Taking positions on the Gulf War

...Pacifists and Leninists have prepared answers...

...socialists provide theories about the deeper roots of conflict...

...To oppose the war both tough- and tendermindedly —not on the ground that the United States is the font of all evil, not because Israel explains Saddam Hussein, not because Saddam is the prince of noble anti-imperialism—to oppose the war in this difficult way is, on the other hand, to bear witness to another possibility: that somehow, against the odds, smart collective security and diplomacy can stop aggression with less carnage than smart bombs...

...The air war has also refocused the problem of Hussein's capacity for chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare...

...There was—there remains— another way to stop Saddam Hussein: the combination of sanctions and genuinely multilateral enforcement...

...The size, the scope, the likely consequences of the war, and the fact that there is a war now, all follow from the rapidity of the shift in one man's mind from the first to the second of these thoughts...

...But by responding at all, and hearing themselves say the things they said, they may SPRING • 1991 • 155 Comments and Opinions have built up a useful memory against the rapid orchestration of future wars...

...Dennis Wrong The principle of collective security justifies the effort to repel by force Iraq's invasion of Kuwait...

...Before January 16 the existence of a credible alternative to war made the choice of war unjustified...

...From the beginning, Bush made it clear that he would accept nothing short of Iraq's complete withdrawal from Kuwait...

...But we should be skeptical of this kind of certainty about the future...

...It did not spring from mere neglect, however, but from a conscious political choice...

...This was a criminal blunder...

...European leftists supported the sanctions but were unwilling to use force to implement them— unwilling to fight or even to threaten to fight for Haile Selassie's empire...

...But a few simple facts about the war must not be forgotten...

...The evil effects of this war are hard to predict and may be hard to shake off...

...Not because I was sure it would work, but because I hoped it might avoid the horrors of war...

...The president's first thought was: a war is bad at election time (the election being 1990...

...The reality of war since January 16 has yet to alter that conclusion...

...And, since mid-January, many of the resources sustaining his occupation have been blown to bits in the massive allied air campaign...

...His second thought came to be: a protracted standoff in foreign policy —as when sanctions have damaged but not defeated an enemy—is worse at election time than a finished war (the election being 1992...

...that he ought to have been driven from Kuwait by sanctions and international pressure...

...Yet the president determined in November that the fighting should start early, with whatever loss to the spirit of internationalism...

...How much time must be spent seeking political solutions...

...The same is true of all wars that are not wars for survival...

...When we have the time to think, let us remember that evil is being done to us as well as them, and to some of us more than to others...

...This is scarcely good old World War II all over again...

...Some other tyrant, usually...

...that, to gain any chance of success, those means required a longer trial than three months— for us, there is little to add to the warnings of Zbignew Brzezinski, Daniel Moynihan, and so many others...

...With his brutality, his massive arsenal, and his regional ambitions, Hussein has long been a frightening figure...

...The possibility that Hussein might pull out of Kuwait, retaining only the islands of Bubiyan and Warba, and thereby undermining the rationale for a U.S...

...But neither tradition is very strong at coping with a twentieth-century phenomenon: the ruthless, perhaps mad, dictator—on a large scale, a Hitler and, on a small scale, a Hussein—who establishes a totalitarian regime at home and attempts expansionist aggression abroad...

...Dissent does not take collective positions...

...It began in July 1990, when the U.S...

...Is war preferable somehow...

...After the war, the allies would still have to work out a tough disarmament for Iraq—and eventually for the Middle East...

...True, Bush's talk about a "New World Order" is hard to take seriously...

...The deep truth is that the United States has blundered into an Arab civil war between radical nationalism (latched to a fascist tyrant) and bloated emirates—a monstrous war likely now to go on, one way or another, for the rest of our lives, to the great economic and political and, I want to say, spiritual detriment of all...

...With strong predispositions against military actions, we nevertheless have to judge each situation as it comes along, relying on specific analyses and fallible intelligence...

...the victims don't have to be, and won't usually be, embodiments of sweetness and SPRING • 1991 • 153 Comments and Opinions light...

...The United States has also been guilty of a few questionable military interventions, but none of them involved lengthy occupation of the country invaded, let alone its annexation...

...I favored the embargo and wished it had been kept going, without military measures, for several months longer...

...In some quarters, especially Israel, there is we-told-you-so pleasure that the just demands of Palestinians can once more be deferred...

...Despite Bush's claims about a "New World Order," this episode strikes me as drearily familiar...

...military invasion, was referred 156 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions to by Bush and his people as the "nightmare scenario...

...This war is the terrible simplifier all around...

...All the pre–January 16 arguments about the effectiveness of this strategy to force him out of Kuwait still hold...

...And the Iraqi refugee on the news the other night who said, "I hate Saddam Hussein, but I hate George Bush more" —what are we to make of him...

...But unless we want to comfort ourselves with abstract "positions" of rectitude, I see no alternative...

...Some people called for military action against Iraq not so much because of Kuwait but because of Hussein himself...

...One assumes either that tens of thousands of bombing sorties have destroyed many of his production facilities and stashes or that the materiel is so well protected as to be largely impervious to further raids...

