We need 'Iraq for Dummies' No doubt: Saddam must go

LONDON--For the past few weeks it has been impossible to escape some glum pundit demanding that President Bush ''explain'' why the United States needs to make war on Saddam Hussein.

Nor can the soul rest, faced with the serried ranks of Pax Christi, the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, all furrowed brows over the need for enlightenment and a temporal blessing from the United Nations and the European Union. If this were genuine, one could make a fortune on a quick edition of Iraq for Dummies.

But whether it is the Financial Times or some media figure together with all other pleading pundits, politicians and professors in search of the illuminating ''dossier'' of Saddam's evil-doings, this craving for knowledge fails to convince.

These voices never floundered before. They have never let information alone stand in the way of telling prime ministers and presidents what to do about the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, the Falklands, global warming, poverty, hunger and dirt.

One suspects that they really want to put their collective heads in the sand or, less generously, side with a coalition of anti-Americans, muddled Marxists and confused admirers of Islamism all intent on seeing capitalism, Israel and America crippled. But as this agenda is not quite respectable, so it must be masked by a feigned thirst for knowledge.

Still, let us take them at face value. Let's pretend that Bush has explained nothing and no dossier is forthcoming. Let's further assume that those who ask for an explanation are all earthlings and not from Mars. What would they see?

Iraq is ruled by Saddam Hussein, a tyrant who maintains a completely repressive state. You do his bidding or are murdered. He's bumped off several in his inner circle, including two sons-in-law. If you are a Shi'ite or a Kurd, you will be decimated with poison gas.

Non-Martians would observe that the same tyrant has ambitions beyond his own frontiers, namely to subjugate his neighbors. Whether his neighbors are nasty or nice is another matter to be addressed in another chapter.

In this chapter, it is enough to note that he fought a war with Iran (1980-88) causing about 1 million casualties, then attempted to take over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

This same tyrant who wants to put up his portrait on every street corner and patch of desert happens also to be enamored of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. This is par for the course. All tyrants want weapons of mass destruction.

Earthlings do not need to read the entrails of birds to discover any of the above. Iraq's nuclear facilities were bombed by the Israelis 15 years ago. The world grumbled, but by the time of the Gulf War, they were very relieved. If we had any doubts about Saddam's nuclear ambitions, Khidhir Hamza, the nuclear physicist who headed his nuclear weapons program, defected in 1994 and testified in great detail to Congress as well as writing the book Saddam's Bombmaker.

Our commentators must also know, if they watch their own programs and read their briefs, that Saddam has developed chemical weapons including CS, mustard gas, and possibly tabun and sarin nerve gas.

He has used them on his own subjects and in the Iraq-Iran War. A UN investigation (March 1986) confirmed this. Photos of his victims, many of whom were flown to European hospitals for treatment, were shown by the very media outlets that today demand that Bush ''explain'' why we need to go to war with Iraq.

Saddam has defied every UN resolution aimed at monitoring his weapons programs, has fired on Unscom inspectors, admitted having a full-scale biological weapons program and, according to Unscom, hidden at least 17 tons of biological weapons material.

Earthlings also know that tyrants such as Saddam do not voluntarily relinquish power. This is as true of Saddam as of a Mugabe, Idi Amin, Castro or Kim Il-sung. He has withstood defeat in the Gulf War, economic sanctions, a low-grade war against him with no-fly zones and missile attacks. That leaves only an external force with the ability to remove him, namely war.

The question then becomes, is it necessary to remove him before the inevitable happens and he is removed by God, who ultimately deals with everyone? Not all tyrants are the same. Castro is a wretch to his own people but no longer a threat to anyone else.

Ditto Mugabe. Saddam already has modest stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and needs only fissionable material for a nuclear device. We live in a world where this material exists and is not sufficiently secure. Expert estimates of when he will have up to three nuclear weapons range from six months to 2010. All agree he will get them.

If we leave this tyrant alone, he will continue consolidating his power. He will get more nightmarish weapons of mass destruction. Saddam himself may be a secularist, with his Ba'athist movement having the same Marxist-socialist roots as Nasser, but his eye is on power.

In today's world, the route to power isn't Ba'athist but Islamist. Saddam has made it clear that he intends in his madness to be the leader of the Arab world. This requires him to be the leader of the Islamist movement whose goal, clearly stated and hideously demonstrated, among other incidents, in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, is the eradication of the West and its values.

The first target of Saddam would be the Wahhabi sheiks in Saudi Arabia. The first endangered outpost of the West would be Israel, which Saddam threatened to ''burn half of'' with chemical weapons in 1990.

Critics ask, disingenuously, if the United States should force a ''regime change'' (also known as ''war'') before America gives us all a clear idea of what it will cost and what will come afterward. Jonathan Swift could not devise a satire to compete with this question.

Our parliamentarians and pundits have turned into accountants. Yes, they say, we will support you, but we do need to know how much it will cost, how long it will take and what will come afterward. This must be the most insane approach to war the world has ever seen. Who knows what it will cost? It is war. The question to ask is what will it cost if we do nothing?

