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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Thursday, February 6, 2003
12:10 - The definition of "is"

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So yesterday, many of us were assuming that Powell's presentation would be exactly the "smoking gun", the proof of Iraqi noncompliance and threat that so many people have been demanding, the absence of which they were using as the basis for their opposition to war. We figured that anybody who wasn't convinced by now would never be convinced by anything short of "Saddam personally driving a truck full of Sarin right through their living rooms", as Mike put it.

Well, this morning I was listening to Forum on NPR, and caller after caller expressed levels of disapproval of the war-- each person had a different reaction to the presentation, but almost none of them (aside from one Holocaust survivor, and everybody knows we can just ignore what they have to say, right?) had anything good to say about the prospects for war. Nobody appeared to have been "swayed" by the presentation; they just had different justifications now.

Some people said the presentation was rock-solid-- but war was not the answer. So what if Iraq is doing all these terrible things? If the alternative is us going in there and slaughtering millions of Iraqi civilians, destroying their already tattered infrastructure, and sending hundreds of thousands of our own young people to be killed and maimed and gassed-- it's still unacceptable! I find myself wondering whether people have World War I and the Civil War so indelibly printed in their brains that it's become the archetype of all "war" that anybody can conceive. Never mind Gulf War I and its tremendously low civilian casualty rate and absurdly low American troop loss; never mind Afghanistan, which was even more clean and one-sided, largely thanks to those big bad super-weapons we've been designing all these years which specifically avoid harming civilian populations and instead go directly for the pinpointed positions of known command figures. No, war is apparently all about killing the maximum possible number of civilians-- case closed.

Nobody's guaranteeing that the war will go smoothly. But Iraqi Kurds are asking for the US to invade, because it's better than what they're having to deal with now-- and it has a real chance of making things way better once it's over.

Callers kept saying that "there must be a peaceful solution," just as the UN delegates whose responses they so admired kept repeating. But so far the only such solution anybody has proposed is "more inspections", and if those don't work (and Powell's thesis is that they haven't), what then? Is our example of peacefulness supposed to shame them into changing their minds and disarming?

Another argument was: And how are we supposed to pay for this, anyway? My Social Security goes down the toilet to pay for oil from Iraq? Tacking the "oil and empire" argument onto this otherwise interesting thought betrays the questioner's unwillingness to listen objectively to the idea that there might be other reasons why we're going to war. Yes, the financial question is an important one (though not without answers). But the point of this presentation was indirectly to show that oil and empire are not what this is about. The War on Terrorism did not end with Afghanistan, and if we make the mistake of thinking that it did, then we plunge the Middle East back into the same self-destructive cycle of despotic oppression and dangerous anti-Western rhetoric that led to 9/11 in the first place. Does anyone think the opinions that many policymakers in the Middle East hold of the US could possibly get any worse if we attack Saddam? What's more likely to turn it around-- backing off and leaving everything the way it is, bubbling over with hatred and poverty and oppression? Or sweeping in, eliminating Saddam, and turning Iraq into a liberated nation free to join the world community and lift itself above the hell to which it's currently condemned?

I'd like to see some discussion of where the money for this war will come from, and how it will be paid for down the road. (One side effect of a takeover of Iraq will be that we will have cheaper oil, but it's just that-- a side effect. It'll help, though.) It's an important question, but I hope it doesn't boil down to Bush taking the podium to say, "Well, my fellow Americans, I'd really love to protect you all from global terrorism-- but it's just not in the budget this year. Sorry 'bout that."

Another caller said the presentation appeared damning, but calling down the line that someone else had used: "Who are you going to believe-- Saddam Hussein or the Bush administration?" --the caller linked it to the baby incubator hoax, which the earlier Bush administration used in order to drum up Congressional support for Gulf War I. Who was this caller prepared to believe? Why, Saddam, of course. After all, look what our government did.