...Short of full-fledged world government, however, the principle cannot be applied with the consistency of domestic laws within the jurisdictions of established nation-states...

...Of all the phrases that have come out of this conflict, the one that haunts me most was dreamed up by the Bush administration months before the fighting began...

...Saddam is clearly not a threat to world peace comparable to Hitler or Stalin, but his potential as a regional overlord is quite sufficient to justify action against him...

...In allowing them to do it, President Bush overrode the counsel of his Secretary of Defense and the Director of the CIA, both of whom warned that indifference to the threat of invasion would lead irreparably to war...

...The end of the cold war now makes it possible to act on the principle of collective security without risking nuclear conflagration and with reference to an unambiguous case of one nation's engulfing another...

...There are thousands like him, and this war will create thousands more...

...If the fighting should end while Iraq's army and its war-making power is still intact, then it will be necessary to renew the embargo, at least on military technology...

...The civilization that began there could end there...

...But now that the war is a reality, I want to see a defeat of Saddam Hussein sufficient to destroy his nuclear, biological, and chemical capacities...

...Michael Walser In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and the League of Nations immediately voted to impose sanctions against Italy...

...and yes, there is often a point to socialist indictments of imperial rivalry...

...it is why they leave a sick feeling from the start...

...Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was inexcusable—but if Hussein had been allowed to keep those two islands, would that really have been such a terrible thing...

...The claim that Kuwait is not a "real" country but a product of arbitrary mapmaking by imperial powers overlooks that this has been true of most territories subject to acts of aggression and therefore instances of casus belli in the present century...

...So far, that has not proved necessary...

...But that is a political, not a military, goal—as are all the other nice things that one might wish for in the Middle East: democratization, redistribution of oil revenues, an overall peace settlement...

...For someone on the left this is an uncomfortable stance, but there it is...

...Shouldn't making him leave Kuwait be easier now...

...And once it was begun, I can't see that there was anything to hope for but the decisive defeat of the Iraqi forces...

...Nonetheless, we think readers will be interested in knowing the opinions of our editors...

...Todd Gitlin his war is a catastrophe, all the more so for being avoidable...

...At present, for those of us who believe that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped from invading Saudi Arabia...

...The legitimate aim of the war is the end of the aggression and the containment of the aggressor...

...During a cease-fire, economic sanctions and a military blockade would continue to sap Hussein's strength...

...Liberals stress the need for rationality and conciliation...

...each person below speaks for him- or herself...

...I can't claim to be sure that a combination of negotiations and economic pressure would have caused Hussein to give up his stranglehold on Kuwait, but I think it's shocking that Bush never tried to find out...

...EDS...

...Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return...

...A variety of viewpoints appears below, roughly along the lines to be found within our editorial board...

...Is there a way to reconcile these demands...

...David Bromwich We are good at ambivalence...

...Consider the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig in the 1930s and West Berlin, South Korea, and South Vietnam during the cold war...

...What can...

...George Bush, who has had so much trouble explaining anything at all about this adventure, has never even tried to explain why we were so friendly with Saddam Hussein before he invaded Kuwait...

...The single encouraging sign has been that the Congress and Senate did, at last, acknowledge their constitutional duty to participate in the national decision whether to go to war...

...Saddam Hussein, safe in his fiihrer-bunker, assures the people of his devastated country that "the mother of all battles" is proceeding gloriously...

...We'll support the crummiest tyrant, until his interests conflict with ours...

...As for the struggle for a decent society in America, it is a helpless euphemism to say that the conditions of the struggle will not be improved by anything about the war with Iraq...

...The sanctions, unenforced, failed...

...Those who think there is indicate that the pluralism of judgments that we favor in general may not have prevailed among ourselves...

...That this will not in itself solve all the problems in the Middle East—of course...

...But again, was war the most intelligent response...

...How long should one threaten to attack without attacking...

...That there should be such differences neither surprises nor dismays us—a pluralism of opinion is part of our tradition...

...They understood that it is only the aggressor who chooses the victims of aggression...

...We spent forty-five years preparing for a moment in Soviet-American relations that may now be passing while we are occupied elsewhere...

...Before the war began, my response was one of ambivalence (by no means, I'd say, the worst or least cogent response...

...Stop Buying Dissent...

...Joanne Bark= With George Bush ready to touch off a ground war in the Gulf, what could be more futile than "calling" for a substitute policy that has no chance of being adopted...

...But it is a hard question whether and when this opposition should reach to actual warfare...

...Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly, and Secretary of State James Baker, in the various settings of an interview with Saddam Hussein, a prepared statement before Congress, and an ad lib statement for the American press, all gave signals that could be plausibly read as saying to Iraq: Do what you like with Kuwait...

...Brian Morton Every war enriches the language...

...The rationality of the think tank and the thrill of the video game generate fantasies of neat war and neater settlement...

...Still, there was a lot of negotiating between August and January, and the strategy of forcing Saddam Hussein to withdraw with a threat and a deadline and a vague offer of peace and safety was not unreasonable: most observers, applying their own version of rational decision theory, thought that it would work...

