LETTER FROM A FRIEND:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Support the War (Bryan Francoeur)

Well, this is a day late and a dollar short, but seeing as the peace activists in San Francisco have expressed their desire to follow the teachings of Ghandi and King by rioting and destroying private property, (here's betting they're not Libertarians) I figured I'd send this anyway.

In 1991, the US promised Iraqi rebels and resistance fighters that if they revolted against Saddam, we would support them. They revolted and we let them dangle and as many as 50,000 Iraqi civilians died in the first year after the war as Saddam put down the revolts. We didn't get involved in Iraq back then because there wasn't a UN blessing for it, the French weren't behind it, there wasn't a coalition for it, the "Arab Street" was against it - does this sound familiar? We broke a promise to the Iraqi people and they have suffered for twelve years. Now we have the opportunity to make things right. The US has given a lot of people the shaft in its history and it's incredibly difficult to atone for these things. We can't go back in time and prevent FDR and California Governor Earl Warren from interning Japanese-Americans and we can't go back to the 1860's and prevent the Supreme Court from allowing the Jim Crow laws to be inacted. But in this one case in our history, we have the opportunity to atone for a national sin and to make things right for a people that we've grievously wronged. No other country can take responsibility for this.

Is this war really all about oil? I don't know, but I would suggest that the burden of proof rests on the accusers, rather than the accused. To echo the cry of the anti-war protesters, "Where's the smoking gun?" If you really, really want to believe that George Bush is the nefarious head of a super-secret cabal of oil magnates who have manipulated world events to their own evil purposes then you will find evidence that fits your purpose and be damned with common sense and contradictory evidence. Common sense such as: If the Bush Administration was really so hot to get Iraq's oil, why wage a war that is going to cost more money than will be gained from oil production? Contradictory evidence like: If the Bush Administration wants the oil so bad and doesn't care who has to die to get it, why not just press the UN to drop the sanctions and cut a deal with Saddam? We could leave him in power, he can kill as many Iraqi civilians as he pleases, and the Bush Administration gets the oil and the bonus of the blessings of the anti-war left (who want the sanctions lifted) and the French (who want Saddam left in power). Of course all of this proves nothing; I can't prove a negative. It's up to the "No Blood for Oil!" folks to come up with some hard evidence to support their case. Not a nebulous connection of dots; any five-year old can easily demonstrate that dots can be connected to form any pattern one chooses. I keep asking myself, "If the No Blood for Oil types are correct, then Bush is committing treason. Do I really believe that a sitting president is fomenting war and putting American troops in harm's way merely to line his pockets? Or is it more likely that he is merely trying, as all other presidents have before him, to do the right thing for his country as he perceives it?" Occam's Razor favors the latter and not the former.

Some folks are saying that this military action is unconstitutional. Evidence to support this lies in much-wrangled over interpretations of the Constitution and goes way back to the old arguments on whether or not the South should have been allowed to secede from the Union. They say that only Congress can declare war, but I have three little words for them: "War Powers Act." Passed in 1973 during the closing days of the Vietnam War, the War Powers Act gives the President 90 days to send troops anywhere he damned well pleases before he asks Congress for authorization. President Bush wisely asked Congress for authorization back in November before any troops were sent. Congress gave its authorization and so this is a done deal. The President is not required to declare war before he sends troops anywhere. Ask Truman, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton; they all sent troops
overseas without a formal declaration of war. Now, the Constitutionality of the War Powers Act is something that can certainly be debated; the Constitution is one of those funny documents that, like the Bible, can be interpreted to mean whatever the reader wants it to mean. But that doesn't change the fact that the War Powers Act has been in force for 30 years and is, right now, the law of the land. Don't like it? OK, that's fine that's your right. Call your Congressman and start the ball rolling to get it repealed. Just don't forget that the War Powers Act was enacted to prevent decade-long quagmires like the Vietnam War, and without it, the Constitution is silent on the President's authority to use the military without Congressional authority. One more point on the Constitutionality of the current conflict: I think it's pretty funny that most of the same people who encourage an extremely liberal interpretation of the Constitution are the same people who are up in arms over this conflict being "unconstitutional." Well, gang, that sword cuts both ways. If you're going to encourage a strict, by-the-book interpretation of the Constitution, that also means a strict, by-the-book interpretation of the Second Amendment, the Electoral College and other lefty boogeymen. Also a strict, almost Libertarian interpretation means no Civil Rights Act of 1964, no EPA, no Social Security, no National Endowment for the Arts and none of the other feel-good federal programs of the last 75 years. This would be, of course, a Libertarian utopia, but I'm betting that the anti-war Libertarians and Buchannanites would have an ideological clash with the anti-war Leftists and Naderites on this topic.

I'm continually amazed at the peace activists who claim they want to save Iraqi civilians. A historical analogy would be if the isolationist America Firsters of the 1930's had claimed that they wanted to keep the US out of European affairs because of concern for the fate of German Jews. If the modern incarnation of the America Firsters really had the welfare of the Iraqi people at heart, they would want them to be free. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the peace activists subscribe to the idea that "war should be avoided at all costs" except that they do not think about what the phrase "at all costs" actually means. If more people die under the peace than would die under the war, does that still mean that war should be avoided? What the peace activists really want is to be able to say that their hands are clean. Iraqi civilians dying by the millions under the boot of a brutal tyrant thousands of miles away don't make the news and are very easy to forget. Iraqi civilians dying by the hundreds on our nightly news and caused by our own weapons cause uncomfortable feelings of guilt. Well, friends and neighbors, sometimes doing the right thing feels bad. Yes, we have all seen enough episodes of MASH to know that war is bad. But there are worse things than war, and screwing these people over again right when they need our help most is one of them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 27, 2003 12:55 PM