UP TO 15 per cent of Iraqi conscripts holding Saddam Hussein’s northern front line have already deserted, according to US special forces in the region.Elite US troops based in the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq are regularly probing Iraqi lines, to draw up target lists for airstrikes.
They are looking for pockets of ‘hard core’ pro-Saddam troops who can be attacked first to break the back of resistance.
It is hoped the attacks will turn the trickle of desertions into a torrent, allowing Kurdish resistance fighters to drive southward to seize the Kirkuk and Mosul oil fields.
Liaison teams have been building up links with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters from the KDP and PUK resistance groups. As in Afghanistan, these teams have been operating largely in plain clothes to avoid attracting the attention of western journalists based in the Kurdish safe haven.
Up to five thousand US, British and Australian special forces troops are now deployed around Iraq’s borders and are already playing a key role in General Tommy Franks’ war plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
But their main role will come in the first few hours of the attack. Oil facilities at the top of the Arabian Gulf are to be the target of lightning US and British special forces raids to thwart the Iraqis opening their taps and releasing millions of barrels of oil in a campaign of ‘environmental terrorism’.
With one short stab on Monday, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's United Nations ambassador ... inflicted a wound that may take far longer to heal...."One country in particular has underlined its intention to veto any ultimatum 'no matter what the circumstances'. That country rejected our compromise before even the Iraqi government itself, and has put forward suggestions that would row back on the unanimous agreement of the council in 1441."...
French officials were stung. "So it is our fault? This is just untrue," one said. "They did not get the majority in the council. That is just a matter of fact."
While Paris was unlikely to renege on its humanitarian responsibilities to Iraq, the official said Sir Jeremy's words could have implications for future attempts by the allies to return to the UN. "In three days we'll need each other. This makes things more difficult."
Amazingly, some people think that France's diplomacy is more sophisticated than ours.
UPDATE--DOGPILE ON THE LAPIN (from OJ):
This is from the President's address tonight:
Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power. For the last four-and-a-half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that Council's long-standing demands. Yet, some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it. Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace, and a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world. The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.
For the past 20 years, the regime in Khartoum has bombed, starved, and enslaved black Southern Sudanese with impunity in an effort to subject them to Islamic rule. As a result, over two million black non-Muslims have perished. A further five million have been driven off their land.Sudanese slaves -- mainly women and children -- are routinely beaten, raped, genitally mutilated, forced to convert to Islam and racially abused.... Credible estimates of the number of Sudan's slaves range from tens of thousands to over 200,000....
France provided Khartoum with military intelligence for the prosecution of the jihad, while French and German helicopters have been used for ethnic cleansing in southern Sudan's oil fields. Driving black, non-Muslims out of their homes creates greater security for the investments of oil firms like Total Fina (France/Belgium) and the German engineering giant Mannesmann....
France and Germany ... persuaded the UN Commission on Human Rights to censor any use of the word "slavery" from official documents on Sudan and replace it with the euphemism "abduction" -- a lesser offense.
The Cold War ended in the defeat of the Soviet Union, but the conflict between Western and anti-Western values continues. It appears that France can be counted upon to champion tyranny, murder, and slavery, in opposition to U.S.-championed values such as freedom, nonviolence, and cooperation.
I understand that for advice on how to prosecute this conflict, President Bush has turned to Dave Barry.
MORE (via Porphyrogenitus):
EU economic outlook 'grim without reform' (Financial Times, 3/17/2003)
European business leaders will on Monday warn that the economic outlook will continue to be "unremittingly grim" unless EU leaders finally live up to their rhetoric on reform.
Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor and protect your country by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Our forces will give Iraqi military units clear instructions on actions they can take to avoid being attacked and destroyed. I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.
And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."
Robin Cook is a brilliant parliamentary debater, but comes across dreadfully on television. He believes in an "ethical dimension" for foreign policy, but cheated repeatedly on his wife. His soft-left views are in tune with many Labour MPs, but he has few real friends on the back benches.For the former leader of the Commons, the personal always seems to get in the way of the political. Last night, amid a fevered atmosphere at Westminster, many MPs were wondering what was going on in Mr Cook's brain. Was he plotting to lead a rebellion solely against the war on Iraq, or was it a wider campaign against New Labour itself?
His supporters claim that, in the short term at least, his clear intelligence and passion could make him one of the most formidable opponents of a Blair government. Some more excitable colleagues even suggest that if the war on Iraq went disastrously wrong, he would be ideally placed to defeat Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership.
His critics wondered if his resignation was a desperate attempt to restore the reputation of a man who had thrown his dignity away while in office.
