
This is an updated version of the edition of Quasi that I emailed out on the first of the month. I've included at the very beginning another outstanding column written today by Andrew Sullivan; it is one of the clearest, most comprehensive pieces to address the current crisis in Iraq. If you don't read anything else, read Sullivan's first column below.
For those of you interested in reading Sullivan regularly, he writes every day on his blog, which is found at www.andrewsullivan.com. Another excellent blog is written by freelance journalist Russell Working, who writes daily on matters surrounding the Iraq showdown. Go to www.fal.net/workingdrafts/index.html, and read the Q&A section first; it fully explains who Russell Working is and where he's coming from.
One other thing I added to this online edition of Quasi is something I wrote in response to an editorial published in the Diamondback, the student-run newspaper at the University of Maryland. That is placed second, just above Sullivan's excellent second piece, "A Just War."
This issue is the first of the publication's second year. I almost didn't put this one out, but then was overwhelmed with how much was being written about our government's efforts to oust Saddam. In the fourth piece included, a National Review article gives us a glimpse of just how low some anti-war protesters will go to ensure that their message is the only one heard.
I encourage you to inform yourself. Happy reading.
-- Jon (jonwardeleven@comcast.net)
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Spot The Difference
Bush and Clinton on Iraq
Here's a simple pop-quiz. Who said the following: "What if [Saddam] fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? ... Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal."
Full marks if you guessed Bill Clinton. It was 1998. But I wonder how many of you did. The political amnesia of so many in Europe with regard to the Iraq crisis is one of the most striking aspects of the whole current trans-Atlantic divide. To read the papers, to watch the "anti-war" protestors, to listen to the BBC, you'd easily imagine that out of the blue a belligerent and brand new American administration had just torn up the old rule book and started a new foreign policy utterly unconnected to the old one.
The truth, however, is that the current Bush policy toward Iraq is indistinguishable from Bill Clinton's. After the U.N. inspectors found that they could no longer do their job effectively in 1998, the U.S. shifted its policy in Iraq toward regime change in Baghdad - exactly the policy now being pursued. The difference between Bush and Clinton, of course, lies in the sense of urgency and importance applied to the same policy. September 11 made the White House acutely aware of the ruthlessness of the new Islamist terror-masters: suddenly, the American homeland was also in play. The possibility of a chemical or biological 9/11 made Washington realize that its continued Iraq policy needed actual enforcement. It made Washington realize that regime change needed to mean what it said.
Are there deeper differences between Bush and Clinton on this? There is, of course, the matter of style. Clinton was a master of the European dialogue. He meant very few things he said but he said them very well. He was a great schmoozer. When he compared the Serbian genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, it sounded earnest but no-one, least of all the massacred Bosnians, actually believed he meant it. And he didn't. If he had meant it, he wouldn't have allowed a quarter of a million to be murdered in Europe, while he delegated American foreign policy to the morally feckless and militarily useless European Union. Ditto with Iraq and al Qaeda. A few missiles here and there; some sanctions that starved millions of Iraqis but kept Saddam in power; and a big rhetorical game kept the pretense of seriousness up. But there was no actual attempt to match words with actions. In this, the French were completely - preternaturally - comfortable. No wonder Clinton was popular.
Bush's style couldn't be more different. He's blunt, straightforward, folksy, direct. Although his formal speeches have been as eloquent as any president's in modern times, his informal discourse is of the kind to make a European wince. And his early distancing from many of Clinton's policies, his assertion of American sovereignty in critical matters, undoubtedly ruffled some Euro-lapels. In retrospect, he could have been more politic.
But the point is: the foreign policy of Bush is not so drastically different from Clinton. On Iraq, in particular, there isn't a smidgen of principled difference between this administration and the last one. In fact, Bush came into office far less interventionist than Clinton and far more modest than Gore. His campaign platform budgeted less for defense than Al Gore's did. And his instincts were more firmly multilateral. That, of course, changed a year and a half ago. 9/11 made him realize that American withdrawal from the world was no longer an option. But even then, the notion of Bush's unilateralism is greatly exaggerated. To be sure, last spring, the Bush White House argued that taking out Saddam's weapons was non-negotiable, implying that it would be done with or without U.N. support (a position, by the way, that Bush had announced in the 2000 primaries). But by last September, as the world knows, Bush decided to pursue the policy of disarmament through the United Nations, despite the risk of falling into the inspections trap that has proved so intractable. And now, even after a unanimous resolution supporting serious consequences if Saddam refused to disarm immediately and completely, he's still going back to the U.N. for further permission to enforce the resolution by military means. His reward for this multilateralism? Contempt and derision.
Now compare that policy to Clinton's similar dilemma with how to deal with the Balkan crisis throughout the 1990s, culminating in the Kosovo intervention. Did Clinton go through the United Nations to justify his eventual NATO bombardment of Serbia? No he didn't. He didn't go through the U.N. because the Russians pledged to veto such a military engagement. So where were the peace protestors back then? In terms of international law, those American bombs in Belgrade - even hitting the Chinese embassy - were far less defensible than any that will rain down on Baghdad. Serbia had never attacked the U.S. No U.N. mandate provided cover. But Clinton ordered bombing anyway. And the same people who now viciously attack Bush as the president of a rogue state - Susan Sontag anyone? - actually cheered Clinton on.
Or take Kyoto, the emblem of what Europe finds so distasteful about president Bush. What no one seems to remember is that president Clinton had done absolutely nothing to ensure the implementation of the Kyoto Accord in his term of office. Besides, the president is not the person who is required to ratify such a treaty. Under the American constitution, such a treaty has to be ratified by the Senate. And what happened when the U.S. Senate considered the Kyoto treaty? It was voted down 95 - 0, under president Clinton. So how on earth can Bush be held responsible for a treaty his predecessor had ignored and the Senate had overwhelmingly rejected? Bush's fault was not killing Kyoto. It was announcing its already determined demise.
