Posted on 02/03/2003 12:44:26 PM PST by GailA
COLUMN: M.D. Harmon
Those seeking a 'smoking gun' had better hope they don't get it
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
The United States and a constantly increasing number of allies are coming closer and closer to holding a despicable tyrant responsible for his past actions and rendering him unable to continue them both at home and abroad.
So, some people are upset. An entire dovecote of "anti-war activists" (at least for this war, and for this president - they were far less dovish when Bill Clinton attacked Serbia) is chirping its alarm over the fact that we have a president who understands that his principal task is the protection of our lives and interests.
Their exaggerations are so many, and their contact with reality so flimsy, that's it's hard to know where to start to hold them to account. Let's start with the big rally that was held in Washington last month.
I have a friend who lives in northern Virginia, a retired State Department officer who loves his country and who protested the Vietnam War in the '60s. Seized with serious doubts about the president's plans for Iraq, he crossed the Potomac to see if the rally would support his qualms.
He hasn't changed his mind about Iraq, but he was aghast at the march. Here's what he e-mailed me:
"I went to the March for Peace for three reasons: to register my anti-war views, and to voice my views on administration policy, and to show my niece and nephew (who came along) that the United States is a peaceful country with millions of citizens united for peace. But then I saw with my own eyes the hypocrisy and vicious hatred that so many marchers had for America. Mike, those people were openly anti-American. I saw it with my own eyes. You could cut the anti-Ameri- canism with a knife. . . . The ANSWER event was not a peace march - it was a virulent anti-American march. . . .
"For the demonstrators there is some kind of moral equivalence between us and Saddam."
Not terribly surprising, considering that ANSWER, the group that sponsored the march, is affiliated with an unreconstructed hard-left Marxist fringe that in the past has expressed admiration for the murderous Joseph Stalin, dictator Kim Jong-Il of North Korea and war crimes indictee Slobodan Milosevik.
Oh, but the marchers didn't necessarily support that? OK, think about who would go to a civil rights march sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan, and then wonder why ANSWER's sponsorship was fine by those attendees.
Next, there are all the people who keep demanding more proof that Saddam Hussein has both evil intentions and the means to carry them out. True, there have been no Cuban-missile-crisis photos - yet - but there are at least two major talks they haven't heard yet, either. One will come this Wednesday, when Secretary of State Colin Powell speaks to the United Nations, and the other will come after that, when President Bush addresses the nation again.
Anybody who doesn't think Saddam is a threat both to his neighbors and the West has not been paying attention - deliberately, I believe, because U.N. inspectors themselves say he has tons of lethal stuff he won't account for - but those speeches should satisfy all but the same people who attended the "March for Peace."
What is truly dangerous is the demand by some that they must see a "smoking gun" before they'll back Bush. In that, they show less support for America than the leaders of Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Denmark and the Czech Republic, who sent a letter last week proclaiming "New Europe's" strong support for Bush. France and Germany had better start worrying about the perils of unilateralism.
In truth, what would a "smoking gun" be? Well, it might be a mushroom cloud forming over Manhattan; or a radioactive "dirty bomb" ex- ploding a few blocks upwind of the Capitol or the White House; or letters full of finely milled anthrax being sent not to a few congressional offices but to hundreds; or a thousand vials of smallpox infecting tens of thousands of people, with a death rate of 30 percent or more among the unvaccinated victims.
Folks, we don't need those kinds of smoking guns. We don't even need them drawn from their holsters. We may not be able to find each and every member of al-Qaida yet, but as the president said Tuesday, we've found a number of them, and they won't be bothering us any more. Their leader, Osama bin Laden, hasn't been reliably heard from since December 2001, and could be among the group Bush mentioned.
It's no easy decision to go to war, and I even have some sympathy for Bill Clinton, who has been strongly criticized for not dealing with terrorism and Saddam after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and subsequent terror attacks abroad.