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...Given limited ends, the war should be fought with limited means, protecting civilian lives as far as possible and rejecting any policy that targets Iraq's nonmilitary industrial plant...

...Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded to resist armed aggression by creating, if necessary, military coalitions of concerned nations to deter or reverse it...

...The United Nations authorized the American-led military resistance to North Korea's invasion of South Korea in 1950...

...When China developed nuclear weapons, some conservatives called for a preemptive strike on the same grounds: if we don't fight now, we'll have to fight later...

...A successful strategy of sanctions could (and must) include that same disarmament...

...So here are the slogans I'd write on my banner today: Stop the war...

...A more sober response would have involved sanctions, multilateral military containment, an embargo on military technology, and diplomacy—serious diplomacy, to ease the regional tensions that enable demagogues like Saddam to thrive...

...Now the unintended and half-intended consequences are spilling out like Kuwait's oil, with more horrors, no doubt, in store on every side...

...The possibilities for escalation are numerous and vivid, and it is here that leftists should draw their own line...

...154 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions Irving Howe There is no ready-made socialist position on war...

...On the prowar side one hears euphemisms for denying the terrible sufferings...

...Two apprentice diplomats and a master pollster with no international pretensions brought us to this catastrophe...

...Many brutalities, many brutalizations...

...q Murray Hausknecht SPRING • 1991 • 157...

...To such questions neither we nor our friends in the antiwar movement provide sufficient answers...

...Nonetheless, aggression ought to be resisted...

...In the event, that strategy made the war certain...

...On the antiwar side one hears flaming anti-Semitism, harsh indifference to Israeli casualties and fright, refusal to recognize that something is at stake besides the lone superpower's desire to show off its smart bombs...

...we, for better or worse, do not...

...But to list all such criticisms of American policy, even to multiply them tenfold, is not yet to answer the immediate question: What should be done with or about Saddam Hussein...

...Certainly, the democratic movement in China will never thank us for the price we paid to get the Chinese communists to back the coalition...

...True, Saddam Hussein was partly a creature of the Western powers and the Soviet Union, both of which contributed to his military prowess...

...We should in any case seek some sort of postwar arms control regime...

...It condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but, as with earlier Soviet aggressions, it did not support military action in circumstances that risked war between the superpowers...

...General Norman Schwarzkopf, asked about the civilians the United States has killed, replies that even surgical strikes involve some "collateral damage...

...That is what the United Nations and, for that matter, the armed forces of the United States are for...

...This is a legal and just war, whatever reasonable doubts there may be about its wisdom...

...Damn the facile analogies, from El Alamein to Vietnam...

...Stop Iraq's occupation of Kuwait...

...Better to argue about what the troops should do and shouldn't do, and then about what the United States and the United Nations should do once the troops are done...

...Stop Saddam Hussein...

...These questions would have been foreclosed had the Kuwaitis, against all the odds, held off the invading army for a few weeks and had we simply joined their resistance...

...But neither of these quite provides an immediate response to the tyrant's accumulating power and his imperial ventures...

...In the latter case, even the most devastating ground war in Kuwait would not eliminate the inventories stowed in Iraq...

...Liberals and socialists have certain virtues...

...Use the enclosed card...

...This is a war to which American leftists should give critical support...

...But he knew, as everyone knows, that if you leave your adversary no room for compromise, you leave him little choice but to fight...

...then we'll drop him, or destroy him, and support someone else...

...Something has been learned since then: most people on the left today favored a militarily enforced embargo against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, and many were prepared to threaten war—in defense, this time, of the al-Sabah family's feudal emirate...

...The speed of the conquest meant that the questions had to be answered (and the war begun) in slow motion and in cold blood...

...Possibly Gorbachev would not have moved on Lithuania and Latvia had our attention been engaged there...

...What shall be done about the frightening prospect that the thug who rules Iraq—he who has already used poison gas against the Kurds and sent missiles to kill civilians in Tel Aviv—might soon have nuclear weapons...

...But in the conduct of foreign policy, we have gone a long way now to a different system: a plebiscitary despotism, in which the executive is invested with extraordinary powers and contact with a docile public is mediated on television and in newspapers by reports of actions already taken...

...Yes, it would be good if liberal reason could prevail...

...Hussein is a mass murderer, a war criminal, a vicious anti-Semite...

...And of course, for many of us, his threats against Israel were a special concern, a special fear...

...Not unqualified support (which no war deserves), for we need to guard against any escalation in the aims of the war and in the means with which it is fought...

...Regimes like Mussolini's and Saddam Hussein's, whenever they move beyond their borders, ought to be forcefully (not merely rhetorically) opposed...

...People who opposed the policy of sanctions tended to argue that if we didn't fight Iraq now, we'd have to fight a stronger Iraq later...

...They did it too late...

...Bring the troops home" is a bad slogan, for it suggests an outcome that will be called, and will be, a victory for Saddam Hussein...

...A working political democracy does not work like this...

...But resignation—which means an end to public debate—disables democracy...

...Until August 2, he was our ally...

...The Middle East is tinder...