Some have argued that president Bush hasn't spent enough time schmoozing the various foreign leaders or reaching out to the broader global public in order to sell his policy. That's what Bill Clinton did, after all. But Bill Clinton never had to face the kind of tough decisions Bush has been presented with - largely because he kicked many of these issues down the road for his successors to pick up. It's easy to enjoy sweet relations with allies when no tough issues actually emerge.
But again, this schmooze comparison is also overblown. Bush has spent many hours cultivating world leaders. How do you explain, for example, his remarkable relationship with Tony Blair - an ideological and personal opposite? Or the hours and hours Bush spent bringing Vladimir Putin around on NATO expansion and the end of the ABM Treaty? Or the equally impressive relationship with Pakistan's Musharraf - a relationship that last week delivered the biggest victory against al Qaeda since the liberation of Afghanistan? As for diplomacy, few would argue that Madeleine Albright is a more credible figure than Colin Powell. And last December's 15 - 0 U.N. Resolution against Saddam was a huge diplomatic coup for the White House. It is hardly the Americans' fault if the French and Russians simply refuse to enforce the plain meaning of the resolution they previously signed.
The truth is: Bush's diplomatic headaches have much less to do with his own poor diplomatic skills than with the simple fact that he is trying ambitious things. Rather than simply forestall crises, postpone them, avoid them or fob them off onto others, Bush is actually doing the hard thing. He's calling for real democracy in the Middle East. He's aiming to make the long-standing U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq a reality. He actually wants to defeat Islamist terrorism, rather than make excuses for tolerating its cancerous growth. And when this amount of power is fueled by this amount of conviction, of course the world is aroused and upset.
What the world, after all, is afraid of is not the deposing of the monster, Saddam. What the world is afraid of is American hyper-power wielded by a man of very American faith and conviction and honesty. Bush's manner grates. His style - like Reagan's - offends. But, like Reagan, he is not an anomaly in American foreign policy - merely a vivid and determined representative of a deep and idealistic strain within it. And history shows that the world has far more to gain from the deployment of that power than by its withdrawal. If the poor people of Iraq know that lesson, what's stopping the Europeans?
March 10, 2003, Sunday Times.
copyright © 2003, Andrew Sullivan
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In the Details
Addressing Common Arguments Made by the Anti-War Side
by Jon Ward
Many have protested that there is no established link between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam Hussein, in response to President George W. Bush's justification for the impending invasion of Iraq. In doing some reading, I have found there to be ample evidence that a clear link probably does exist. Consider the following.
New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in March of last year about his visit to Northern Iraq, which is controlled by the Kurds, whom Saddam hates in much the same way Hitler hated Jews. Goldberg interviewed prisoners held there who belonged to a terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam. A weapons smuggler named Muhammed Mansour Shahab told Goldberg that he had smuggled guns and chemical weapons from Ansar al-Islam to Osama bin-Laden's al Quaeda fighters, and that Saddam's security agency, the Mukhabarat, has had a relationship with al Quaeda since 1992.
"Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden share the same enemies, the same conspiracy theories... Their ideologies are quite close, even if Saddam is not an Islamist. And since he has been supporting many terror organizations, I would not be surprised if there are close ties on the ground between Iraq and Al Qaeda.... They may be cooperating and even if they are not, these are two trees growing in the same soil," said Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, a German human rights activist and journalist who spent eight months doing humanitarian work in the southern part of the country just after Saddam Hussein crushed the Shi'ite uprising there in 1991.
You may be surprised to learn that the Washington Post wrote the following in a Feb. 5 editorial: "The Iraqi regime poses a threat not just to the United States but to global order...That Iraq has the capacity to threaten vital U.S. interests has been clear at least since 1990...Those who advocate containment through inspections ignore that strategy's costly failure during the 1990s. Inspectors traipsed through Iraq for seven years as Baghdad defied or ignored one Security Council resolution after the next."
Please read on. What the Post says here is verifiable, particularly in a book called "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst.
"The most dangerous chemical and biological weapons were not discovered for four years, and then only with the help of a defector. After that, Iraq stepped up its concealment operation, leaving thousands of tons of chemical and biological material and dozens of missiles missing; as inspector Hans Blix reported [at the end of January], they are still unaccounted for. Meanwhile, the Iraqi people suffered terribly, even as Saddam Hussein built new palaces. There were widespread reports of deaths through malnutrition and lack of medicine, and many Arab extremists, including Osama bin Laden, reaped political capital by blaming the United States. Eventually, the Security Council's will to maintain the containment regime collapsed, and in 1998 Saddam Hussein was able to drive out the inspectors."
The inspectors have only been allowed back in because of a determined effort by our government. Can't we see that Saddam is trying to play the same game he played in the 90's? Up to now, the Iraqi people have been the only ones to pay the price. But Saddam would no doubt love to act the same towards Americans if given the chance.
Mr. von der Osten-Sacken estimates that Saddam has killed more than one million of his own citizens, civilians no less, since 1979. It is also estimated that he has used chemical weaons on nearly 4 million of his own people, according to Christine Gosden, a British medical geneticist who Goldberg called "the only Western scientist who has even begun making a systematic study" of Saddam's attacks on the Kurds after their uprising in 1991. Lebanese intellectual Fouad Ajami has said that for 30 years, Iraq has been conducting a war against its own society.
But it won't stop there. "For Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population. They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations," said Gosden.
Another common protest is that the only people who want the US to invade Iraq are those with oil interests. That argument also falls down in the face of the facts.
Mr. von der Osten-Sacken has said that seventy percent of all Iraqis are in favor of American liberation of their country. Certainly, those who have been or remain imprisoned by Saddam are among those. Read this account of an Iraqi prison in 1991 by Zainab Al-Suwaij—a Shi’ite woman who is now executive director of the American Islamic Congress.
"As I wandered around the jail, some of the liberated prisoners gave us a tour. I saw huge meat grinders that fed into a septic tank and rooms I believe were used for sexual abuse. Instruction manuals on how to use torture devices were posted on the wall. A terrible smell was everywhere. Here before me was the dark secret of Saddam's Iraq."