Brian Naylor, NPR, is reporting that in his speech tonight Mr. Bush will give Saddam and company 48 hours to get out of Iraq.
A generation ago, Paul Ehrlich warned in "The Population Bomb" that with demands on resources soaring, overpopulation would kill our planet. As demands on water and air soared, many thought he was right. Now it turns out that population growth rates are plummeting--for good and tragic reasons. The implications are profound.According to a United Nations report issued recently, most advanced countries could, in effect, slowly turn into old-age homes. For example, by 2050, the median age in Japan and Italy will be over 50. Fertility rates in nearly all well-off countries have already fallen below 2.1 babies per woman, the rate at which a population remains stable.
In the developing world, fertility rates average three children, down from six a half-century ago, and the U.N. projects that the rate will dip below the
replacement level in most poor countries later this century. Slower growth rates are both the cause and consequence of a higher standard of living, and of the emancipation of women.There are also alarming reasons for the drop in the population growth rate--notably the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. It is one of the factors the United Nations cited in revising its 2050 world population projections, from 9.3 billion people down to 8.9 billion (we're at 6.3 billion today). The U.N. estimates that there will be a half-billion fewer people in the 53 nations most afflicted by AIDS than there would have been. [...]
Aging populations will pose an economic challenge for most wealthy nations as smaller working-age populations will have to pay for the health and pension benefits of a growing number of longer-living retirees.
Even a cursory understanding of these demographic trends makes two things clear. Helping poor countries improve their economies is not a matter of charity but of intelligent foreign policy. And no matter how much progress is made, there will be large population shifts into better-off nations. The immigrants will need the jobs and the richer countries will need the workers. So increasing the orderly, legal migration of labor from poorer to richer countries in the next few decades is a global imperative. Those who oppose this trend will be embracing long-term economic suicide.
Certainly the developed world will require massive immigration if it is not to collapse, but combine that outflow with already falling birthrates in the underdeveloped world and you've a recipe for permanent poverty there. Is Africa to be just a mammoth cemetery/safari park?
Meanwhile, mightn't we expect that a story like this would at least mention abortion? "Fertility rates" has such a polite sound to it, but the reality is that there are entire nations and even several American counties that have more abortions than live births every year. We're not just having fewer children, we're killing off the babies who would help solve this crisis. We are, in the Timesmen's own phrase "embracing long-term economic suicide", but it's a murder/suicide pact.
Federal prosecutors said a Hollywood private detective may be indicted on charges of widespread wiretapping and witness intimidation following his arrest on unrelated weapons charges.FBI agents have secured the names of various people who allegedly hired Anthony Pellicano to conduct illicit wiretaps or secure the silence of potential witnesses.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders said the FBI identified the computer software Pellicano allegedly used to tap into telephones, his contact at the telephone company and a corrupt law enforcement officer who assisted him.
Pellicano, 58, was arrested and released in November after he posted $400,000 bond, following a probe into allegations that he hired a man to threaten a Los Angeles Times reporter researching a story about an alleged Mafia extortion plot targeting actor Steven Seagal.
Alexander Proctor was charged with threatening a Times reporter, who was investigating a relationship between actor Steven Seagal and a reputed Mafia associate. Proctor was accused of planting a dead fish, a rose and a sign reading "Stop," on her car.
French officials on Monday dismissed suggestions that Paris had knowingly helped Iraq obtain biological weapons, but conceded Baghdad may have had ulterior motives for scientific cooperation dating back two decades.The New York Times reported that Iraq had identified a Virginia-based biofirm and France's prestigious Pasteur Institute as suppliers of 17 types of biological agents that were used in weapons programs.
The Pasteur Institute told Reuters it had helped Iraq work on anthrax and other dangerous bacteria in the 1980s -- in purely scientific and educational research -- but said the last shipment of material had been transferred around 1985.
For Jennifer Hoes, a Dutch student, May 28 will be a doubly exciting day. She'll turn 30, and she'll be a blushing bride - plus her own groom. In the Trouwzaal, or wedding room, of the City Hall of Haarlem in the Netherlands, Jennifer will marry herself.Bedecked in a wedding gown studded with 200 perfect latex copies of her own nipples, Jennifer will appear before Ruud Grondel, Haarlem's registrar, and promise to "love, respect and honor" herself in good times and in bad, according to Dutch and German newspaper reports.
Then Jennifer, her mother, her uncle, aunts, cousins and some other 80 relatives will indulge in a $22,000 wedding feast. That done, Jennifer's wedding garment, studs included, will wind up in the show window of the shop that manufactured it free of charges.
