DAMN THE SCIENCE!:

Why should we in Britain help Bush to get re-elected? (Richard Dawkins, 01 March 2003, Independent)

Tony Blair's restless shifting of his justification for war undermines conviction, for standard "lady doth protest too much" reasons. More important is the dangerous paradox that his opportunism must arouse in the mind of Saddam Hussein. When the stated aim was to disarm him, Saddam had only to comply and war would be averted. But if the aim is to save the poor helpless Iraqis from their wicked tyrant, everything changes. Why would anyone disarm on the eve of an inevitable attack? Mr Blair's sudden shift to the moral high ground is presumably a desperate (and it now seems unsuccessful) bid to win over his own party. But has he thought through how it will be viewed in Iraq?

The timing alone indicates that the real reason for war is neither of the two offered by Tony Blair. If it had been, all this would have blown up long ago. It would not have waited until George Bush failed to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and needed a new foreign adventure to divert his electorate. War would have been a big plank in both Bush's and Blair's election platforms. Gerhard Schröder is the only major leader to have mentioned such a war to his electorate – he was against it – and he consequently has the best, if not the only, claim to a popular mandate. Bush not only failed to mention it in his manifesto. He failed even to get elected.

This is George Bush's war. His motives and his timing have an internal American rationale. Bush is so unswerving in his thirst for war that Saddam has even less incentive to disarm than Blair's paradox would suggest. Cowboy Bush is saying, in effect, "Stick your hands up, drop your weapons, and I'll shoot you anyway."

Bush wants oil and he wants the 2004 election. Unlike Blair's two aims, Bush's two are far from contradictory. An important part of the post-11 September American electorate likes kicking Arab butt, and never mind if a completely different lot of Arabs (who, incidentally, detest the secular Saddam) committed the atrocity. If Bush now wins a quick war, with few American casualties and no draft, he will triumph in the 2004 election. And where will that leave us?

Bush, unelected, has repudiated Kyoto, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, international trade agreements and environment-friendly initiatives set up by the Clinton administration, and he threatens the UN and Nato. What may we expect of this swaggering lout if an election success actually gives him something to swagger about?

Victory over Iraq will play well in Peoria. It will bomb – literally as well as metaphorically – in the rest of the world. In that post-war climate of seething hostility, are we, in Britain, going to let ourselves be identified, throughout the world, with this uncouth fundamentalist redneck? And are we really going to help him finally to get elected?

Those of us opposed to the war are sometimes accused of anti-Americanism. I am vigorously pro-American, which is one reason I am anti-Bush. They didn't elect him, and they deserve better.

Funny, Mr. Dawkins used to say: "We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment." But then when our genes drive us to actions he doesn't like he works himself into high dudgeon. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2003 10:40 AM