One other thing: some accuse the economic sanctions placed on Iraq as responsible for the Iraqi people's suffering. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1995, the United Nations implemented the food-for-oil program, which was essentially made to force Saddam to buy $2 billion of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies for his own people. However, in the late 1990s, his people were still starving. "The United Nations repeatedly chastised Iraq for not buying enough of the humanitarian goods it claimed to lack," writes Kenneth Pollack in "The Threatening Storm."
Where were the goods that were intended for the Iraqi people going? "Kuwait caught ships smuggling food and medicine out of Iraq for resale on the black market. Baby milk sold to Iraq under the oil-for-food program turned up in markets throughout the Gulf region," Pollack writes. Saddam bought the goods then resold them to make a profit so he could build palaces and buy weapons while his people starved, then blamed the U.S. And many of us have taken the bait. It's time to wake up.
September 11 changed everything. September 11 raised the stakes. It made the issue of dealing with Iraq one that our president decided could no longer be avoided after 12 years of Saddam Hussein's trickery. The Post called a war on Iraq "an operation essential to American security."
Although I am for peace, I cannot help but agree after trying to see both sides of the issue. Sometimes, as the saying goes, if you want peace, prepare for war.
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A Just War
The Morality of Ousting Saddam
The strongest emotional appeal of the movement to stop a war against Saddam Hussein is the notion that peace should always be given the moral benefit of the doubt over war. War is always "failure," as French president Jacques Chirac has put it. Almost every single religious leader - from the Pope on down - has argued that peace is almost always morally preferable to war; and that this war - whatever its strategic or political justification - is simply unjust. Indeed, many of these authorities have gone right up to the edge of saying that peace, under any circumstances, deserves not only a chance, but an almost infinite number of chances before we resort to force of arms.
But this ignores the fact that some wars obviously are moral. The war against Hitler killed millions - but it was also just. And no sane person, after all, is opposed to peace as such. The question is: Peace at what risk? Peace on whose terms? Peace for how long? Looked at this way, war is not only sometimes a moral option - as theologians have long argued. Sometimes, it's the only moral option we have.
That case holds powerfully today. First off, we are not initiating a war. We are not the aggressor. We are still in a long process of defense. It's hard to remember now but this war is not a new one. It's merely the continuation of one begun in 1990 by Saddam whe he invaded Kuwait. Recall that when that war was won twelve years ago, no peace treaty was signed. Instead, a truce was arranged on clear and unequivocal conditions: that Saddam completely disarm himself of weapons of mass destruction. Since no one - including the U.N. inspectors - believes that such disarmament has happened, the truce no longer holds. The issue is therefore not whether to start a war. It is whether to end one by rewarding the aggressor and simply ignoring his infractions of the truce. Such a policy, in as much as it clearly rewards unprovoked aggression, is immoral and imprudent.
Have we exhausted every single alternative to war? Well, we've spent the last twelve years trying to find peaceful ways to get Saddam to live up to his promises. Waves of inspections; countless resolutions; occasional use of targeted force under the Clinton administration; crippling economic sanctions; and finally a last attempt under U.N. Resolution 1441 to give Saddam a last, last chance to disarm. He was told three months ago by unanimous U.N. agreement that he had to disarm immediately and completely. He still hasn't. I can't think of any recent war that tried so hard for so long to give peace a chance. This isn't so much a "rush to war" as some have bizarrely called it. It's been an endless, painstaking, nail-biting crawl.
But can the war be legitimate without the sanction of the U.N.? Of course it can be. Traditional just war theory leaves the responsibility for grave decisions like these to the relevant authorities, i.e. the parties to the dispute and the countries planning on taking action. We do not live under a world government. We live under a system in which nation states wield authority, in cooperation with one another. A coalition of the willing - a majority of the states in Europe, the U.S., Britain and other countries - easily qualifies as a legitimate source of authority for launching war.
Is there a credible alternative? Well, there is one obvious alternative to war: continuation of economic sanctions on Iraq. But these sanctions have long been abused by Saddam to allow him to finance his weapons programs, while leaving thousands of Iraqis, including children, to starve or die for lack of good medical care. Is it moral to allow this intense suffering to continue indefinitely while we congratulate ourselves for giving "peace" a chance? We have long been told that these sanctions have resulted in the deaths of countless thousands of innocents, including children. Is it more moral to maintain that horror rather than to try and win a quick war to depose Saddam, free the Iraqi people from tyranny and end the sanctions?
War is an awful thing. But it isn't the most awful thing. No one disputes the evil of Saddam's brutal police state. No one doubts he would get and use weapons of mass destruction if he could. No one can guarantee he would not help Islamist terrorists get exactly those weapons to use against the West or his own regional enemies. No one disputes that the Iraqi people would be better off under almost any other regime than the current one - or that vast numbers of them, including almost every Iraqi exile, endorses a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimun of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice.
February 27, 2003, Time.
copyright © 2000, 2003 Andrew Sullivan
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Voice of Iraqis
Why don't antiwar types want to hear them?
By Amir Taheri
February 26, 2003, 10:00 a.m.
Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people about my life?"
asked the Iraqi grandmother.
I spent part of a recent Saturday with the so-called "antiwar" marchers in
London in the company of some Iraqi friends. Our aim had been to persuade
the organizers to let at least one Iraqi voice to be heard. Soon, however,
it became clear that the organizers were as anxious to stifle the voice of
the Iraqis in exile as was Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The Iraqis had come with placards reading "Freedom for Iraq" and "American
rule, a hundred thousand times better than Takriti tyranny!"
But the tough guys who supervised the march would have none of that. Only
official placards, manufactured in thousands and distributed among the
"spontaneous" marchers, were allowed. These read "Bush and Blair,
baby-killers," " Not in my name," "Freedom for Palestine," and "Indict Bush
and Sharon."
Not one placard demanded that Saddam should disarm to avoid war.
The goons also confiscated photographs showing the tragedy of Halabja, the
Kurdish town where Saddam's forces gassed 5,000 people to death in 1988.
