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Posted on 10/05/2002 1:45:31 PM PDT by knighthawk
Canada backs U.S. on Iraq -- The Globe and Mail, Oct. 2
Canada will not support unilateral action by U.S. -- The National Post, Oct. 2
We have arrived at the very pinnacle of Liberal foreign policy, the shining achievement of Chrétienism: a position of such cunning duplicity, such divine ambiguity, as to be capable of two exactly opposite interpretations.
To be fair, Canada's position -- against invading Iraq unless necessary, for it if necessary; against the Americans attacking unilaterally, for attacking with United Nations approval -- is genuinely ambivalent, even defensible. That at least is its current position. It wasn't so long ago that the government was denying any need for military action -- there was no "proof," remember -- and by the time this is over it will very likely join in any U.S.-led attack, if for no other reason than to make it multilateral.
If we really are backing the Americans this time, it is because the American position is itself so quintessentially Canadian, i.e. an elaborate charade, based on an obvious falsehood. George Bush pretends to seek the Security Council's consent for war with Iraq, the Security Council pretends to seek Saddam Hussein's compliance with its demands, and we pretend to back them both. Everybody knows the whole thing's an act: Saddam will not disarm, the UN will do nothing about it, and the United States will, after an appropriate interval, invade Iraq and topple Saddam. Yet everyone carries on as if none of this were the case. Of course the Chrétien government's on board.
The key to this dance of denial is to pretend that you can sever each of the various intermediate questions from the others. Hence great importance is attached to arms inspections, without considering whether these will actually succeed in disarming the regime. Disarmament, in turn, can supposedly be achieved without regime change. And regime change, if it is not possible without war, is not held to be sufficient to justify it. By such means are we encouraged to believe, even by those who acknowledge the threat posed by Saddam, that war can be avoided. But it can't. You can't sever these questions. They are links in a logical chain. In brief, you need war to force regime change to effect disarmament. Only then do inspections have any real use.
We have seen already how likely it is that Saddam will blink. Faced with an ultimatum -- admit the inspectors, without conditions -- he sets conditions. Suppose eventually he relents: grants inspectors unfettered access, even inside his "palaces," allows Iraqi scientists and their families to leave the country, the works. Those with experience of previous efforts to root out Saddam's weapons programs agree it would be child's play for Saddam to outwit the inspectors this time. Facilities can be hidden underground, equipment can be moved about, or disassembled into small pieces.
Rather than holding him to account, there is a real danger of inspections becoming an excuse for inaction. If the inspectors fail to find any weapons of mass destruction, it will be taken by some as proof that it was all a false alarm. If they do find any, it will be held up as proof that inspections were all that was required. And if by some miracle the inspectors succeeded in destroying all of Saddam's weaponry and dismantling all of his development programs, he would be back at it the day they leave.
It was, remember, only the threat of force that even persuaded Saddam to come this far. But he has held onto the weapons he has, and to his dreams of still greater destructive power, through the Gulf War and its humiliating aftermath, through seven years of inspections and 11 years of sanctions. The notion that he would be willing to give them up now, merely because the Security Council said so, represents the triumph of wishful thinking. There is only one way to force him to disarm, and one way to ensure that he does not rearm: that is to remove him from power. And there is only one way that he is likely to be removed from power. Hint: Assassination isn't it.
At this point the critics divide into two camps. Some still deny the need for war, on the grounds that even a nuclear-armed Saddam can be deterred, his aggression contained, rather as the Soviet Union was. After all, we are told, he may be bad, but he is not suicidal. Not intentionally, no. But, as Kenneth Pollack, Bill Clinton's security advisor on Iraq, has argued, that is the practical effect of many of his missteps. He is monumentally reckless, routinely misreads others' intentions, and has an inflated sense of his own genius. It was suicidal to invade Kuwait, for example, yet he did it anyway. We should trust Saddam's judgment no more than his word. And we should not put ourselves in a position of having to call his bluff.
On the other hand, there are those who concede that war is necessary, but who would "prefer" that it be done multilaterally. Very well. But if they mean what they say in the first instance, they must say what they mean by the second. If the United Nations fails to act, will they back the United States?
There seems to be some kind of tacit international agreement, among non-communist countries anyway, as to how these things shall be done.
| George Bush pretends to seek the Security Council's consent for war with Iraq, the Security Council pretends to seek Saddam Hussein's compliance with its demands, and we pretend to back them both. Everybody knows the whole thing's an act: Saddam will not disarm, the UN will do nothing about it, and the United States will, after an appropriate interval, invade Iraq and topple Saddam. Yet everyone carries on as if none of this were the case.
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Thanks, knighthawk!
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Uh oh, somebody said the truth out loud.