Our history professor gets a kick out of repeatedly bringing up Iraq (and bludgeoning his opponents with salvoes of ad hominem attacks, which I'm somewhat less fond of) and trying to twist the class around to agree with him. (He's quite strongly against the war.) One thing he's fond of doing is getting the opposition to repeat arguments from the previous discussion, then sandbagging them with an intricate, pre-planned response. In this case, the topic was "Why attack Iraq, instead of North Korea?" I'd said before that I thought it made sense to fight the demons we knew we could vanquish, and hope that the other situations improved as a result of it, or simply in the meantime. Well, he hadn't responded with anything at the time, but he got me to repeat my argument, and promptly used a World War II analogy: we attacked the Germans before we attacked the Japanese because they were judged to be the greater threat. I gave that some thought, but I don't think that's a sound analogy, primarily because Hitler was an immediate threat, while we have North Korea contained. If we could have frozen Hitler in stasis for a few years while we hammered the Japanese, I don't think anyone would have objected to that. And in a way, our policy of ignoring the DPRK is actually dealing with the problem, because their state seems to be in the process of a slow implosion. They have a crisis, so they're making lots of loud noises about their nuclear program, desperately hoping to get someone else (mostly us) to think there's an urgent international crisis so they can wring concessions from them, but really, the problem is on their side, and time is on our side. Waiting them out certainly seems to be the best choice out of a lot of pretty awful choices, anyway.
He also took great pleasure in setting up an argument that goes as follows: if we must remove Saddam because he this absolutely evil monster, as Bush continually reminds us, then won't he, as an absolutely evil monster, have no compunctions about nerve gassing our troops or his own populace or Israel or whoever else if he thinks his end is near? Therefore, it's wiser not to provoke him if he is an evil monster, and there is no reason to attack him if he is not.
Ahem. Well, I think that this risk is going to be there regardless of when we decide to deal with Saddam. And make no mistake, we are going to have to deal with this guy sooner or later, given his ambitions to set up a pan-Arab empire and demonstrated willingness to invade his neighbors and desire to obtain (if he has not already) the nuclear deterrent that will allow him to do so. That is what, in my opinion, gives our task such urgency: if Saddam did obtain the nuclear deterrent, he becomes enormously harder to deal with. (More like the DPRK, in fact.) So the choices are not, war and people die and there's lots of suffering versus peace and all is rosy and wonderful with the world, but rather, war now or probably a lot worse war later. And won't the argument that we shouldn't attempt to depose him by force because he might use WMD on us be just as valid then as it is now? In my opinion, this logic could very easily lead to a policy of appeasement (and in my opinion, the parallels between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler are more than ominous -- not the least of which is each man's desire to destroy the Jews).
There is also the worthwhile point that even if we backed down, Saddam might very well learn that he is about to die through some other means (cancer, for instance), and go berserk and start nerve gassing people at that point. If we fight him now, at least we get to fight him on our terms, not his. And if we fear for the lives of our soldiers so much that we are willing to let the Iraqi populace suffer and die indefinitely, that we are willing to abandon Israel and his Arab neighbors to his naked aggression, there is the very real risk of having to deal with an empire created by Saddam, run by Saddam's equally monstrous offspring, and armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. (USSR v. 2.0?) As I said, we will have to eventually deal with Saddam, and it seems to me that it's far better to do so now while he's weak and lacks the nuclear deterrent.
thus ranteth Pericles v. 2.0 at 10:39 PM | Permalink |
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