We managed to reach some of the stars of the show, including Reverend Jesse
Jackson, the self-styled champion of American civil rights. One of our
group, Salima Kazim, an Iraqi grandmother, managed to attract the reverend's
attention and told him how Saddam Hussein had murdered her three sons
because they had been dissidents in the Baath Party; and how one of her
grandsons had died in the war Saddam had launched against Kuwait in 1990.
"Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people about my
life?" 78-year-old Salima demanded.
The reverend was not pleased.
"Today is not about Saddam Hussein," he snapped. "Today is about Bush and
Blair and the massacre they plan in Iraq." Salima had to beat a retreat,
with all of us following, as the reverend's gorillas closed in to protect
his holiness.
We next spotted former film star Glenda Jackson, apparently manning a stand
where "antiwar" characters could sign up to become "human shields" to
protect Saddam's military installations against American air attacks.
"These people are mad," said Awad Nasser, one of Iraq's most famous
modernist poets. "They are actually signing up to sacrifice their lives to
protect a tyrant's death machine."
The former film star, now a Labor party member of parliament, had no time
for "side issues" such as the 1.2 million Iraqis, Iranians, and Kuwaitis who
have died as a result of Saddam's various wars.
We thought we might have a better chance with Charles Kennedy, a
boyish-looking, red-headed Scot who leads the misnamed Liberal Democrat
party. But he, too, had no time for "complex issues" that could not be
raised at a mass rally.
"The point of what we are doing here is to tell the American and British
governments that we are against war," he pontificated. "There will be ample
time for other issues."
But was it not amazing that there could be a rally about Iraq without any
mention of what Saddam and his regime have done over almost three decades?
Just a little hint, perhaps, that Saddam was still murdering people in his
Qasr al-Nayhayah (Palace of the End) prison, and that as the Westerners
marched, Iraqis continued to die?
Not a chance.
We then ran into Tony Benn, a leftist septuagenarian who has recycled
himself as a television reporter to interview Saddam in Baghdad.
But we knew there was no point in talking to him. The previous night he had
appeared on TV to tell the Brits that his friend Saddam was standing for
"the little people" against "hegemonistic America."
"Are these people ignorant, or are they blinded by hatred of the United
States?" Nasser the poet demanded.
The Iraqis would had much to tell the "antiwar" marchers, had they had a
chance to speak. Fadel Sultani, president of the National Association of
Iraqi authors, would have told the marchers that their action would
encourage Saddam to intensify his repression.
"I had a few questions for the marchers," Sultani said. "Did they not
realize that oppression, torture and massacre of innocent civilians are also
forms of war? Are the antiwar marchers only against a war that would
liberate Iraq, or do they also oppose the war Saddam has been waging against
our people for a generation?"
Sultani could have told the peaceniks how Saddam's henchmen killed dissident
poets and writers by pushing page after page of forbidden books down their
throats until they choked.
Hashem al-Iqabi, one of Iraq's leading writers and intellectuals, had hoped
the marchers would mention the fact that Saddam had driven almost four
million Iraqis out of their homes and razed more than 6,000 villages to the
ground.
"The death and destruction caused by Saddam in our land is the worst since
Nebuchadnezzar," he said. "These prosperous, peaceful, and fat Europeans are
marching in support of evil incarnate." He said that, watching the march, he
felt Nazism was "alive and well and flexing its muscles in Hyde Park."
Abdel-Majid Khoi, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Khoi, Iraq's foremost
religious leader for almost 40 years, spoke of the "deep moral pain" he
feels when hearing the so-called " antiwar" discourse.
"The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive and tortured by a gang
of thugs," Khoi said. "The proper moral position is to fly to help that man
liberate himself and bring the torturers to book. But what we witness in the
West is the opposite: support for the torturers and total contempt for the
victim."
Khoi said he would say ahlan wasahlan (welcome) to anyone who would liberate
Iraq.
"When you are being tortured to death you are not fussy about who will save
you," he said.
Ismail Qaderi, a former Baathist official but now a dissident, wanted to
tell the marchers how Saddam systematically destroyed even his own party,
starting by murdering all but one of its 16 original leaders.
"Those who see Saddam as a symbol of socialism, progress, and secularism in
the Arab world must be mad," he said.
Khalid Kishtaini, Iraq's most famous satirical writer, added his complaint.
"Don't these marchers know that the only march possible in Iraq under Saddam
Hussein is from the prison to the firing-squad?" he asked. "The Western
marchers behave as if the US wanted to invade Switzerland, not Iraq under
Saddam Hussein."
With all doors shutting in our faces we decided to drop out of the show and
watch the political zoology of the march from the sidelines.
Who were these people who felt such hatred of their democratic governments
and such intense self-loathing?
There were the usual suspects: the remnants of the Left, from Stalinists and
Trotskyites to caviar socialists. There were the pro-abortionists, the
anti-GM food crowd, the anti-capital-punishment militants, the black-rights
gurus, the anti-Semites, the "burn Israel" lobby, the
"Bush-didn't-win-Florida" zealots, the unilateral disarmers, the
anti-Hollywood "cultural exception" merchants, and the guilt-ridden
postmodernist "everything is equal to everything else" philosophers.
But the bulk of the crowd consisted of fellow travelers, those innocent
citizens who, prompted by idealism or boredom, are always prepared to play
the role of "useful idiots," as Lenin used to call them.
They ignored the fact that the peoples of Iraq are unanimous in their
prayers for the war of liberation to come as quickly as possible.
The number of marchers did not impress Salima, the grandmother.
"What is wrong does not become right because many people say it," she
asserted, bidding us farewell while the marchers shouted "Not in my name!"
Let us hope that when Iraq is liberated, as it soon will be, the world will
remember that it was not done in the name of Rev. Jackson, Charles Kennedy,
Glenda Jackson, Tony Benn, and their companions in a march of shame.
