Drums of War, Calls for Peace: How Should the Left Respond to a U.S. War Against Iraq?
Cohen, Mitchell
IS BAGHDAD simply another miserable regime? Just one of those unpleasant tyrannies that, sadly, speckles our globe, but ought not to compel overbearing concern? Much depends on how one answers...
...Disarmed-Saddam is an oxymoron...
...It is not even a matter of Iraq's dogged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction— although this is clearly Saddam's fixation, and he has demonstrated his readiness to use them against citizens and neighbors (and would be pleased to do likewise against Americans...
...Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is pathological and distinct from other rotten regimes today, including those rooted in a similar ideology (Syria, for example...
...In the meantime, I will support Iraqi democrats, even if they are few in number and their prospects difficult...
...The more important question is this: why was Baghdad willing to forgo a hundred and fifty billion dollars in oil earnings rather than disarm...
...Why did mortality rates fall in the semi-autonomous Kurdish areas, where the UN—rather than Baghdad—administers proceeds of "oil for food...
...Sanctions permitted Iraq to sell oil to buy medicine and food, but not military goods...
...Ask Iranians...
...Some people will, undoubtedly, protest: how can you support the Bush administration...
...Its mission ended in 1998—not because it was completed but because it was frustrated so well by Saddam's apparatus...
...Back in the late 1990s, while Saddam was freeing himself from UNSCOM (and while, elsewhere, al-Qaeda was planning attacks), our patriotic Republicans thought the nation's focus ought to be on Monica Lewinsky...
...I am antifascist before I am anti-imperialist...
...The only real questions are when, how much force, and what aftermath...
...The problem lies in what it could not achieve because of Saddam's determination to undermine inspections...
...But I urge people on the left to judge the Iraqi danger independently both of distrust of Bush and of third-worldist prejudices...
...I am antifascist before I am antiwar...
...And I am antifascist before I am anti-Bush...
...But why, then, did Saddam rebuff UN appeals to buy baby formula in 1998-1999...
...Wars always are, which is why every sensible means ought always to be used to prevent them...
...Why was he exporting food...
...Why deal with Saddam now...
...If Saddam has not demonstrated unwillingness to accept international rules, then unwillingness to accept international rules is indemonstrable...
...Sooner or later...
...The reason is not the sanctions regime (which has, in fact, been quite porous...
...I'm glad it did so because it ended the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge...
...At various points in these comments I also draw material from the Economist, December 8, 2001, Chen Zak's Iran's Nuclear Policy and the IAEA (Washington Institute for Near East Policy Military Research Paper #3, 2002) and articles in the New York Times, September 8 and 16, 2002...
...Iraqi suffering ought not to be exploited by "activists" with other agendas (such as Israel/ Palestine, which has nothing to do with Saddam's tyranny and must be addressed on its own, unhappy grounds...
...I do believe that there is a moral debt to be paid to Iraqis, but not because of sanctions...
...Why was he importing massive quantities of scotch for his hierarchy and building an amusement park for the Ba'ath elite...
...Inspectors were readmitted only because of an immediate American threat, not because of a Security Council resolution—even if some Western governments, intellectuals, and activists won't admit it...
...And there was insurance: each important level of the program had a duplicate...
...Current intelligence reports of Baghdad's accelerated efforts to produce nonconventional weapons surprise no one who has paid adequate attention to and understood Saddam's pathology and priorities...
...He is, of course, right that war ought never to originate from nowhere...
...Do not, then, wait until you have suffered some treatment and then rue it, but be on your guard before you suffer...
...I worry a great deal about the Bush administration— about the fact that it has not thought out adequately what happens after a war, about its cynical exploitation of the Iraq crisis to pursue its dreadful domestic agenda, about its unconstructive unilateralist instincts, displayed in matters like Kyoto and the International Criminal Court...
...So I CONCLUDE, reluctantly, that the options are not "war or peace," but "sooner or later...
...Sensible" is the key word, however, and it is perilous and not sensible to invent choices that are comfortable to you, and then to choose between them...
...Ask Iraqi Shiites...
...The UNalas!— has demonstrated its inability to enforce them adequately...
...His pursuit of nuclear capabilities began over two decades ago, although plentiful oil gives Iraq no need of nuclear energy...
...Around a hundred and sixty bombs and two dozen Scud missiles mounted with anthrax could not be found by UNSCOM, according to its final report...
...The answer, I think, is no...
...No, it is not "just" these things...
...The problem is Saddam's exploitation of it...
...After its spring 1990 inspection of Iraq, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Baghdad's claim to be fulfilling its duties as a party to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons...
...Exemplary" cooperation, said the supervisor of the Agency's safeguards division...
...The past inspection record is mixed...
...Baghdad's budget priorities after the vast carnage of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), which Saddam initiated, placed Iraq's high technology military industry over civilian reconstruction...