Jennifer pretty much acknowledges that hers will be the quintessential postmodern union. "We live in a 'Me' society. Hence it is logical that one promises to be faithful to oneself," she told a reporter of Der Spiegel, the leading German newsmagazine.
This leaves of course a number of unanswered questions: Will she fall for the postmodern rage and adopt a double-barreled name - Jennifer Hoes-Hoes, for example? And what if she ceases to like herself - will divorce be an option, and which Hoes will get the car?
Indeed, what if she should fall in love with somebody else deeply enough to wed him - must she first send herself packing? In case she doesn't but still says, "I do," to the guy, would this be considered an act of bigamy? Could she go to jail for that? "There's room for two rings of my finger," she said.
In more ways than one, Jennifer ought to be congratulated. Intentionally or unintentionally, she is taking the Mickey out of a nutty society determined to deconstruct matrimony, a state most religions and cultures have since time immemorial held up as holy and essential for the health of communities and nations.
Top Turkish leaders say government will urgently take action toward allowing in U.S. troops, according to a statement.
In an e-mail to her family on Feb. 7, two weeks after her arrival in the Gaza Strip, Rachel Corrie wrote that "no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing . . . could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here."Corrie, a 23-year-old Washington state college student described by her friends as a committed peace activist, was killed Sunday by a bulldozer while in Gaza protesting the demolition of Palestinian houses by the Israelis. [...]
Corrie's friends remembered her Sunday as an inspired, courageous and responsible peace activist.
"She actually told me she was inspired to become a peace activist by the World Trade Center bombing on Sept. 11," said Will Hewitt, who watched in horror Sunday as a bulldozer crushed his friend. The two friends were part of a group of human shields protecting homes from demolition. "If you can understand people who are different than you, you can help resolve the conflict."
Corrie strived to build a bridge of understanding between the Palestinians and her hometown of Olympia, Wash., by establishing a "sister city" relationship with pen pals and other connections, said her friend Phan Nguyen.
Corrie had arrived in Gaza on Jan. 24 and planned to stay three months, participating in projects from guarding the remaining water pump in the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip to standing in front of bulldozers.
Before leaving the United States, "she was afraid and nervous at the same time as being excited," said Nguyen, 28, a fellow Olympia peace activist who has made similar trips to the West Bank. "She felt it was something she had to do."
Nguyen described Corrie as a dedicated peace activist and organizer with the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace.
But "she wasn't a radical extremist," he said. "She wasn't someone who would participate in protests for the thrill of it. She wasn't reckless."
We've put together a page with numerous links to background information and links to Orrin's relevant reviews as we prepare to liberate Iraq. Take a look at Liberate Iraq and let us know what's missing. We'll be adding links and content in the ensuing days.
A federal Appeals Court ruled yesterday that hundreds of individuals captured during the war on terrorism and now held by the US military in Cuba have no right to challenge their detention in American courts.As foreign citizens in military custody outside the United States, the detainees have no rights under the Constitution, even if they were determined not to be enemies of the United States, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled.
Since January 2002, the government has sent as many as 650 people to Camp X-Ray at the American military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Only five are known to have been released since then. They have had no access to their families or lawyers.
The ruling solidifies their legal isolation. A foreigner ''without property or presence in this country has no constitutional rights, under the due process clause or otherwise,'' the court said.
''If the Constitution does not entitle the detainees to due process, and it does not,'' the three-judge panel added, ''they cannot invoke the jurisdiction of our courts to test the constitutionality or the legality of restraints on their liberty.''
The families of 16 detainees -- 12 Kuwaitis, two Australians, and two Britons -- said that none of them had taken up arms against the United States, even though they were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan during US military operations after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Although the Justice Department insisted that all were enemy combatants, to strengthen its case that they have no rights, that argument was unnecessary. The Appeals Court made clear that, even if they were innocent of committing hostile acts against the United States, they still would have no right to be in US courts.
The circumstances that put the detainees beyond the reach of any American court, the judges said, are that they are overseas and in the custody of the US military, have never been in this country, and were captured during military operations outside the United States.
Thomas Willner, a Washington lawyer for 12 of the detainees, said the ruling ''gives a green light to US officials to imprison foreigners outside the rule of law. It allows the executive branch to capture any foreigner, at any time, for any reason, and to jail him or her outside the law and with no rights whatsoever, simply by choosing to imprison him or her outside our sovereign territory.''
Recalling, and reaffirming its [previous] resolutions . . . .