- Amir Taheri is author of The Cauldron: The Middle East behind the
headlines. Taheri is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-taheri022603.asp
----
an outlet for writers
March 10, 2003
Volume 2, Issue 1
Second go Round
This is an updated version of the edition of Quasi that I emailed out on the first of the month. I've included at the very beginning another outstanding column written today by Andrew Sullivan; it is one of the clearest, most comprehensive pieces to address the current crisis in Iraq. If you don't read anything else, read Sullivan's first column below.
For those of you interested in reading Sullivan regularly, he writes every day on his blog, which is found at www.andrewsullivan.com. Another excellent blog is written by freelance journalist Russell Working, who writes daily on matters surrounding the Iraq showdown. Go to www.fal.net/workingdrafts/index.html, and read the Q&A section first; it fully explains who Russell Working is and where he's coming from.
One other thing I added to this online edition of Quasi is something I wrote in response to an editorial published in the Diamondback, the student-run newspaper at the University of Maryland. That is placed second, just above Sullivan's excellent second piece, "A Just War."
This issue is the first of the publication's second year. I almost didn't put this one out, but then was overwhelmed with how much was being written about our government's efforts to oust Saddam. In the fourth piece included, a National Review article gives us a glimpse of just how low some anti-war protesters will go to ensure that their message is the only one heard.
I encourage you to inform yourself. Happy reading.
-- Jon (jonwardeleven@comcast.net)
---------
Spot The Difference
Bush and Clinton on Iraq
Here's a simple pop-quiz. Who said the following: "What if [Saddam] fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? ... Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal."
Full marks if you guessed Bill Clinton. It was 1998. But I wonder how many of you did. The political amnesia of so many in Europe with regard to the Iraq crisis is one of the most striking aspects of the whole current trans-Atlantic divide. To read the papers, to watch the "anti-war" protestors, to listen to the BBC, you'd easily imagine that out of the blue a belligerent and brand new American administration had just torn up the old rule book and started a new foreign policy utterly unconnected to the old one.
The truth, however, is that the current Bush policy toward Iraq is indistinguishable from Bill Clinton's. After the U.N. inspectors found that they could no longer do their job effectively in 1998, the U.S. shifted its policy in Iraq toward regime change in Baghdad - exactly the policy now being pursued. The difference between Bush and Clinton, of course, lies in the sense of urgency and importance applied to the same policy. September 11 made the White House acutely aware of the ruthlessness of the new Islamist terror-masters: suddenly, the American homeland was also in play. The possibility of a chemical or biological 9/11 made Washington realize that its continued Iraq policy needed actual enforcement. It made Washington realize that regime change needed to mean what it said.
Are there deeper differences between Bush and Clinton on this? There is, of course, the matter of style. Clinton was a master of the European dialogue. He meant very few things he said but he said them very well. He was a great schmoozer. When he compared the Serbian genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, it sounded earnest but no-one, least of all the massacred Bosnians, actually believed he meant it. And he didn't. If he had meant it, he wouldn't have allowed a quarter of a million to be murdered in Europe, while he delegated American foreign policy to the morally feckless and militarily useless European Union. Ditto with Iraq and al Qaeda. A few missiles here and there; some sanctions that starved millions of Iraqis but kept Saddam in power; and a big rhetorical game kept the pretense of seriousness up. But there was no actual attempt to match words with actions. In this, the French were completely - preternaturally - comfortable. No wonder Clinton was popular.
Bush's style couldn't be more different. He's blunt, straightforward, folksy, direct. Although his formal speeches have been as eloquent as any president's in modern times, his informal discourse is of the kind to make a European wince. And his early distancing from many of Clinton's policies, his assertion of American sovereignty in critical matters, undoubtedly ruffled some Euro-lapels. In retrospect, he could have been more politic.
But the point is: the foreign policy of Bush is not so drastically different from Clinton. On Iraq, in particular, there isn't a smidgen of principled difference between this administration and the last one. In fact, Bush came into office far less interventionist than Clinton and far more modest than Gore. His campaign platform budgeted less for defense than Al Gore's did. And his instincts were more firmly multilateral. That, of course, changed a year and a half ago. 9/11 made him realize that American withdrawal from the world was no longer an option. But even then, the notion of Bush's unilateralism is greatly exaggerated. To be sure, last spring, the Bush White House argued that taking out Saddam's weapons was non-negotiable, implying that it would be done with or without U.N. support (a position, by the way, that Bush had announced in the 2000 primaries). But by last September, as the world knows, Bush decided to pursue the policy of disarmament through the United Nations, despite the risk of falling into the inspections trap that has proved so intractable. And now, even after a unanimous resolution supporting serious consequences if Saddam refused to disarm immediately and completely, he's still going back to the U.N. for further permission to enforce the resolution by military means. His reward for this multilateralism? Contempt and derision.
Now compare that policy to Clinton's similar dilemma with how to deal with the Balkan crisis throughout the 1990s, culminating in the Kosovo intervention. Did Clinton go through the United Nations to justify his eventual NATO bombardment of Serbia? No he didn't. He didn't go through the U.N. because the Russians pledged to veto such a military engagement. So where were the peace protestors back then? In terms of international law, those American bombs in Belgrade - even hitting the Chinese embassy - were far less defensible than any that will rain down on Baghdad. Serbia had never attacked the U.S. No U.N. mandate provided cover. But Clinton ordered bombing anyway. And the same people who now viciously attack Bush as the president of a rogue state - Susan Sontag anyone? - actually cheered Clinton on.
Or take Kyoto, the emblem of what Europe finds so distasteful about president Bush. What no one seems to remember is that president Clinton had done absolutely nothing to ensure the implementation of the Kyoto Accord in his term of office. Besides, the president is not the person who is required to ratify such a treaty. Under the American constitution, such a treaty has to be ratified by the Senate. And what happened when the U.S. Senate considered the Kyoto treaty? It was voted down 95 - 0, under president Clinton. So how on earth can Bush be held responsible for a treaty his predecessor had ignored and the Senate had overwhelmingly rejected? Bush's fault was not killing Kyoto. It was announcing its already determined demise.
