CONTEMPLATING WAR IN THE LAND OF PEACE
…This is a continuation of the same national system of denial that we
began to construct during Gulf War I. Ask a knowledgeable American
how many people died in that conflict and you will probably be told
that the death toll was somewhere around 150. (I seem to recall 138
American fatalities.)
You will probably not hear about the roughly 400,000 Iraqis we killed
during that bully outing. You will almost certainly not hear about
the retreating column of almost 50,000 Iraqi soldiers that were
incinerated on the highway from Kuwait on the orders of war
criminal-turned-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey. While I think that Gulf
War I may have been justified and even necessary, the fact that we
were able to conduct it with so little empathic memory does not bode
well for Gulf War II. We should still be in mourning for all the
unwilling conscripts who died at the point of our surgically sharp
sword rather than wielding it again with so much less moral
justification.
But this is just one aspect of how we have blunted our national
conscience with media. Even more dangerous is our new willingness to
believe that America’s agenda is more important than the preservation
of international law. The United Nations Charter explicitly prohibits
one nation from attacking another except in self-defense or with the
sanction of the UN Security Council. If our attack of Iraq is
self-defense, then I would be equally innocent if I returned to
Wyoming and killed everyone in Pinedale who is well-armed, doesn’t
like me, and beats his wife. (This would require quite a killing
spree…)
Even if this war is so sophisticated that very few “collateral
damages” are inflicted, even if the Ba’ath regime folds immediately
and our troops enter Baghdad festooned in the garlands of a grateful
and liberated populace, even in the extremely unlikely event that we
find a cache of Iraqi nuclear weapons, all packed up for delivery to
Al -Qa’ida , it will still be illegal and immoral. Victory will not
change that.
It is also profoundly impractical, when one considers the larger consequences.
Even if victory is swift and painless , we will have wounded, perhaps
mortally, the peace-waging capacity of the United Nations.
We will have sewn deep discord within the European Union and badly
damaged relations with two of our most important allies, France and
Germany.
We will have destroyed remaining popular support for the governments
of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, our three most important allies
in the Middle East.
We will have established – and not only for ourselves – the
legitimacy of preemptive attack.
We will have radicalized half a billion young Muslims, transforming a
monster into a martyr in their eyes.
We will have installed ourselves as the rulers of an energy colony
that will not be easy to govern, given the bitter – and, to us,
inscrutable – divisions that exist between its Shiites, its Sunni,
and its Kurds.
We will have brought ourselves to the brink of active hostilities
with Turkey, formerly a strong ally.
We will have bankrupted the teetering American economy.
We will have inserted long-term instability in world financial and
energy markets.
We will have devalued the currency of American moral authority to the
vanishing point. We will have turned America, long the hope of the
world, into the most feared and hated of nations. We will have traded
our national capacity to inspire for a mere capacity to intimidate.
And for what? To avenge 9/11 by punishing a regime that had no proven
role in it? Out of humane concern for the Iraqi people, whom we have
been, by our own policies, starving and impoverishing for the last
decade? In order to destroy possibly mythical “weapons of mass
destruction” in Iraq, even while we abide their proven existence in
such potentially irrational countries as Pakistan, Israel, India,
France, and, hardly least, the United States? The Administration
attacked before it ever provided a justification that would satisfy
any but the most TV-enchanted Christian soldier.

Continue reading →