Noting that, despite all efforts by the United Nations, Iraq refuses to comply with its obligation to implement resolution 660 (1990) and the above-mentioned subsequent relevant resolutions, in flagrant contempt of the Security Council,
Mindful of its duties and responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance and preservation of internationalnd peace and security,
Determined to secure full compliance with its decisions,
Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter,
1. Demands that Iraq comply fully with resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions, and decides, while maintaining all its decisions, to allow Iraq one final opportunity, as a pause of goodwil, to do so;
2. Authorizes Member States co-operating with the Government of Kuwait, unless Iraq on or before 15 January 1991 fully implements, as set forth in paragraph 1 above, the foregoing resolutions, to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area; . . . .
Even as President Bush struggles against robust international opposition to launch a regime-toppling invasion of Iraq, some of the strongest and earliest supporters of military action against Saddam Hussein are already looking ahead to the next target.Some hawks outside the government are beginning to turn up the rhetorical heat against Iran and Syria, both of whom are Iraq's neighbors, and both known to be funneling aid to Middle East terrorist groups. Others are focusing on North Korea and its rapidly mobilized nuclear weapons program, or the North African country of Libya.
"Even after Mr. Hussein is gone, other tyrannies, such as North Korea and Iran, will continue to threaten world peace," said Max Boot, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Such tough talk reflects the fact that, despite Bush's rocky road toward his goal of regime change in Iraq, and despite the many questions about how it will proceed, some in Washington believe the Iraq conflict will mark only the beginning of U.S. resolve to exercise its military muscle.
"It takes little imagination to dream up other scenarios that might call for pre-emptive military action," said Thomas Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has led the charge for war against Iraq.
Donnelly said one such example might be the imminent overthrow of the Musharraf government in Pakistan, given that country's possession of nuclear weapons.
One European defence minister said: "If war breaks out without a second UN resolution, it could affect the stability of the global political system. Many governments could fall."He painted a scenario in which turmoil in the EU and the demise of Nato gives France and Germany the chance to forge ahead with plans for unity among a "core group" of about six European countries with a common foreign policy and a Euro-army.
"By provoking a rift with America, Chirac will force other European countries to take sides and try to create a union in which he would be the leader," said the minister.
UPDATE (from OJ):
...which reminds us of the classic conservative comic strip, The Wizard of Id, and the panel where it is announced to the King that: "The peasants are revolting!" To which he responds: "Of course they are."
instauration (in-sto-RAY-shuhn) noun1. Renewal; renovation; restoration.
2. An act of founding or establishing something.
[From Latin instauration-, from instauratio, from instaurare (to renew).
Other words derived from the same root are: store, restore, and stow.]
The United States, backed by Britain and Spain, on Monday ended diplomatic efforts to disarm Iraq and this led to a stock market rally as the uncertainty that has plagued Wall Street for months seemed to finally lift.American Public Opinion About Iraq (Gallup Poll).
Americans increasingly support the concept of U.S. involvement in war against Iraq, and the public has generally become more critical of the United Nations and countries like France, Germany, and Russia that have attempted to slow down the move toward military action.I find these two stories just astonishing. The market hates uncertainty, it hates turmoil, it hates anything that threatens to destabilize the middle east. It is rallying this morning. In the last few weeks, "millions" have marched for peace, the tv news and newspapers hve been full of criticism of the administration, which has "blown" the diplomacy and ruined our standing in the world. Even some supporters of the war have complained that all the dithering was sapping our resolve. More Americans now support the war than did before the Left started to make such fools of themselves. Maybe we're just going to have to live with the idea that the President knows what he's doing.Gallup's latest poll shows 64% support for U.S. involvement in a war against Iraq -- an increase of five points over the last two weeks.
Robin Cook has become the first minister to resign over IraqRobin Cook has resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet as the build-up to apparent war with Iraq gathers pace.
The decision by the Leader of the House of Commons, one of the highest profile figures in the Labour Party, came as the cabinet held an emergency meeting in Downing Street.
Announcing the news, Downing Street said Mr Cook would make a personal statement in the House of Commons on Monday evening.
An alleged terrorist accused of helping the 11 September conspirators was invited to a party by the Iraqi ambassador to Spain under his al-Qaeda nom de guerre, according to documents seized by Spanish investigators.Yusuf Galan, who was photographed being trained at a camp run by Osama bin Laden, is now in jail, awaiting trial in Madrid....