Some have argued that president Bush hasn't spent enough time schmoozing the various foreign leaders or reaching out to the broader global public in order to sell his policy. That's what Bill Clinton did, after all. But Bill Clinton never had to face the kind of tough decisions Bush has been presented with - largely because he kicked many of these issues down the road for his successors to pick up. It's easy to enjoy sweet relations with allies when no tough issues actually emerge.
But again, this schmooze comparison is also overblown. Bush has spent many hours cultivating world leaders. How do you explain, for example, his remarkable relationship with Tony Blair - an ideological and personal opposite? Or the hours and hours Bush spent bringing Vladimir Putin around on NATO expansion and the end of the ABM Treaty? Or the equally impressive relationship with Pakistan's Musharraf - a relationship that last week delivered the biggest victory against al Qaeda since the liberation of Afghanistan? As for diplomacy, few would argue that Madeleine Albright is a more credible figure than Colin Powell. And last December's 15 - 0 U.N. Resolution against Saddam was a huge diplomatic coup for the White House. It is hardly the Americans' fault if the French and Russians simply refuse to enforce the plain meaning of the resolution they previously signed.
The truth is: Bush's diplomatic headaches have much less to do with his own poor diplomatic skills than with the simple fact that he is trying ambitious things. Rather than simply forestall crises, postpone them, avoid them or fob them off onto others, Bush is actually doing the hard thing. He's calling for real democracy in the Middle East. He's aiming to make the long-standing U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq a reality. He actually wants to defeat Islamist terrorism, rather than make excuses for tolerating its cancerous growth. And when this amount of power is fueled by this amount of conviction, of course the world is aroused and upset.
What the world, after all, is afraid of is not the deposing of the monster, Saddam. What the world is afraid of is American hyper-power wielded by a man of very American faith and conviction and honesty. Bush's manner grates. His style - like Reagan's - offends. But, like Reagan, he is not an anomaly in American foreign policy - merely a vivid and determined representative of a deep and idealistic strain within it. And history shows that the world has far more to gain from the deployment of that power than by its withdrawal. If the poor people of Iraq know that lesson, what's stopping the Europeans?
March 10, 2003, Sunday Times.
copyright © 2003, Andrew Sullivan
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In the Details
Addressing Common Arguments Made by the Anti-War Side
by Jon Ward
Many have protested that there is no established link between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam Hussein, in response to President George W. Bush's justification for the impending invasion of Iraq. In doing some reading, I have found there to be ample evidence that a clear link probably does exist. Consider the following.
New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in March of last year about his visit to Northern Iraq, which is controlled by the Kurds, whom Saddam hates in much the same way Hitler hated Jews. Goldberg interviewed prisoners held there who belonged to a terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam. A weapons smuggler named Muhammed Mansour Shahab told Goldberg that he had smuggled guns and chemical weapons from Ansar al-Islam to Osama bin-Laden's al Quaeda fighters, and that Saddam's security agency, the Mukhabarat, has had a relationship with al Quaeda since 1992.
"Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden share the same enemies, the same conspiracy theories... Their ideologies are quite close, even if Saddam is not an Islamist. And since he has been supporting many terror organizations, I would not be surprised if there are close ties on the ground between Iraq and Al Qaeda.... They may be cooperating and even if they are not, these are two trees growing in the same soil," said Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, a German human rights activist and journalist who spent eight months doing humanitarian work in the southern part of the country just after Saddam Hussein crushed the Shi'ite uprising there in 1991.
You may be surprised to learn that the Washington Post wrote the following in a Feb. 5 editorial: "The Iraqi regime poses a threat not just to the United States but to global order...That Iraq has the capacity to threaten vital U.S. interests has been clear at least since 1990...Those who advocate containment through inspections ignore that strategy's costly failure during the 1990s. Inspectors traipsed through Iraq for seven years as Baghdad defied or ignored one Security Council resolution after the next."
Please read on. What the Post says here is verifiable, particularly in a book called "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst.
"The most dangerous chemical and biological weapons were not discovered for four years, and then only with the help of a defector. After that, Iraq stepped up its concealment operation, leaving thousands of tons of chemical and biological material and dozens of missiles missing; as inspector Hans Blix reported [at the end of January], they are still unaccounted for. Meanwhile, the Iraqi people suffered terribly, even as Saddam Hussein built new palaces. There were widespread reports of deaths through malnutrition and lack of medicine, and many Arab extremists, including Osama bin Laden, reaped political capital by blaming the United States. Eventually, the Security Council's will to maintain the containment regime collapsed, and in 1998 Saddam Hussein was able to drive out the inspectors."
The inspectors have only been allowed back in because of a determined effort by our government. Can't we see that Saddam is trying to play the same game he played in the 90's? Up to now, the Iraqi people have been the only ones to pay the price. But Saddam would no doubt love to act the same towards Americans if given the chance.
Mr. von der Osten-Sacken estimates that Saddam has killed more than one million of his own citizens, civilians no less, since 1979. It is also estimated that he has used chemical weaons on nearly 4 million of his own people, according to Christine Gosden, a British medical geneticist who Goldberg called "the only Western scientist who has even begun making a systematic study" of Saddam's attacks on the Kurds after their uprising in 1991. Lebanese intellectual Fouad Ajami has said that for 30 years, Iraq has been conducting a war against its own society.
But it won't stop there. "For Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population. They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations," said Gosden.
Another common protest is that the only people who want the US to invade Iraq are those with oil interests. That argument also falls down in the face of the facts.
Mr. von der Osten-Sacken has said that seventy percent of all Iraqis are in favor of American liberation of their country. Certainly, those who have been or remain imprisoned by Saddam are among those. Read this account of an Iraqi prison in 1991 by Zainab Al-Suwaij—a Shi’ite woman who is now executive director of the American Islamic Congress.
"As I wandered around the jail, some of the liberated prisoners gave us a tour. I saw huge meat grinders that fed into a septic tank and rooms I believe were used for sexual abuse. Instruction manuals on how to use torture devices were posted on the wall. A terrible smell was everywhere. Here before me was the dark secret of Saddam's Iraq."
