THE COMPLEX MR. CARROLL :

Questions on Bush's war on Iraq (James Carroll, 7/23/2002, Boston Globe)

We Americans find ourselves in the extraordinary position of witnessing our government's slow but certain movement toward a major war with Iraq.

Such open maneuvering, with clear statements of intention from the Bush administration, the leaking of war plans from the Pentagon, and the acquiescence of Congress, could not have happened when US power was balanced, and therefore checked, by the Soviet Union, nor when that power was mitigated by Washington's regard for world opinion. Now the only conceivable check on the sole superpower is the will of its own people, manifest through politics, which is why we must urgently take up the subject. [...]

The obvious difference between Iraq and the United States is that this nation is a democracy. That means that we US citizens are responsible for the behavior of George W. Bush in ways that the people of Iraq are not responsible for Saddam Hussein. There is good reason to believe that Bush, in his highly personal, irrational, and thoroughly Manichaean campaign against Hussein, has set the very world on a course toward disaster. No one can change that course but us.

What's most interesting about this column, which is otherwise just a rather stale defense of a brutal regime by someone who's used to defending them, is that Mr. Carroll seems utterly incapable of grasping his own message. He is absolutely right that, in a democracy, when we go to war it will be a war of the American people against Saddam Hussein and his government. We will all bear responsibility for it.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2002 9:14 AM