George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, has made increasingly strong statements alleging [an al Qaeda - Iraq] connection. In Congressional testimony last month, he said that Iraq had co-operated with al-Qaeda for 10 years, and that it had trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and the use of chemical and biological weapons. In an apparent attempt to refute the sceptics, he said this information 'comes from reliable sources'.
President Bush planned to address the nation Monday night to give Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum. "He will say that to avoid military conflict Saddam Hussein must leave the country," spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
We are not initiating this war. The truth is that Saddam is a whirlwind of war. Wherever he is, there is war. Consider:
Saddam, in short, has been waging a perpetual war against civilization. There can be no peace in the world until Saddam is removed from power, because Saddam will not live in peace with others.
It only takes one to make a war. Our choice is to submit and be victimized by Saddam's ongoing aggression, or to fight back. It is time -- past time -- for civilization to fight back.
May God bless the coalition troops. May the war be swiftly ended with few lives lost. May liberty come to the people of Iraq and security to America. Lord, hear our prayer.
Recrimination at the failure of US diplomacy has begun in Washington, one source close to the administration admitting yesterday: "This has been the worst American diplomatic debacle of our lifetime."Administration sources suggest that this is the prelude to a postwar bloodletting in which the secretary of state, Colin Powell, will be the fall guy.
The result merchant's business counterpart is the executive who punishes failure and rewards success, without considering the reasons for failure or success. This practice, it has been found, destroys all incentive to innovate. Innovation is always risky, and it can fail for many reasons not the fault of the innovator. Punishing failure punishes all risk-taking, and soon enough eliminates it.
We have seen what an administration that fears action looks like: the Clinton administration. Problems are swept under the rug and infections allowed to fester until life-threatening. The Bush administration cannot afford to become risk-averse while the war on terror remains half won.
Moreover, politically Bush cannot allow infighting and recriminations. If the administration is convinced this was a failure, the public surely will be. Currently, the public views administration diplomacy as well handled:
By a ratio of more than 2-to-1, most Americans say the Bush administration has done a good job handling diplomatic efforts with other nations.
I agree with the American public: this diplomatic interlude has been quite successful. It has exposed countries (e.g. France) and institutions (e.g. the U.N.), and the truth is a great cleanser. It has done no harm except to muddle people's minds. Forthright action will soon enough clear those minds, reminding everyone of the fundamental issues.
Nothing is more despicable than a result merchant, except a back-stabber. George Bush should put the word out: There was no failure, and there will be no recriminations.
UPDATE (from OJ):
HOW FRENCH DIPLOMACY FAILED:
The Men Behind the French 'Non': Chirac and his aide, De Villepin, were expected to improve Franco-U.S. ties. Instead, they are fundamentally at odds with a centuries-old ally. (Sebastian Rotella, 3/17/03, LA Times)
With close supervision from Chirac, De Villepin played a lead role last fall in drafting the U.N. resolution mandating that Iraq disarm. Subsequently, however, analysts and diplomats say his high-voltage style angered Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whom Europeans saw as the U.S. leader most sympathetic to their antiwar views.De Villepin and Powell got along well and spoke frequently throughout the fall. But Powell, according to numerous accounts, felt ambushed by his French counterpart at a Jan. 20 meeting of the Security Council. The meeting, nominally about terrorism, took place on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Powell was in great demand at events around the U.S. and attended the U.N. session reluctantly at De Villepin's urging, according to Parmentier and others.
Powell grew tense as France and Germany turned the forum into a discussion of Iraq. He was furious when De Villepin used a news conference afterward to declare France's determination to oppose war plans, according to sources.
The French view disputes the idea that De Villepin somehow "lost" Powell at a vital moment. Parmentier said Powell had already indicated at a meeting with the French foreign minister that he had converted to the camp of the hawks.
Despite the gulf of misunderstanding and resentment that now separates Paris and Washington, Chirac and De Villepin's goal has been to reassert France's influence and strengthen its bonds to such countries as Russia and such regions as the Middle East. In the long run, they think the Bush administration is an unusually radical government that may be weakened by war in Iraq, especially if the aftermath is messy, according to Marchal.
"It may be a wrong assessment, but Chirac and Villepin are looking beyond this group of neoconservatives," Marchal said. "They think that the Americans, at the end of the day, will need France for anti-terrorism cooperation, trade and so on. To what extent could the U.S. government really carry off an economic boycott of France?
"They think maybe Bush will not do so well in terms of economic policy and a new administration could come in with more traditional thinking."
