WASHINGTON — The prospect of a bloody war, with no prize worth the tens of thousands of American lives it would cost, can make you a little nervous. I’m getting a little nervous.
It isn’t that I doubt the ability of America’s fighting forces to take out a third-rate power like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. My doubts concern the purpose for doing so. Saddam is being described as a ruthless and power-mad tyrant bent on achieving political control of the Arab world and economic control of the region’s oil reserves. I don’t question the description, but it does seem to me that most of the current saber rattling is coming from Washington, not Baghdad. At one level, the prospect for Bush may be extremely enticing. By launching an all-out attack on Saddam, he could neutralize that despot for all time, make the United States a major power in the Persian Gulf, and show himself to be a man among men.
I wrote those words a dozen years ago, back when the first President Bush was contemplating the invasion of Iraq. I repeat them now not to show that I was prescient — the fact is, I later apologized to George I, acknowledging that his strategy had been successful beyond my imagining. But if it was so successful, why are we rattling sabers now?
No, the reason I recall my earlier doubts is that they are so much a carbon copy of my present ones. The present President Bush seems, as his father seemed in 1990, not to be using the threat of military action to force a recalcitrant Saddam Hussein to do the right thing; he seems to be hoping that the tyrant doesn’t do the right thing. He seems to want war, if only to finish the job his father didn’t finish.
Maybe it was a mistake not to wipe out the last scrap of Iraq’s military power back then, not to mow down the surrendering Republican Guard like shooting fish in a barrel.
But surely the failure to do so then cannot justify a unilateral attack now. Maybe that’s why George II seems so hellbent on dreaming up new rationales for attack, the original one (the invasion of Kuwait) no longer applicable, and the latter one (noncooperation with weapons inspectors) having grown tired.
As in 1990, I offer no defense of Saddam. What bothers me has more to do with us. Think of America not as the playground bully but as the well-muscled mild-mannered good kid who finally hauls off and whacks the loudmouth pipsqueak who won’t stop bugging him. You can justify the whacking. But when the loudmouth cries "uncle" and the fight ends, the big kid can’t go back on some transparent pretext to whack him again without running the risk of becoming the playground bully.
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I seem to hear behind the recent buzz about invading Iraq (as opposed to our punitive air strikes) the hope that we’ll kill Saddam himself — as "collateral damage," of course, assassination being against U.S. and international law.
Those are mostly moral doubts. I have pragmatic ones as well. I can well understand why America would like someone else to run Iraq — just as Israel would like someone other than Yasser Arafat to run the Palestinian Authority. But for all the glib talk of "regime change," it is tricky business picking other people’s leaders. We may find it a lot easier to take down a leader we hate than to install one who is both willing to do our bidding and able to govern his own people.
Why mention Israel in this context? It is the more-or-less official view that Saddam is Arafat’s chief international sponsor, the implication being that the way to peace in the Middle East is to get rid of Saddam.
But a major U.S. attack on Iraq now (unless Saddam is stupid enough to do something truly provocative) would destroy the coalition, including Arab states, that has made it possible to keep some pressure on Iraq and also to move against international terrorism. Far worse, it could begin to transform the current difficulties into a religious war — Christians and Jews against Muslims.
That has been a problem at least since last September: How to move against America’s radical Arab foes without radicalizing the entire Arab world — including that part that resides within our borders.
It would be no show of cowardice for America calmly to review its international behavior with a view to finding ways to demonstrate that our fight is against a specific class of terrorists and sponsors of terrorism, not Arabs and Muslims in general.
William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.
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