As for the matter of what will be in place after Saddam, this is a legitimate query if you are planning a campaign against Francois Mitterrand or even the Greek colonels, but when it comes to Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, it is nonsensical. We have an Amin-like tyrant developing weapons of mass destruction with the added charm of having demonstrated a thirst for expansion. The only legitimate questions are tactical.

If all else fails, the Guardian, the Independent, the BBC and their flocks bring up faux legalisms. They object that the connection between Iraq and the bombing of the World Trade Center last year has not been proved. But by just raising this point, they assume that we may fight only those people we know are directly linked to Sept. 11.

Everything else done to us and to disturb the world's peace is beyond our response. Saddam was clearly involved with the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. Saddam was involved in the attempted assassination of former President George Bush in 1993 in Kuwait. Saddam is currently offering $25,000 to families of suicide bombers.

Would people who demand proof oblige us to wait until the man who committed such offenses has nuclear weapons just because we cannot prove he was involved with one particular terrorist act? Let us assume that Sept. 11 was the one act of terrorism Saddam had nothing to do with. Is Sept. 11 now to become a safe house? Unless you were definitely part of the 2001 World Trade Center bombing, you're safe?

If we could turn the clock back to the 1991 Gulf War, we might have played the game differently. Knowing that Saddam wanted only to enrich himself and had no strong pan-Islamist notions, at that time we might have made a temporary deal with him.

If we had turned a blind eye to his invasion of Kuwait and his chemical warfare and thought only of our short-term material interests--if we had done in fact what Saddam thought that the American Ambassador April Glaspie meant when she told him in July 25, 1990, that America ''had no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border dispute with Kuwait''--we might have made a good oil deal for ourselves.

And after Iraq had finished off the sheiks and possibly the ayatollahs, we could have finished him off.

But although we did half-heartedly support Saddam against Iran, our Western scruples stopped us from being full-fledged Machiavellians. We couldn't betray Kuwait or the Wahhabi sheiks of Saudi Arabia who have betrayed us at every turn.

Now we cannot turn the clock back. We must pull ourselves together--and do what is needed before it is too late.

The reason we did not "take out Hussein" in 1991 is found in the US Constitution. The declaration of war that Congress passed in 1991 was explicitly keyed to several prior UN Resolutions. These authorized "any nation" to use force to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
So, what Congress authorized (per the Constitution) in 1991 was a limited declaration of war. The authority it gave to the President ended when Iraqi troops were out of Kuwait.
This time in 2001, Congress has passed an open-ended declaration of war. It authorizes the President to use "military force" against "individuals, organizations and nations" involved in terror. There is no necessity, this time, for the UN to act first, because the US has been directly attacked. That brings into force Article V of the UN Charter which recognizes for every nation its "right of self-defense."
President Bush has, this very moment, the authority to go after Iraq and to remove Hussein by force. It is politically wise -- but not at all constitutionally required -- that he throw down the gauntlet to the UN and to opponents in Congress, requiring both to put up or shut up.
The UN will probably act, but not decisively. They will produce some sort of mealy-mouthed resolution that stops short of approving war against Iraq. No matter. Congress will act, and will approve war against Iraq. Then the war will begin, probably using about 75,000 troops plus airpower in a surgical strike mode.
The war will be over inside of six months. Hussein and his pathological family and supporters will be dead. A military government that is entirely cooperative with the US will be in power. Real inspections and destruction of weapons will immediately take place. And American aid to the Iraqi people will flow like the Tigris and Euphrates after a spring rain.
Ordinary Iraqis will rejoice in the streets like the Afghanis did. And all other tin pot dictators in the Middle East will quake in their sandels over the "bad" example of "Western" progress that has just been established in their midst. IMHO.

Congressman Billybob

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This time in 2001, Congress has passed an open-ended declaration of war. It authorizes the President to use "military force" against "individuals, organizations and nations" involved in terror. There is no necessity, this time, for the UN to act first, because the US has been directly attacked. That brings into force Article V of the UN Charter which recognizes for every nation its "right of self-defense."

Thank you for your response. Those are excellent legal arguments and beside the point of a complete failure of leadership and political will to do what most reasonable people in this country saw was necessary eleven years ago.

The exact arguments our president made to the United Nations this week could have been made by his father to the UN and to congress back then in conjunction with the invasion of Kuwait. It's the same madman with a history of butchery of innocents. For the life of me, I cannot understand why leaders of the Western world would have expected any improvement in the behavior of Saddam Hussein during the last eleven years.

The monster needs to be slain now as he most certainly needed to be slain years ago. When it happens, most Americans will proclaim, "It's about damn time!"

Conventional wisdom in 1991 was that Saddam was so weakened by the pounding Iraq took in the Gulf War that he would be overthrown from within. The lasting memory of the "turkey shoot" and Iraqi soldiers surrendering to CNN cameramen helped create the illusion that Saddam was a fallen dictator.

Right! We didnt preserve him in power, we thought he'd fall .. he didnt ... now we must finish off the job.

that madmen who support international terrorists need to be taken out once and for all. Right again! You never wound a mortal enemy, you need to kill him.

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