By some time this weekend the Iraqi regime will likely have been changed; the UN, Old Europe, and "world opinion" will have been shown to be utterly ineffectual; and Colin Powell will have made common cause with the hawks and ended up leading the charge to war. Every goal which George W. Bush might have set himself for the Iraq conflict a year ago will have been realized. The press is doing post-mortems on a patient who lived--time to carve up the one that died, French-led multilateralism.
The Azores Summit will go down in history as the time when the talking stopped. "Tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world," said George W Bush, before reiterating his support for an interim authority in a liberated Iraq. Mr Bush added that today would be the last day when diplomacy could work."Without a credible ultimatum," said Tony Blair, "more discussion just means more delay." Appealing for the world to unite behind such an ultimatum, he added that "we are in the final stages. Now is the time when we have to decide."
This was an ultimatum in all but name. Saddam Hussein has been given only a day's grace. Assuming that France, Russia and the other opponents of war do not climb down by agreeing to a new resolution, there is every likelihood that the war will begin within hours. It could even begin tonight.
Despite Mr Blair's readiness to press on with a final round of talks, it was clear from the news conference that time has run out for Saddam. Mr Bush was only prepared to talk about new UN resolutions "if military force is required É to encourage broad participation in the process of helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq". That means the American demand for regime change has prevailed, and Mr Bush emphasised this by insisting that Saddam could still avert war by leaving Iraq.
Saddam's reaction to the warning was instant and characteristic: "Who appointed America the unjust judge of the world?" The fact that Jacques Chirac might well echo Saddam's sentiment is an indication of how the French president's intransigence has divided the West.
President Bush compared the diplomacy to poker, adding that France had "shown its cards" by threatening to veto any new resolution. In this game of nerves, the stakes are vertiginously high. It is not only the future of Iraq that is in question; the viability of the Western alliance, the UN, and the entire world order is also at stake.
While Mr Bush was emphatic on the importance of the UN, he made it clear that the nature of war in the 21st century, and specifically the war against terrorism, would require a more effective system to secure international cooperation. His scepticism about whether the UN would, or could, "do its job" was obvious to all. [...]
Yesterday's summit finally dispelled the illusion that the UN is or can be the sole arbiter of war and peace. It is not a question of unilateralism versus multilateralism, but of action versus words.
Patrick Ruffini asked last week what people thought were the "best" arguments for waging this war. His are posted at his website. For myself, I have only two:
(1) Saddam Hussein and his gang of thugs are responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including his own citizens, through war, civil war, purges, torture, intentional starvation, and various other forms of repression. He long ago turned Iraq into a state whose predominant feature is terror. Here's just one story from a profile by Mark Bowden (Tales of the Tyrant, Atlantic Monthly):
In 1987 Entifadh Qanbar was assigned to work on the restoration of the Baghdad Palace, which had once been called al-Zuhoor, or the Flowers Palace. Built in the 1930s for King Ghazi, it is relatively small and very pretty; English in style, it once featured an elaborate evergreen maze. Qanbar is an engineer by training, a short, fit, dark-haired man with olive skin. After earning his degree he served a compulsory term in the army, which turned out to be a five-year stint, and survived the mandatory one-month tour on the front lines in the war with Iran.Work on the palace had stalled some years earlier, when the British consultant for the project refused to come to Baghdad because of the war. One of Qanbar's first jobs was to supervise construction of a high and ornate brick wall around the palace grounds. Qanbar is a perfectionist, and because the wall was to be decorative as well as functional, he took care with the placement of each brick. An elaborate gate had already been built facing the main road, but Qanbar had not yet built the portions of the wall on either side of it, because the renovation of the palace itself was unfinished, and that way large construction equipment could roll on and off the property without danger of damaging the gate.
One afternoon at about five, as he was preparing to close down work for the day, Qanbar saw a black Mercedes with curtained windows and custom-built running boards pull up to the site. He knew immediately who was in it. Ordinary Iraqis were not allowed to drive such fancy cars. Cars like this one were driven exclusively by al Himaya, Saddam's bodyguards.
The doors opened and several guards stepped out. All of them wore dark-green uniforms, black berets, and zippered boots of reddish-brown leather. They had big moustaches like Saddam's, and carried Kalashnikovs. To the frightened Qanbar, they seemed robotic, without human feelings.
The bodyguards often visited the work site to watch and make trouble. Once, after new concrete had been poured and smoothed, some of them jumped into it, stomping through the patch in their red boots to make sure that no bomb or listening device was hidden there. Another time a workman opened a pack of cigarettes and a bit of foil wrapping fluttered down into the newly poured concrete. One of the guards caught a glimpse of something metallic and reacted as if someone had thrown a hand grenade. Several of them leaped into the concrete and retrieved the scrap. Angered to discover what it was, and to have been made to look foolish, they dragged the offending worker aside and beat him with their weapons. "I have worked all my life!" he cried. They took him away, and he did not return. So the sudden arrival of a black Mercedes was a frightening thing.
