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Leftists For Bombing Iraq back to the StoneWednesday 05 Feb 2003
author: mitch
A Leftist's Case for War
By Mitchell Cohen
Dissent Magazine | February 3, 2003
Is Baghdad simply another miserable regime? Just one of those unpleasant tyrannies that, sadly, speckles our globe, but ought not to compel overbearing concern? Much depends on how one answers this question. The answer, I think, is no. Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is pathological and distinct from other rotten regimes today, including those rooted in a similar ideology (Syria, for example).
It is not just a matter of this regime's fascist-like character (call it fascism-plus), although its ruling Ba'ath Party fused Pan-Arabism to the worst ideas of early twentieth-century Europe. It is not just Baghdad's brutality, although it is difficult to imagine a more vicious, vengeful regime. It is not just a question of Saddam's totalitarian aspirations at home and aggressive ambitions abroad, although Iraq's citizens and neighbors know firsthand that these aspirations and ambitions are beyond question. It is not even a matter of Iraq's dogged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction-although this is clearly Saddam's fixation, and he has demonstrated his readiness to use them against citizens and neighbors (and would be pleased to do likewise against Americans).
No, it is not "just" these things. It is their combination with the fact that this regime never keeps agreements. Virtually every major accord Saddam has reached with domestic or foreign foes-usually under pressures produced by his recklessness-lasts only until he recovers sufficiently to pursue his purposes. Ask Iranians. Ask Kuwaitis. Ask Iraqi communists. Ask Iraqi Shiites. Ask Iraqi Kurds. Recall the UN inspections.
So I conclude, reluctantly, that the options are not "war or peace," but "sooner or later." Unless there is a coup, force will eventually be needed to defang Saddam's regime. The only real questions are when, how much force, and what aftermath.
Some people will, undoubtedly, protest: how can you support the Bush administration? I worry a great deal about the Bush administration-about the fact that it has not thought out adequately what happens after a war, about its cynical exploitation of the Iraq crisis to pursue its dreadful domestic agenda, about its unconstructive unilateralist instincts, displayed in matters like Kyoto and the International Criminal Court. But I urge people on the left to judge the Iraqi danger independently both of distrust of Bush and of third-worldist prejudices.
Sooner or later? "Sooner" will be costly, dicey, scary. Wars always are, which is why every sensible means ought always to be used to prevent them. "Sensible" is the key word, however, and it is perilous and not sensible to invent choices that are comfortable to you, and then to choose between them. So although I think that arguments against preemptive war are formidable, and although I share many of their assumptions, I don't think that they are always persuasive. "Kantianism has pure hands, but it has no hands," warned Charles Péguy, the French essayist, a century ago.
"Later" will allow Baghdad to shore up, to expand, and to conceal further its lethal capacities. There can be no doubt that Saddam will do so. UN inspectors, who are arriving in Baghdad as I write, will, I hope, impair his efforts at concealment, but their success is likely to be temporary and partial. Inspectors were readmitted only because of an immediate American threat, not because of a Security Council resolution-even if some Western governments, intellectuals, and activists won't admit it. For Saddam, inspectors are a problem to be overcome, and he has proven staying power. Disarmed-Saddam is an oxymoron. So, I'm afraid that "later" just means rescheduling to his advantage, and the likelihood of immeasurably more suffering among Iraqis, their neighbors, and any outside forces moving against him at another date.
The past inspection record is mixed. After its spring 1990 inspection of Iraq, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Baghdad's claim to be fulfilling its duties as a party to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. ("Exemplary" cooperation, said the supervisor of the Agency's safeguards division.) A year later, after the Gulf War, it was revealed that Baghdad had initiated and concealed an ambitious nuclear weapons program-between ten and fifteen billion dollars of investment in some thirty sites, in a workforce of twenty thousand, and, significantly, in the production of highly enriched uranium. And there was insurance: each important level of the program had a duplicate.
The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), established in 1991 to deprive Baghdad of its biological, chemical, and nuclear arms and longer range ballistic missiles, achieved a good deal. The problem lies in what it could not achieve because of Saddam's determination to undermine inspections. (He acceded to them in the first place only because of military defeat.) So UNSCOM verified that thirty-nine tons of VX, the deadly nerve agent, were destroyed, but it also feared that Baghdad had sequestered chemical materials sufficient to produce another two hundred tons of it. Saddam manufactured mobile germ laboratories and the like. Around a hundred and sixty bombs and two dozen Scud missiles mounted with anthrax could not be found by UNSCOM, according to its final report. Its mission ended in 1998-not because it was completed but because it was frustrated so well by Saddam's apparatus.