One other thing: some accuse the economic sanctions placed on Iraq as responsible for the Iraqi people's suffering. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1995, the United Nations implemented the food-for-oil program, which was essentially made to force Saddam to buy $2 billion of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies for his own people. However, in the late 1990s, his people were still starving. "The United Nations repeatedly chastised Iraq for not buying enough of the humanitarian goods it claimed to lack," writes Kenneth Pollack in "The Threatening Storm."
Where were the goods that were intended for the Iraqi people going? "Kuwait caught ships smuggling food and medicine out of Iraq for resale on the black market. Baby milk sold to Iraq under the oil-for-food program turned up in markets throughout the Gulf region," Pollack writes. Saddam bought the goods then resold them to make a profit so he could build palaces and buy weapons while his people starved, then blamed the U.S. And many of us have taken the bait. It's time to wake up.
September 11 changed everything. September 11 raised the stakes. It made the issue of dealing with Iraq one that our president decided could no longer be avoided after 12 years of Saddam Hussein's trickery. The Post called a war on Iraq "an operation essential to American security."
Although I am for peace, I cannot help but agree after trying to see both sides of the issue. Sometimes, as the saying goes, if you want peace, prepare for war.
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A Just War
The Morality of Ousting Saddam
The strongest emotional appeal of the movement to stop a war against Saddam Hussein is the notion that peace should always be given the moral benefit of the doubt over war. War is always "failure," as French president Jacques Chirac has put it. Almost every single religious leader - from the Pope on down - has argued that peace is almost always morally preferable to war; and that this war - whatever its strategic or political justification - is simply unjust. Indeed, many of these authorities have gone right up to the edge of saying that peace, under any circumstances, deserves not only a chance, but an almost infinite number of chances before we resort to force of arms.
But this ignores the fact that some wars obviously are moral. The war against Hitler killed millions - but it was also just. And no sane person, after all, is opposed to peace as such. The question is: Peace at what risk? Peace on whose terms? Peace for how long? Looked at this way, war is not only sometimes a moral option - as theologians have long argued. Sometimes, it's the only moral option we have.
That case holds powerfully today. First off, we are not initiating a war. We are not the aggressor. We are still in a long process of defense. It's hard to remember now but this war is not a new one. It's merely the continuation of one begun in 1990 by Saddam whe he invaded Kuwait. Recall that when that war was won twelve years ago, no peace treaty was signed. Instead, a truce was arranged on clear and unequivocal conditions: that Saddam completely disarm himself of weapons of mass destruction. Since no one - including the U.N. inspectors - believes that such disarmament has happened, the truce no longer holds. The issue is therefore not whether to start a war. It is whether to end one by rewarding the aggressor and simply ignoring his infractions of the truce. Such a policy, in as much as it clearly rewards unprovoked aggression, is immoral and imprudent.
Have we exhausted every single alternative to war? Well, we've spent the last twelve years trying to find peaceful ways to get Saddam to live up to his promises. Waves of inspections; countless resolutions; occasional use of targeted force under the Clinton administration; crippling economic sanctions; and finally a last attempt under U.N. Resolution 1441 to give Saddam a last, last chance to disarm. He was told three months ago by unanimous U.N. agreement that he had to disarm immediately and completely. He still hasn't. I can't think of any recent war that tried so hard for so long to give peace a chance. This isn't so much a "rush to war" as some have bizarrely called it. It's been an endless, painstaking, nail-biting crawl.
But can the war be legitimate without the sanction of the U.N.? Of course it can be. Traditional just war theory leaves the responsibility for grave decisions like these to the relevant authorities, i.e. the parties to the dispute and the countries planning on taking action. We do not live under a world government. We live under a system in which nation states wield authority, in cooperation with one another. A coalition of the willing - a majority of the states in Europe, the U.S., Britain and other countries - easily qualifies as a legitimate source of authority for launching war.
Is there a credible alternative? Well, there is one obvious alternative to war: continuation of economic sanctions on Iraq. But these sanctions have long been abused by Saddam to allow him to finance his weapons programs, while leaving thousands of Iraqis, including children, to starve or die for lack of good medical care. Is it moral to allow this intense suffering to continue indefinitely while we congratulate ourselves for giving "peace" a chance? We have long been told that these sanctions have resulted in the deaths of countless thousands of innocents, including children. Is it more moral to maintain that horror rather than to try and win a quick war to depose Saddam, free the Iraqi people from tyranny and end the sanctions?
War is an awful thing. But it isn't the most awful thing. No one disputes the evil of Saddam's brutal police state. No one doubts he would get and use weapons of mass destruction if he could. No one can guarantee he would not help Islamist terrorists get exactly those weapons to use against the West or his own regional enemies. No one disputes that the Iraqi people would be better off under almost any other regime than the current one - or that vast numbers of them, including almost every Iraqi exile, endorses a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimun of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice.
February 27, 2003, Time.
copyright © 2000, 2003 Andrew Sullivan
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Voice of Iraqis
Why don't antiwar types want to hear them?
By Amir Taheri
February 26, 2003, 10:00 a.m.
Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people about my life?"
asked the Iraqi grandmother.
I spent part of a recent Saturday with the so-called "antiwar" marchers in
London in the company of some Iraqi friends. Our aim had been to persuade
the organizers to let at least one Iraqi voice to be heard. Soon, however,
it became clear that the organizers were as anxious to stifle the voice of
the Iraqis in exile as was Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The Iraqis had come with placards reading "Freedom for Iraq" and "American
rule, a hundred thousand times better than Takriti tyranny!"
But the tough guys who supervised the march would have none of that. Only
official placards, manufactured in thousands and distributed among the
"spontaneous" marchers, were allowed. These read "Bush and Blair,
baby-killers," " Not in my name," "Freedom for Palestine," and "Indict Bush
and Sharon."
Not one placard demanded that Saddam should disarm to avoid war.
The goons also confiscated photographs showing the tragedy of Halabja, the
Kurdish town where Saddam's forces gassed 5,000 people to death in 1988.