"Who is the engineer here?" the chief guard asked. He spoke with the gruff Tikriti accent of his boss. Qanbar stepped up and identified himself. One of the guards wrote down his name. It is a terrible thing to have al Himaya write down your name. In a country ruled by fear, the best way to survive is to draw as little attention to yourself as possible. To be invisible. Even success can be dangerous, because it makes you stand out. It makes other people jealous and suspicious. It makes you enemies who might, if the opportunity presents itself, bring your name to the attention of the police. For the state to have your name for any reason other than the most conventional ones—school, driver's license, military service—is always dangerous. The actions of the state are entirely unpredictable, and they can take away your career, your freedom, your life. Qanbar's heart sank and his mouth went dry.
"Our Great Uncle just passed by," the chief guard began. "And he said, 'Why is this gate installed when the two walls around it are not built?'"
Qanbar nervously explained that the walls were special, ornamental, and that his crew was saving them for last because of the heavy equipment coming and going. "We want to keep it a clean construction," he said.
"Our Great Uncle is going to pass by again tonight," said the guard. "When he does, it must be finished."
Qanbar was dumbfounded. "How can I do it?" he protested.
"I don't know," said the guard. "But if you don't do it, you will be in trouble." Then he said something that revealed exactly how serious the danger was: "And if you don't do it, we will be in trouble. How can we help?"
There was nothing to do but try. Qanbar dispatched Saddam's men to help round up every member of his crew as fast as they could—those who were not scheduled to work as well as those who had already gone home. Two hundred workers were quickly assembled. They set up floodlights. Some of the guards came back with trucks that had machine guns mounted on top. They parked alongside the work site and set up chairs, watching and urging more speed as the workers mixed mortar and threw down line after line of bricks.
The crew finished at nine-thirty. They had completed in four hours a job that would ordinarily have taken a week. Terror had driven them to work faster and harder than they believed possible. Qanbar and his men were exhausted. An hour later they were still cleaning up the site when the black Mercedes drove up again. The chief guard stepped out. "Our Uncle just passed by, and he thanks you," he said.
No human being should have to live this way. No American, believing the words upon which our nation was founded, can read of such a place--where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the birthrights given us by our Creator, mean nothing--and not be appalled. Yet the times are all too few when we as a nation can be summoned to put an end to this kind of state terror. This happens to be one of those rare times and Iraq happens to be the place. There are others equally bad--N. Korea for one--and other peoples equally deserving of freedom, but it is Iraq and the Iraqi people who are our focus at the moment. It will be an unqualified good to free them from Saddam's tyranny, from the terror that has defined their lives for decades. This alone would suffice to justify the coming war.
but, (2) We are not so selfless as to fight a war only to free others; there are purposes here that will benefit us too. Chief among them, I think, is that we will win, again, and another domino in the Middle East will have been toppled by the United States and those who deal in terror will have cause to fear us and thus we will be safer. First, Afghanistan. Second, Saddam. Third, Arafat. And hopefully Qaddafi and Assad will follow and all the while we'll keep rolling up al Qaeda. After twenty or thirty years in which terror prevailed in the Middle East and the West looked feckless, it is long past time to demonstrate that this war can only have one conclusion and that it ends with us winning.
For too long Osama bin Laden was able to recruit and motivate followers by listing a largely uninterrupted string of successes for the radicals against America--the Beirut Marine barracks bombing, the first World Trade Center Bombing, the Battle of the Black Sea, Khobar Towers, the Cole, etc., etc., etc., all the way until 9-11. And until 9-11 he was absolutely correct when he told them that we were too somnolent even to rouse ourselves to our own defense, let alone to strike back. Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marines. Ramzi Youssef was arrested, but no other action followed. We pulled out of Somalia. We let the Saudis dither around with the Khobar bombing. The Cole limped home. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton fired a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan and the Sudan, but did more damage to himself and our credibility that to al Qaeda. If you were an angry young man, filled with hatred and resentment towards the West, why not join bin Laden--he was winning; terror was winning.