Now, the incubator thing is a pretty serious scandal, and I'm not going to apologize for it, even if a case can be made for judicious bits of propaganda serving the greater good. But a variation on that argument is that even accepting the incubator case as a lie, once we actually went into Iraq, we did in fact find plenty of evidence for stuff that was just as bad. The incubator thing was a fiction, but one composed of truths-- it was genuine intelligence repackaged and reimagined for easy consumption. We know that stuff like that went on and continues to go in within Iraq. Presenting this story as truth galvanized Congress for the war, and after the war was over, the verbatim story wasn't vindicated, but the war was. And so the argument that we can't trust the Bush administration to tell us the truth more than we can trust Saddam to do so becomes less compelling. One lies for the right reasons, the other lies for the wrong reasons. Is the incubator lie worse than Saddam's lies that such things did not happen in Iraq? Not so easy to develop an opinion out of that, is it?

Finally, a number of callers said that they found the presentation totally unconvincing. They said it was all just propaganda and circumstantial evidence and speculation; they said "It's just a bunch of grainy photographs of trucks and buildings-- Iraq's allowed to have trucks and buildings, aren't they?-- and recordings of people talking in Arabic. How do we know what they're saying?" Most people expressing this reaction said they'd been anti-war before the presentation-- they weren't exactly coming at it from an unbiased position. But there were Arabic-speakers at the UNSC meeting; they can verify that the voices on the tapes were saying what they were saying. The satellite and U2 photos require only an acceptance of the dates and times of recording to be damning. And so either the whole presentation is a fabrication, or it shows what it purports to show; and I don't think I can take a tenable position in an argument against someone who holds the former view. It's just not a debate I'd be interested in having. Such a fabrication would, if uncovered, be such a monstrous scandal as to bring down the entire US government-- just as would be a war promoted solely by Bush's supposed crusade for oil. Either these callers will have to acknowledge that the evidence is genuine, or they're effectively accusing the entire US government of high treason. I'm not sure they recognize the implications of the scale of those claims.

Amanda mails me this analysis by Paul Ryan, who points out that the evidence Powell presented is still open to interpretation. And that's fine, but it still implies an assumption that this is the best evidence we have to justify war, and we're doing it anyway. I really don't think that's the case. There's plenty more evidence we could have presented, as Powell said, but to reveal too much would reveal too much, as it were. If the US doesn't have classified information that's way more damning to use to justify this war, then they're negligent and treasonous, and somehow I don't think the government has reached that point. (If the Bush administration were that dishonest, wouldn't they have started building that Caspian oil pipeline through Afghanistan by now, and maybe claimed that the Columbia was brought down by sabotage linked to Iraq?)

Iraq does not have the ability to attack America right now, says Ryan and several callers on Forum. No, but they've demonstrated ability to hide weapons and willingness to develop them in secret, as well as bad faith in cooperating with inspectors. If the ricin link isn't indicative of plenty more dangerous things that Saddam could and would like to indirectly do to us, then what is-- short of an actual attack that can be traced conclusively back to Iraq? It's a state that is acting in direct opposition to UN resolutions, with demonstrated willingness and motive to cause harm to the US, and demonstrated links to groups that are willing to attack us directly. If we do get attacked by Iraqi chemical weapons delivered by al Qaeda agents, won't hindsight be 20/20?

It might have been my imagination, but I think I saw more NO WAR bumper stickers on cars on the way to work today than I've seen in a while. The presentation seems to have won over many, many people; but the remaining anti-war forces have been galvanized into still firmer resolve. As is always the case when the moderates in an argument are won away from their side, what's left are the really hard-core believers. That means the argument over the war is likely to get more strident now, not less.

For the US not to go to war now would be a betrayal of everything the Bush administration has been saying and doing, and of everybody who has subscribed to its stance on the post-9/11 world. We've been talking about "rope-a-dope", about Bush snookering France and Germany into relegating themselves to irrelevancy and cornering the UN and NATO into writing their own death warrants.

But the US is kinda trapped too.

Staying the course is the way out; but that course is a sobering and bloody one. There will be some very non-trivial consequences. War is the right answer, I still say, or at least the least wrong answer. But it will cause more wounds in this country. That's the real legacy of 9/11.


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© Brian Tiemann