But that was all prior to Sept. 11. We've seen two of our tallest buildings fall in fire and ruin, seen people jump from the 80th floor because that was better than being incinerated in their offices, seen our military headquarters lethally attacked.
Still, you may want more than this. If you're patient for a week or a month, I think you'll get it.
Myself, I've seen and heard enough. Saddam delendus est.
- M.D. Harmon, an editorial writer and editor, can be reached
at mharmon@pressherald.com or 791-6482.
Yep.
You think the Pakistani ISI will be watching closely what happens in Iraq?
It's only one example of where we can't solve the terrorism problem by removing the regime. There are and will be many more, so we need to concentrate on those solutions and not on easy fixes (I think the war itself will be easy) that create more problems later.
I imagine that just because we can't conquer North Korea, we should all just crawl into a hole and wait for the nukes!
In a way, yes. The same way we can't defend against China's nukes: they will simply overwhelm any defense with lots of cheap decoys. WMD are the great equalizers and Saddam wants to be equal. But many other present and future Arab despots do too. And even worse, there are Islamic radicals that would like them as well. There's no easy way to deal with the problem. International enforcement of non-proliferation has worked in many cases, but it failed in North Korea. Other covert methods might have worked better, but attacking a decade ago would have been a bloodbath.
I look at Saddam and see a stability and secularism and that looks better than the potential civil war and Islamic states that could take his place.
I disagree. The rest of tin-pot dictators will learn to get WMD first before declaring their defiance to the U.S. Second, they will look at how many Iraqi draftees will get turkey-shot in the desert (probably a lot) versus how many high level Iraqis get what they deserve (maybe none). Third, we keep many of those tin-pots in power because the alternative (e.g. Islamic states) is worse.
You may be right. I just want to be more sure about going to war in this case.
Um, I'm saying neither. Any set of positions (favor/oppose war on Yugo/Iraq) could be "consistent". It depends on one's reasons for their position. It makes little sense to speak of "consistency" without reference to one's stated reasons for their views.
For example, a pro-Yugo war / anti-Iraq war position would be perfectly "consistent" if one was operating from the following principle: "it's always good to depose madmen, unless they're Arab, because then the 'Arab street' might 'rise up' and that's scary".
An anti-Yugo war / pro-Iraq war position is consistent according to this principle: "War can sometimes be necessary when dealing with madmen who have WMDs."
A pro-Yugo / pro-Iraq war position is consistent according to this principle: "It's always good to depose madmen whenever you can."
And so on. It depends.
But here is what I am saying is inconsistent: people who say (1) "I oppose war on Iraq because war should always be a last resort, and we're being unilateral, and we have no valid interest in Iraq, and there's no hard proof that Hussein is a threat", and on and on, when three years ago they said (2) "bomb Yugoslavia? Sure, go for it. UN? Who needs 'em, let's use... uh, NATO, sure, yeah, that's it. Milosevic is no threat to us whatsoever? But he's evil, isn't that enough?" etc.
That set of positions is what I find inconsistent.
Meanwhile, you've shown no reason for why you were earlier pretending that the anti-Yugo war / pro-Iraq war position is somehow inconsistent. Unless I missed it somewhere.
I think the flaw in your argument - and I've mentioned this before - is that you lump all of those who oppose the war into one, monolithic bunch.
Oh, sure. That's a perfectly fair point, and I want to make it clear I wasn't trying to do that. You are absolutely right. For the record: I was speaking only of the anti-Iraq-war folks who are, or claim to be, or pretend to be, "anti-war" in some generalized sense. For example, people who resort to universal platitudes like "war should always be the last resort", "we shouldn't do this unilaterally", etc. As I made more clear above, it is these people who are inconsistent (if they didn't also protest the Yugo war). You, probably, are not one of them, and my comments are not to be applied to you, then. Such a thought wasn't in my head in the first place; I was only responding to the charge of hypocrisy which came from you, remember.
Speaking for myself, I opposed both the efforts in the Balkans and in the Middle East. Missing in both cases were clear objectives, exit strategies and long-term plans. [etc...]
