TALK IS, AFTER ALL, CHEAP:

When the talking stopped (Daily Telegraph, 17/03/2003)

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.

I can't find the quote right now, but General Robert E. Lee once said words to the effect of, it is well that war is so awful, else we would come to love it. We will soon be engaged in a war that will certainly be awful for some of the Iraqi people and will be unpleasant, even deadly, for some--we pray not many--American and British soldiers. Would that we could have avoided this course of action, that Saddam had stepped down for the good of his people and his nation, but he, as we have cause to know, doesn't care about anyone but himself and his fever dreams of glory. And so we move from words to action--action that I believe to be just and necessary. It is accepted form to hang one's head at a moment like this and to tut-tut about how much we regret war, but I find I don't have that in me. I welcome this war and think it will have a couple salutary effects, though perhaps not the ones that the Administration's hawks and even the President hope.

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.

This is hardly the worst story to be told of Saddam's Iraq--the truly awful ones make it too easy to judge. Instead this shows in one little vignette what it is like to live in the unreasoning terror of such a state.

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.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2003 1:20 AM