We managed to reach some of the stars of the show, including Reverend Jesse
Jackson, the self-styled champion of American civil rights. One of our
group, Salima Kazim, an Iraqi grandmother, managed to attract the reverend's
attention and told him how Saddam Hussein had murdered her three sons
because they had been dissidents in the Baath Party; and how one of her
grandsons had died in the war Saddam had launched against Kuwait in 1990.
"Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people about my
life?" 78-year-old Salima demanded.
The reverend was not pleased.
"Today is not about Saddam Hussein," he snapped. "Today is about Bush and
Blair and the massacre they plan in Iraq." Salima had to beat a retreat,
with all of us following, as the reverend's gorillas closed in to protect
his holiness.
We next spotted former film star Glenda Jackson, apparently manning a stand
where "antiwar" characters could sign up to become "human shields" to
protect Saddam's military installations against American air attacks.
"These people are mad," said Awad Nasser, one of Iraq's most famous
modernist poets. "They are actually signing up to sacrifice their lives to
protect a tyrant's death machine."
The former film star, now a Labor party member of parliament, had no time
for "side issues" such as the 1.2 million Iraqis, Iranians, and Kuwaitis who
have died as a result of Saddam's various wars.
We thought we might have a better chance with Charles Kennedy, a
boyish-looking, red-headed Scot who leads the misnamed Liberal Democrat
party. But he, too, had no time for "complex issues" that could not be
raised at a mass rally.
"The point of what we are doing here is to tell the American and British
governments that we are against war," he pontificated. "There will be ample
time for other issues."
But was it not amazing that there could be a rally about Iraq without any
mention of what Saddam and his regime have done over almost three decades?
Just a little hint, perhaps, that Saddam was still murdering people in his
Qasr al-Nayhayah (Palace of the End) prison, and that as the Westerners
marched, Iraqis continued to die?
Not a chance.
We then ran into Tony Benn, a leftist septuagenarian who has recycled
himself as a television reporter to interview Saddam in Baghdad.
But we knew there was no point in talking to him. The previous night he had
appeared on TV to tell the Brits that his friend Saddam was standing for
"the little people" against "hegemonistic America."
"Are these people ignorant, or are they blinded by hatred of the United
States?" Nasser the poet demanded.
The Iraqis would had much to tell the "antiwar" marchers, had they had a
chance to speak. Fadel Sultani, president of the National Association of
Iraqi authors, would have told the marchers that their action would
encourage Saddam to intensify his repression.
"I had a few questions for the marchers," Sultani said. "Did they not
realize that oppression, torture and massacre of innocent civilians are also
forms of war? Are the antiwar marchers only against a war that would
liberate Iraq, or do they also oppose the war Saddam has been waging against
our people for a generation?"
Sultani could have told the peaceniks how Saddam's henchmen killed dissident
poets and writers by pushing page after page of forbidden books down their
throats until they choked.
Hashem al-Iqabi, one of Iraq's leading writers and intellectuals, had hoped
the marchers would mention the fact that Saddam had driven almost four
million Iraqis out of their homes and razed more than 6,000 villages to the
ground.
"The death and destruction caused by Saddam in our land is the worst since
Nebuchadnezzar," he said. "These prosperous, peaceful, and fat Europeans are
marching in support of evil incarnate." He said that, watching the march, he
felt Nazism was "alive and well and flexing its muscles in Hyde Park."
Abdel-Majid Khoi, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Khoi, Iraq's foremost
religious leader for almost 40 years, spoke of the "deep moral pain" he
feels when hearing the so-called " antiwar" discourse.
"The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive and tortured by a gang
of thugs," Khoi said. "The proper moral position is to fly to help that man
liberate himself and bring the torturers to book. But what we witness in the
West is the opposite: support for the torturers and total contempt for the
victim."
Khoi said he would say ahlan wasahlan (welcome) to anyone who would liberate
Iraq.
"When you are being tortured to death you are not fussy about who will save
you," he said.
Ismail Qaderi, a former Baathist official but now a dissident, wanted to
tell the marchers how Saddam systematically destroyed even his own party,
starting by murdering all but one of its 16 original leaders.
"Those who see Saddam as a symbol of socialism, progress, and secularism in
the Arab world must be mad," he said.
Khalid Kishtaini, Iraq's most famous satirical writer, added his complaint.
"Don't these marchers know that the only march possible in Iraq under Saddam
Hussein is from the prison to the firing-squad?" he asked. "The Western
marchers behave as if the US wanted to invade Switzerland, not Iraq under
Saddam Hussein."
With all doors shutting in our faces we decided to drop out of the show and
watch the political zoology of the march from the sidelines.
Who were these people who felt such hatred of their democratic governments
and such intense self-loathing?
There were the usual suspects: the remnants of the Left, from Stalinists and
Trotskyites to caviar socialists. There were the pro-abortionists, the
anti-GM food crowd, the anti-capital-punishment militants, the black-rights
gurus, the anti-Semites, the "burn Israel" lobby, the
"Bush-didn't-win-Florida" zealots, the unilateral disarmers, the
anti-Hollywood "cultural exception" merchants, and the guilt-ridden
postmodernist "everything is equal to everything else" philosophers.
But the bulk of the crowd consisted of fellow travelers, those innocent
citizens who, prompted by idealism or boredom, are always prepared to play
the role of "useful idiots," as Lenin used to call them.
They ignored the fact that the peoples of Iraq are unanimous in their
prayers for the war of liberation to come as quickly as possible.
The number of marchers did not impress Salima, the grandmother.
"What is wrong does not become right because many people say it," she
asserted, bidding us farewell while the marchers shouted "Not in my name!"
Let us hope that when Iraq is liberated, as it soon will be, the world will
remember that it was not done in the name of Rev. Jackson, Charles Kennedy,
Glenda Jackson, Tony Benn, and their companions in a march of shame.
- Amir Taheri is author of The Cauldron: The Middle East behind the
headlines. Taheri is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-taheri022603.asp
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posted by Jon at
11:02 PM