All quite reasonable. For the record, I do not, have not, and will not accuse you of being inconsistent or hypocritical.
Meanwhile, your statement is still hanging out there, that we who support war on Iraq but not on Yugo. are hypocritical (you accused us all of doing so only out of "partisan politics", remember). And you still haven't backed this up with any kind of elaboration for why a pro-Iraq war/ anti-Yugo war position is hypocritical on our part. For example, by explaining what the two situations have in common such that one is required to have supported war on Yugo if one supports war on Iraq.
I also predict we will not be greeted with open arms like all the media and the administration is saying. I suspect the Iraqis will resent more the Americans telling them how to do things than they will Saddam Hussein.
We'll see....
Well, it either happened or it didn't. If there is indication that it happened, then I'm not too interested in the fact that you consider such training "unnecessary". The simple fact of such training (if there was such... I'm not saying we know this for sure of course) is enemy activity on the face of it, and would have to be dealt with and punished.
Don't trivialize them by pretending that the box-cutter training in the desert was real as well.
I don't know whether it was "real" or not, and neither do you. But if it was, then I would consider that important. Apparently, you would not; you find it funny. I think we understand each other's positions, then.
Yes, those are BS phrases too. At least they have the minor virtue of not being endlessly-repeated cliches, though, unlike "rush to war", which is literally a verbal virus that gets passed from one op-ed writer or anti-war protester to the next without benefit of actually passing through anyone's brain. So, I'll give you that.
But, the spectacle of some dude sitting on the internet casually tossing off statements like "they have no plan for this war!", as if they've been sitting in on Joint Chiefs meetings and such for the last year and a half, and know in all detail about our troop movements and contingency plans, never ceases to crack me up. You are speaking quite haughily and confidently from your low perch of ignorance. This is the stuff of high comedy.
You can never be sure about going to war. Things might not go your way. Your enemy could surprise you. You may fumble the end game. These things can never be known in advance.
I'm sure as Admiral Halsey steamed into Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, he did not know how or even if the US Navy could defeat the Japanese. All he knew was that we were going to do our level best.
You plan for things as well as you can. You decide what your goals are and what the potential problems are, and you do what looks like it will be most likely to yield the desired result.
It appears that you are not convinced that this is happening in this case. You fear the aftermath, what will replace Saddam's regime. You fear the reprecussions in the rest of the Arab world.
These are all real problems that have to be considered and militated against. For your part you are not satisfied that they have been considered and you think the results of war will not be satisfactory. I, on the other hand, think that these problems can be planned for, and that the result of war will be positive in just about every respect. Different people can look at the same things and come to different conclusions, I guess.
What I don't share with you is an acceptance of the status quo. The US will have to assert itself in this part of the world if it is to prevent a repeat of 9/11. It is foolish to consider this crisis in our own terms, as if we were trying to make peace with Canada, or something. In that part of the world, it is better to be feared than loved, and being loved is probably not possible anyway.
So you're on the record here on 2/3/2003 claiming implicitly that the Iraqis like Saddam ("otherwise he wouldn't arm them".) Ok, I can live with this statement of yours. Remember this day, and we'll see.
I'll go on record, but get the record straight: I am saying the Iraqis will be more angry and insulted at the US than they hate Saddam, even as they celebrate Saddam's ouster.
Just as anyone that loves his country would resent the intruder more than he hates the oppressive leader. It's HIS problem, not the United States'.
Again, I didn't bring up Yugoslavia, the author of the article did. Since he did not qualify his claims of inconsistency (as you have done), I merely point out that unqualified inconsistency can occur from either viewpoint.
I don't think war is that predictable. Do you think we have a plan for all contingencies such as the overthrow of the government of Saudi Arabia? Personally, I doubt it. That outcome is just an example, one of hundreds of possible outcomes. There are good possible outcomes also, but that's not all we should be thinking about.
America cannot tolerate the Loss of ANY SOULS!!
DOC
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