Any liberals on here who support War with Iraq? READ: The Liberal Case for War

[JeremySF]

The Liberal Case for War

Where are all the humanitarian interventionists now? After all, throughout the 1990s they beat the war drums for military intervention against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, who is responsible for the deaths of only one-quarter as many people as Saddam Hussein. In the vast network of prisons, torture chambers, and poison-gas fields of Iraq and its border areas, Saddam bears responsibility for the deaths of a million people. He instigated the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, during the course of which I watched one of his handpicked generals poke the dead body of an Iranian teenager--killed by chemical weapons--while explaining to reporters that it was like using a spray can to kill mosquitoes.


Saddam is not just another dictator with whom we have to live. On a moral plane, even by the dismal standards of the Middle East, he is sui generis. The degree of repression is so severe in Iraq that whenever I would journey from Saddam's Iraq to Hafez al-Assad's Syria in the 1980s, it was like coming up for liberal humanist air. In Syria, despite the repression and the personality cult, you heard grumbling about the regime and could travel freely about the country, talking easily with people. Iraq was like the vast exercise yard of a penitentiary lit by high-wattage lamps, in the sense that nobody whispered a political complaint, and police permission was required to travel from one town to the next.

After I had my passport taken away from me for ten days by the Iraqi security police in 1986, an American diplomat in Baghdad told me that Iraq's was the most cowed population in the Arab world, and if the security services get it into their heads that you are suspicious, there is nothing anybody can do for you. Three years earlier, an American technician for Baghdad's Novotel hotel, Robert Spurling, had been taken away from his wife and daughters at Saddam International Airport and tortured for four months with electric shock, brass knuckles, and wooden bludgeons. His toes were crushed and his toenails ripped out. He was kept in solitary confinement on a starvation diet. Finally, American diplomats won his release. Multiply his story by thousands, and you will have an idea what Iraq is like to this day--at least, that is, until a Western leader has the gumption to stop it.

The only sensible comparisons with Saddam are Joseph Stalin, Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, and Ethiopia's Communist tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose forced collectivization program in the '80s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in addition to the million or so who died of famine. Milosevic may be a war criminal, but his dictatorship was in many respects a subtle one that allowed for open power struggles and even for party politics and street protests. Milosevic did his share of political killing, but retaining his hold on power was often a matter of bribing and manipulating his political adversaries. Saddam only kills. After his health minister, Dr. Riyadh Ibrahim, criticized Saddam's handling of the Iran-Iraq war, Ibrahim was shot and his body cut into pieces and delivered thus to his family. There are no politics in Iraq, no engaging coffeehouse discussions to the degree that there are throughout the rest of the Arab world. This is the lone Arab equivalent of the worst East European satellite state during the cold war ice age. Individuality has been so submerged over the decades by fear that man-in-the-street interviews reveal less the expression of the individual than whatever the mass psychology happens to be at the moment: The Iranians are our enemy. The Americans are our enemy. The regime's illegitimacy requires not only repression but the discipline of wartime mobilization to stay in power.



Invading Iraq would be a humanitarian intervention if ever there were one. Of course, we will invade primarily for strategic reasons. But that was also true of Bosnia. In foreign policy, moral questions are ultimately questions of power: The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the early and mid-'90s was coterminous with similar large-scale ethnic killings in Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ossetia. But what gave a particular edge to the moral arguments for intervention in Bosnia rather than in those other places--all in the Caucasus--was the fact that the bloodshed in Bosnia threatened not only the stability of Europe but the very existence of NATO at a time, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, when its mission was uncertain.


After our 1995 intervention in Bosnia, the argument changed from should NATO exist to should NATO expand. Intervention in Bosnia made NATO's expansion into Central Europe possible, just as intervention in Kosovo now makes possible a further expansion of the alliance to the Black Sea. Similarly, intervention in Iraq--in addition to decapitating a nuclearizing terrorist regime--will allow us, finally, to extinguish the legacy of the cold war in the Middle East.

At the height of the cold war, sectarian dictatorships arose across the Arab world that employed the institutions of the modern European state and the security-service methodology of the East bloc to erect tyrannies more intensely suffocating than any since antiquity. Because Iraq was the most developed of these nations with the most educated populace, and because of its particularly virulent ethnic divides between Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, its police state became the worst of all. Iraq is now the reigning symbol of that old order, its Baathist Party, through which Saddam rules--a calcified variant of Marxist ideology.

This does not mean that removing Saddam will bring American-style democracy to the Middle East. It would be foolish of us to impose our historical experience on, for example, the peoples of the Maghreb, the Arabian Gulf, and the Red Sea strait, whose kings, emirs, and tribal councils have evolved in ways that allow for their own, ofteningenious brand of consultation with the masses. Rather it means that a display of American power and resolve will, in a more general way, embolden the forces of historic liberalism in the region at a time when militant Islamists are already on the run in many countries. Precisely because we cannot save the old order in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, we should at least give direction to the new.

The last time an American leader faced this kind of domestic and international opposition and stood fast against it in order to break down the walls of tyranny was in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan deployed Pershing missiles in Western Germany against the advice of the liberal foreign policy establishment and many world leaders. Disarmament demonstrations raged in the United States and in Europe, but Reagan would not yield. Thus, he helped convince a sclerotic Soviet Communist Party that a new, more dynamic kind of leader in the Kremlin would be required to deal with him, and so Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power.

Reagan's decision to deploy the nuclear missiles--a turning point in the cold war--could not by itself be defended by any universal morality, but it had a vast and profound moral result. The same will be true of an invasion of Iraq, just as it was of our invasion of Afghanistan. Make no mistake: This is a Reaganesque moment. For years intellectuals have pined for simple and consistent moral leadership on life-or-death foreign policy issues, leadership that does not cleverly parse words or twist and turn in the winds of politics and opinion polls for the sake of a tactical career advantage. Well, now they've got it. All of them, not just the neoconservatives, should support President George W. Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposed humanitarian intervention in Iraq.

Robert D. Kaplan , a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of many books, including Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, and Surrender or Starve: Travels in the Horn of Africa, to be republished this year by Vintage.

[JeremySF]

" If forced to choose between tough inspections and nothing, the allies have shown they prefer nothing. If forced to choose between tough inspections and unilateral war, it now looks as though they will choose inspections. Had Bush foresworn unilateral action, as liberals have implored, the prospects for the tough U.N. inspections they now urge would be nonexistent.

Deluded by the hope that they can have multilateralism and disarmament without the risk of war, liberals have concentrated their intellectual energies on the slim possibility that the United Nations will approve an airtight inspections system and that Saddam will submit to it. If that happens, they would not support a unilateral Bush war. And for that matter, neither would I. But the chance of that happening is small.

We have eleven years of accumulated evidence suggesting that the United Nations will not approve loophole-free inspections and that even if it does, Saddam will defy it once more. Which is why it's strange to find so many liberals who consider themselves antiwar conceding that, if all else fails, they would support military action against Iraq.

"All else" has failed for more than a decade. And barring a profound character reversal by Saddam, "all else" will likely fail again in the coming months. Just how many times are we supposed to go down this road before we realize our last resort may be our only option? "