But now the worm has turned. Suddenly there's a price to pay for attacking the West, for using terror against us or, in Saddam's case, against your own people. If we are wise and if we are serious about this war, we will not stop with Saddam. We will use Iraq as the template for ridding the Arab world of a series of regimes that maintain power by terrorizing their own people--from Iran to Syria to Palestine to S. Lebanon to Libya. Folks complain that friendlier nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Kuwait and Jordan are not as free as they could be, and this is true. But there is a qualitative difference between a life that is insufficiently free and one that is lived in terror. We should recognize the difference and relieve the terrified, even as we work to liberalize the merely unnecessarily repressive.
It is said that attacking Saddam will build resentment in the Arab world and make future terrorism more likely--perhaps it will. But we know for sure and certain that our docility was emboldening the practitioners of terror, to the point where they had so little respect for or fear of the U.S. that they thought crashing four jumbo jets into American landmarks would serve to terrorize us, rather than, at long last, rouse us to action. If the price of responding to terror is that the lines in the Middle East become etched more sharply with the terrorists and maybe even entire societies choosing terror, which they think can be harnessed and directed only against the West, as against the freedom we seek to bring them, so be it. We've fought terror before. At their core Nazi terror and Communist terror were really no different than the forms we now face--all seek to impose the mad totalitarian visions of the few upon the many and require the apparatti of terror to do so. That's why it's so easy for a Saddam to model himself after Stalin or for a Hitler to be revered in the region or for state television networks to broadcast series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The hatreds don't change, only the haters. The terror doesn't change, only the terrorizers.
And, to the great dismay of many, but to the great pride of most of us, the liberators don't change either. Once again it is left to the United States, with Britain, to put an end to terror. Right now that may seem too massive a task, but it's no more massive than that of freeing Western Europe from the Nazis and Asia from the Japanese or that of stopping Soviet expansion. Instead, the question now is, which model will we choose. Do we go in and crush terror at its source, as we did to Germany and Japan or do we try to contain it as we did in the case of the Soviets?
Unfortunately, a myth has grown up around the Cold War, about how relatively cost free it was and about how lucky we are to have avoided all out war. It is, in fact, compared favorably to WWII and containment is offered as an alternative to war. This has something of the nature of a mass delusion. WWII was terrible and was marked by murder on a scale man had never dreamt of before, but it was over in six years and is, even today, recalled as "The Good War". The entire society banded together, fought as one, and won--quickly and decisively. The Cold War claimed far fewer victims in direct warfare, but dragged on for fifty soul-killing years, saw the extermination of tens of millions, the ruination of economies, and, worst of all, led the West to loathe itself. Stability came to seem a value, one we were willing to pay any price for, coddle any horrific regime to maintain, idly watch any genocide rather than disrupt. It is not too much to say that by the late 70s, we in the West saw ourselves as no better than our enemies and it was only by the grace of God, the Pope, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan that we were snapped out of that kind of moral relativism and retrieved that last shred of determination to see the fight through to the end, which, having rededicated ourselves, came far faster than most believed it could. But because we for so long fought a war of attrition, which attrited us as surely as them, it was a damn close run thing. By the time the West prevailed there was so little of the West left that it was nearly a Pyrrhic victory.
These are the two choices before us now, assuming damned few want to simply surrender, we can fight or contain. Either will work. Realistically, radical Islam, the terror regimes and the terrorists, are not a long term strategic threat. Like Nazism and Communism, Islamicism could be contained and would eventually fall of its own weight, unable to satisfy the material desires of its people, unable to compete economically, politically, or technologically with the liberal democracies of the West. But if it takes ten or twenty or thirty or even fifty years to run its course, if we have to make all the same moral compromises with ourselves all over again, have to disfigure our economy to pay for a massive military-industrial complex, have to curtail civil liberties for decades, have to actively prop up regimes we find repellent, have to smack down and sacrifice friends who threaten to upset the apple cart, have to maintain our own society with a deep divide between those who wish to continue all this rather than lose and those who would rather lose than dirty their hands, then what will have been the point at the end of that long day? If the 2030s are to be like the 1970s, who would willingly choose such a fate for America?
No, let us fight now and fight as hard as final victory requires. Let terror find no safe haven. Make people choose their sides and fight for them. If that means a wider war and more bloodshed and more killing in the short term, let it come, because the short term fight that we know to be just, no matter how savage it ends up being, will do us less damage than the long term containment we know to be, ultimately, a function of cravenness. Let those who choose terror see that the terror is coming for them, unrelentingly, unremorsefully, unapologetically, until terror is too costly a weapon for them to wield. Then let us help them build societies based on hope and freedom, without bitterness at what they forced us to do to them.
Let us fight for their liberty and our security, that both they and we can be safe and free. Let us one day think of this as a "Good War", but, please God, let us not learn to love it.
