AFTER? THERE WERE ONLY ABOUT SIX OF THEM BEFORE IRAQ:

Turnout Is Mixed as Iraqis Cast Votes on Constitution (DEXTER FILKINS and JOHN F. BURNS, 10/16/05, NY Times)

Millions of Iraqis streamed to the polls Saturday to vote on a new constitution, joined by what appeared to be strong turnouts of Sunni voters in some parts of the country. [...]

Some drew comparisons with the last time Iraqis were asked to vote in a referendum, Oct. 15, 2002, exactly three years ago, when Mr. Hussein, under pressure from the United States before the invasion that came five months later, awarded himself a new seven-year term in a ballot in which he was the only candidate. The next day, his aides announced he had won 100 percent of the 11.4 million votes.

"Before, there was no constitution, there was only Saddam," said Minascan Watanyan, an 82-year-old man who turned out to vote Saturday in Baghdad and who said his son was tortured to death under Mr. Hussein's government.

In Iraq's predominantly Shiite areas, many voters were drawn to the polls by an endorsement of the constitution from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader.

The constitution, and the elections set for December, are seen by Shiites across the country as the keys to enshrining their dominance after decades of living as a repressed majority.

"Sistani's endorsement helped, but the decision was mine; it came from inside me," said Hassan Muhammad, a 37-year-old laborer in Baghdad whose two brothers were executed during the Hussein years. "The best thing about this constitution is that it allows federalism, and that will prevent a concentration of power at the center, another dictatorship." [...]

"I voted then, for Saddam, of course, because I was afraid," said Jabar Ahmed Ismail, 75, living on a $100-a-month pension from a lifetime as an oil pipeline repairman. "But this time, I came here by my own choice. I am not afraid anymore. I am a free man."

A Sunni, Mr. Ismail said he had voted for the constitution, despite appeals by many Sunni leaders for it to be rejected, and threats from Islamic militants to kill anybody participating in it. He said he did not really know what was in the constitution, but the fact that his opinion had been sought was enough for him to back it. "It gives me hope in God, and in my fellow men," he said. As for the insurgents, he said, they were "infidels," and added, "I don't accept them."

"I don't know what they want."

Looking for a good fight: After Iraq, is the liberal hawk an endangered species? (Drake Bennett, October 16, 2005, Boston Globe)

YESTERDAY'S REFERENDUM on the Iraqi constitution should have been a special triumph for those few liberal thinkers who supported the Iraq War. After all, so-called ''liberal hawks," more than their conservative nest mates, have in recent years been the loudest voices for a foreign policy based on human rights and democratic transformation abroad. The last American war, in Kosovo, was a liberal war, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The Serbian surrender, with the subsequent toppling of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, has gone down in history as a victory of military might deployed in the service of liberal humanitarianism. Might not an Iraqi constitution-or at least a constitutional referendum-count as well?

But today the liberal hawks find themselves in a bind. The circumstances in which the country prepared for yesterday's voting-the assassinations, the suicide bombings, the tattered infrastructure-were not exactly what they had in mind. To make matters worse, once it became apparent that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration took up the liberal arguments as a sort of retroactive casus belli. Thus the liberal hawks find their arguments embraced by an administration they never trusted and whose conduct of the war and occupation they have harshly criticized.

No wonder, then, that a few among them are trying to resuce their ideas from the accusation that, as John Mearsheimer, a leading foreign policy scholar at the University of Chicago and avowed skeptic of interventionism both conservative and liberal, puts it, ''there's not really a lot of difference between the liberal imperialists"-his term for the liberal hawks-"and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration."

Two of those liberal hawks, the writers Paul Berman and George Packer, have just published books concerned, in part, with answering Mearsheimer's charge. Peter Beinart, the editor of the mostly liberal and staunchly interventionist magazine The New Republic, is working on his own book, due out in June, based on a long and much-debated article he wrote for the magazine last December. Each thinker, in his way, is trying to salvage something for liberal interventionism out of its ignominious association with Iraq.

Here's another story thast has it exactly backwards--Paul Berman, George Packer, Peter Beinart and the embarrassingly few others who can be plausibly maintained to make up the Decent Left that Michael Walzer lamented was so minute even when we toppled the Taliban http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/2004/02/a_republican_world_but_liberal_1.html>followed George W. Bush in making the argument for humanitarian intervention in Iraq, as detailed at the time. Indeed, WMD were only made a pretext for the war at the insistence of Tony Blair and Colin Powell, who thought that while they could not move others to fight only for the Iraqi people might be able to get them to respond to a military threat. Since we still had to move all our forces into position, President Bush told them to go ahead and try, but never thought them likely to succeed and even stunned Mr. Blair at one point by telling him not to sweat it if he couldn't get the Brits to join us.

As always, and so often over the years since, we'd just refer folks to the President's speech to the United Nations in September 2002, when he explained why we were going to remove Saddam and why others -- the UN in particular -- had to join us if they wanted to be taken seriously morally:

Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.

In one place -- in one regime -- we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.

Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.

To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.

Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.

Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.

Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.

In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.

In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.

As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.

Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.

It's fundamentally a legal and moral case for liberating Iraq.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 16, 2005 10:06 AM