Ever since President Bush broached the subject many months ago, I have found the case for invading Iraq unpersuasive. This document is not intended as an argument, but is simply a list of the factors that influenced my decision. Not all of them occurred to me at the same time, and until I wrote this paper I never expressed them all together. Many intelligent and thoughtful people among my friends and acquaintances, most notably Scott Muller, Jamie Bacon, and Ralph Marra, have argued with me forcefully in support of the war. This list, if not exactly an argument, at least contains all the factors I meant to express to them in response.
1. However evil and vicious Saddam Hussein may be, that is an insufficient reason to attack his country. From Stalin to Pol Pot to Kim Jong Il and countless others, we have managed to live in a world where sadistic rulers tyrannize their people.
2. That Saddam thumbed his nose at Resolution 1441 is an oversimplification. Iraq was no threat to anyone while the inspection process continued, however long it took, and a preference for that status quo to the uncertainties of war is a reasonable choice.
3. That he has used ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (by now an annoying mantra) on his own people and neighbors, and may do so again, is not our problem. Turkey, Syria, and Iran, all of which border Iraq (and Iran has been a target of its aggression), all oppose our attack, to a greater or lesser extent. If we cannot convince them to feel threatened, we should consider that our case may be weak.
4. If Saddam does possess ‘weapons of mass destruction’ he is most likely to use them against our soldiers or his neighbors if and when he is on the brink of being deposed. The carnage that could result is not worth the satisfaction of the president saying I told you so.
5. We, alone among all nations, have used the one true weapon of mass destruction twice against another country, and a generation later we napalmed much of Vietnam. Our present self-righteousness and censoriousness on this subject are unbecoming in the eyes of the world.
6. Attempts to link Saddam to September 11 terrorism have been strained, belated, and probably mendacious. Saddam had no reason to provoke a superpower to that extent.
7. The president’s indifference to public opinion outside this country is chilling. Why is it so difficult to make American hawks consider the possibility that Islamic terrorism may be motivated primarily by a perception of this country as an anti-Muslim, bossy, imperialistic aggressor?
8. Failure to obtain NATO or UN sanction for the attack threatens to render both institutions irrelevant. I’m not sure that is a bad result, but it was reached hastily, without advance billing to permit the public to consider it. And the breach with France, although willed as much by Chirac as by Bush, is an imponderable byproduct of an unnecessary war.
9. National security issues worked too well for Republicans in the 2002 elections. The suspicion lingers, in view of a listless economy and a not particularly popular domestic agenda, that the administration couldn’t resist the temptation to go to war at least in part for political reasons.
10. Another suspicion is that Bush’s simplistic division of the world into good and evil, together with ideological blinders worn by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, led to a rash decision that soon became politically impossible to reverse.
11. We can’t, and probably shouldn’t, deliver on our promise to “liberate” Iraq. A truly democratic election in Iraq would probably lead to a militant Islamic government hostile to western values. And Iraq is not a natural “nation” but a fiction created by Britain after WWI. To liberate it would be to grant self-determination to its peoples, including the Kurds, which we have no intention of doing.
12. “Shock and Awe” may be overrated as strategy of war. Iraq can muster more men in the field than we can, and it can tolerate far more casualties, not just because of “indifference to life”, but because Iraqis are defending their homeland, while we are mere adventurers, or so it may seem if US corpses begin to pile up. While this factor, unlike the others, did not occur to me until after the invasion had begun, it certainly should have occurred to our military leaders and our secretary of defense.
13. We have no idea of the true cost of this war, whether in dollars, diplomacy, or human lives. Since national survival is not at stake, the US invasion of Iraq is therefore imprudent. To “win” at Russian Roulette is no justification for making such a foolish gamble.
April 1, 2003
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