...It is not just a matter of this regime's fascistlike character (call it fascism-plus), although its ruling Ba'ath Party fused PanArabism to the worst ideas of early twentiethDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 7 SYMPOSIUM century Europe...
...UN inspectors, who are arriving in Baghdad as I write, will, I hope, impair his efforts at concealment, but their success is likely to be temporary and partial...
...For instance, Vietnam invaded Cambodia without right, for its own purposes, in violation of international law, and installed a new regime...
...It is due because the United States encouraged Iraqis, especially the Kurds and Shiites, to rebel at the end of the Gulf War, and then stood back while Saddam slaughtered their intifada...
...True, people don't always pay attention...
...Why has he spent two billion dollars on presidential palaces since the end of the Gulf War and offered another one billion dollars in aid to the Palestinian intifada...
...Ask Kuwaitis...
...He is currently a visiting professor at Stanford's Center for Integrative Research in the Sciences and Humanities...
...Because his menace, especially nuclear, will only swell...
...For Saddam, inspectors are a problem to be overcome, and he has proven staying power...
...They ought not to be a "doctrine...
...Saddam manufactured mobile germ laboratories and the like...
...So, I'm afraid that "later" just means rescheduling to his advantage, and the likelihood of immeasurably more suffering among Iraqis, their neighbors, and any outside forces moving against him at another date...
...In some extreme cases "right" doesn't matter...
...But that is a banality...
...Ask Iraqi communists...
...So UNSCOM verified that thirty-nine tons of VX, the deadly nerve agent, were destroyed, but it also feared SYMPOSIUM that Baghdad had sequestered chemical materials sufficient to produce another two hundred tons of it...
...I am not optimistic about democracy in Iraq, but this debt can be paid at least in part by support for a Saddamfree Iraq, and by making it clear that whatever the immediate post-war arrangements, postSaddam Iraq belongs to Iraqis, not to the United States...
...A year later, after the Gulf War, it was revealed that Baghdad had initiated and concealed an ambitious nuclear weapons program— between ten and fifteen billion dollars of investment in some thirty sites, in a workforce of twenty thousand, and, significantly, in the production of highly enriched uranium...
...Sooner" will be costly, dicey, scary...
...So although I think that arguments against preemptive war 8 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 are formidable, and although I share many of their assumptions, I don't think that they are always persuasive...
...So I will not support an antiwar movement, even if it includes many good people...
...MITCHELL COHEN iS co-editor of Dissent and professor of political theory at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York...
...It is true that Iraqis have suffered...
...But they are appropriate in some cases, and Saddam's priorities demonstrate why he is one...
...Doesn't anyone notice that the UNICEF report was written in *I cull these points from Michael Rubin's devastating report, "Sanctions on Iraq," Middle East Review of International Affairs (online), December 2001...
...Other voices protest: isn't this Iraq business just a ploy by Bush...
...Unless there is a coup, force will eventually be needed to defang Saddam's regime...
...Much depends on how one answers this question...
...for it is rash to allow dangers to come upon you and then to repent of it, when you might have anticipated them...
...Virtually every major accord Saddam has reached with domestic or foreign foes—usually under pressures produced by his recklessness—lasts only until he recovers sufficiently to pursue his purposes...
...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 9 SYMPOSIUM collaboration with Saddam's Ministry of Health...
...Later" will allow Baghdad to shore up, to expand, and to conceal further its lethal capacities...
...It is not just a question of Saddam's totalitarian aspirations at home and aggressive ambitions abroad, although Iraq's citizens and neighbors know firsthand that these aspirations and ambitions are beyond question...
...Kantianism has pure hands, but it has no hands," warned Charles Peguy, the French essayist, a century ago...
...Yet for some time now a loud, scurrilous public campaign has claimed on the basis of a UNICEF report that sanctions helped to kill some one million Iraqis...
...Ask Iraqi Kurds...
...Saddam's principal concern since UN sanctions began has been his arms and not his citizens...
...He acceded to them in the first place only because of military defeat...
...In recent months, as the crisis intensified, some voices protested: by what right does the United States press this issue...
...It is their combination with the fact that this regime never keeps agreements...
...It is not just Baghdad's brutality, although it is difficult to imagine a more vicious, vengeful regime...
...War should not start from a bolt from the blue, but be the consequence of demonstrated Iraqi unwillingness to accept international rules," wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, last summer...
...The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), established in 1991 to deprive Baghdad of its biological, chemical, and nuclear arms and longer range ballistic missiles, achieved a good deal...
...Recall the UN inspections...
...I 0 n DISSENT / Winter 2003...
...There can be no doubt that Saddam will do so...
...The situation was captured long ago by words attributed to Cicero: "How can you believe that a man who has lived so licentiously up to the present time will not proceed to every extreme of insolence, if he shall also secure the authority given by arms...
...IAM WARY of words like "anticipation" and "preemption" because they can be abused politically...
...I hope, for the sake of honest public debate, that those good people keep this movement focused on Iraq...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
