Linkmeister

The Graybeards speak

There were a couple of distinguished voices in today's Op/Ed pages: from the Washington Post, Gary Hart, whose knowledge of terrorism issues is pretty impeccable (he was co-chair of the Commission on National Security/21st Century with Warren Rudman), and from the NY Times, Jimmy Carter. President Carter argues that the seemingly-inevitable military action in Iraq doesn't meet the criteria of a just war; Senator Hart argues that Iraq is not the right enemy, terrorism is.

I am not well-versed enough in either St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine to argue the merits of a just/unjust war, so I'll leave President's Carter's discussion unremarked upon. Senator Hart makes the same point that I've been thinking about almost since the day President Bush announced that Iraq was his target: why? Whatever evil Saddam Hussein has perpetrated, and the catalog is long and ugly, he's not been shown to have participated, funded or in any other way been a part of the terrorist actions of September 11. Some argue that it's all about oil; I'm pretty cynical, but I don't buy that. Others think it's either revenge for Iraq's assassination attempt on the President's father or a feeling that Saddam Hussein is "unfinished business" for current members of the Administration who were participants or advisors in the Gulf War; the second of those theories may have some merit; I don't know. Then there's the idea that Iraq is, in a sense, "low-hanging fruit;" Al Qaeda is a stateless entity, hard to find and destroy, Iraq's not. I suspect that the Administration has a sense of urgency to "do something" to take revenge for the murder of 3,000 people on September 11, and the quick expulsion of the Taliban in Afghanistan wasn't sufficient. That theory is a little more persuasive, although still a little facile for my taste.

Meanwhile, as Senator Hart argues, security at home goes wanting. First responders (public health workers, policemen, firefighters and emergency medical technicians) don't yet have enough equipment or training to be effective in the event of another attack, and the President and his own party are in a spitting match about the funding for those items. Beyond that, nearly every state in the country is beyond broke and facing large deficits. That being the case, each will be hard-pressed to fund the security needs it faces without federal help, yet during the President's State of the Union address he made no mention of helping the states pay for their security requirements.

I am thus left with no real answer as to the reasons for this impending war, and the White House keeps trotting out unpersuasive arguments. "Saddam is evil and has gassed his own people," the President says. Well, true, but what has he done to us? "He's amassing weapons of mass destruction," the President says. Well, maybe; that's why we have UN inspectors in country looking for them. "The Iraqis aren't co-operating," the President says. That's probably true; I'd suggest you assign a squad of US Army soldiers to accompany each carload of inspectors as a show of force. The implication would be "cooperate or face the consequences." Back it up with a couple of carrier groups in the Gulf. Meanwhile, the funds not spent on fighting a war could be used to beef up homeland security at home.

Oh, yeah, and that would free up the foreign policy team to focus on North Korea, which gets more belligerent and provocative every day.

Posted by Linkmeister at March 9, 2003 01:14 PM