In recent months, as the crisis intensified, some voices protested: by what right does the United States press this issue? The more important question is this: why was Baghdad willing to forgo a hundred and fifty billion dollars in oil earnings rather than disarm? In some extreme cases "right" doesn't matter. For instance, Vietnam invaded Cambodia without right, for its own purposes, in violation of international law, and installed a new regime. I'm glad it did so because it ended the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge.
Other voices protest: isn't this Iraq business just a ploy by Bush? "War should not start from a bolt from the blue, but be the consequence of demonstrated Iraqi unwillingness to accept international rules," wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, last summer. He is, of course, right that war ought never to originate from nowhere. But that is a banality. If Saddam has not demonstrated unwillingness to accept international rules, then unwillingness to accept international rules is indemonstrable. The UN-alas!-has demonstrated its inability to enforce them adequately.
Current intelligence reports of Baghdad's accelerated efforts to produce nonconventional weapons surprise no one who has paid adequate attention to and understood Saddam's pathology and priorities. True, people don't always pay attention. Back in the late 1990s, while Saddam was freeing himself from UNSCOM (and while, elsewhere, al-Qaeda was planning attacks), our patriotic Republicans thought the nation's focus ought to be on Monica Lewinsky.
Why deal with Saddam now? Because his menace, especially nuclear, will only swell. The situation was captured long ago by words attributed to Cicero: "How can you believe that a man who has lived so licentiously up to the present time will not proceed to every extreme of insolence, if he shall also secure the authority given by arms? Do not, then, wait until you have suffered some treatment and then rue it, but be on your guard before you suffer; for it is rash to allow dangers to come upon you and then to repent of it, when you might have anticipated them."
I am wary of words like "anticipation" and "preemption" because they can be abused politically. They ought not to be a "doctrine." But they are appropriate in some cases, and Saddam's priorities demonstrate why he is one. His pursuit of nuclear capabilities began over two decades ago, although plentiful oil gives Iraq no need of nuclear energy. Baghdad's budget priorities after the vast carnage of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), which Saddam initiated, placed Iraq's high technology military industry over civilian reconstruction. Saddam's principal concern since UN sanctions began has been his arms and not his citizens.
Sanctions permitted Iraq to sell oil to buy medicine and food, but not military goods. Yet for some time now a loud, scurrilous public campaign has claimed on the basis of a UNICEF report that sanctions helped to kill some one million Iraqis. But why, then, did Saddam rebuff UN appeals to buy baby formula in 1998-1999? Why was he exporting food? Why was he importing massive quantities of scotch for his hierarchy and building an amusement park for the Ba'ath elite? Why has he spent two billion dollars on presidential palaces since the end of the Gulf War and offered another one billion dollars in aid to the Palestinian intifada? Why did mortality rates fall in the semi-autonomous Kurdish areas, where the UN-rather than Baghdad-administers proceeds of "oil for food"? Doesn't anyone notice that the UNICEF report was written in collaboration with Saddam's Ministry of Health?*
It is true that Iraqis have suffered. The reason is not the sanctions regime (which has, in fact, been quite porous). The problem is Saddam's exploitation of it. I do believe that there is a moral debt to be paid to Iraqis, but not because of sanctions. It is due because the United States encouraged Iraqis, especially the Kurds and Shiites, to rebel at the end of the Gulf War, and then stood back while Saddam slaughtered their intifada. I am not optimistic about democracy in Iraq, but this debt can be paid at least in part by support for a Saddam-free Iraq, and by making it clear that whatever the immediate post-war arrangements, post-Saddam Iraq belongs to Iraqis, not to the United States.
So I will not support an antiwar movement, even if it includes many good people. I hope, for the sake of honest public debate, that those good people keep this movement focused on Iraq. Iraqi suffering ought not to be exploited by "activists" with other agendas (such as Israel/Palestine, which has nothing to do with Saddam's tyranny and must be addressed on its own, unhappy grounds). In the meantime, I will support Iraqi democrats, even if they are few in number and their prospects difficult. I am antifascist before I am antiwar. I am antifascist before I am anti-imperialist. And I am antifascist before I am anti-Bush.
*I cull these points from Michael Rubin's devastating report, "Sanctions on Iraq," Middle East Review of International Affairs (online), December 2001. At various points in these comments I also draw material from the Economist, December 8, 2001, Chen Zak's Iran's Nuclear Policy and the IAEA (Washington Institute for Near East Policy Military Research Paper #3, 2002) and articles in the New York Times, September 8 and 16, 2002.
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Mitchell Cohen is co-editor of Dissent and professor of political theory at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is currently visiting professor at Stanford's Center for Integrative Research in the Sciences and Humanities.