Still a Good Idea
U.S. efforts stand to make the world a better place—even for the French
by Roger Abramson
Just two weeks into war with Iraq, American and British troops are ensconced within a stone’s throw of Baghdad, the coalition losses have been relatively small and the Iraqi army can only respond with rococo acts of terrorism disguised as genuine warfare.
By any objective measure of war—admittedly a gauging of the most sanguinary sort—the allied efforts against the murderous and repressive Iraqi regime have been undebateably successful. In the meantime, the Iraqi regime’s response only emboldens the arguments for war in the first place and makes it clear that this should have happened in 1991. But the conventional wisdom held that barging into Baghdad would destroy the global coalition the first President Bush had worked to build, one built on the proposition that the only goal was the liberation of Kuwait.
So, after the United States booted Hussein out of Kuwait, and his Republican Guard went scurrying homeward in March of 1991, we called for a cease-fire and kept our word.
That’s cold comfort, however, for those Iraqis and Kurds who were summarily decimated for standing up to Hussein after the war with—and this is shameful—our encouragement. That unpleasant mass extermination aside, we and our “allies” would keep Hussein “contained” in the future, and all would be right with the world. Problem is, that didn’t work out so well.
It took Hussein less than a month after the cease-fire to thumb his nose at the United Nations yet again. Just two years later, he participated in an attempted assassination of former President George Bush. Just seven years later, President Bill Clinton ordered “Operation Desert Fox,” a military strike against Iraq’s weapons development program because Hussein decided he didn’t want to cooperate with weapons inspectors anymore.
When Desert Fox commenced, Clinton said that “Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.... Left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.”
Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
However rhetorical it’s become, the following is no less true: The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks forced the United States to change the way it responds to external threats. For a very long time, Americans were content to believe that this nation’s sheer size and distance from global hot spots sheltered us from terrorism. In the face of a billion tons of ash and human carnage, it became clear that we’re as vulnerable as anyone else.
But this country has the economic power, the military strength and the political will to do something about it. That’s a blessing, because we can defend ourselves in ways few other nations can. It’s also our curse, because if we don’t deal with the problem—as the United Nations refused to do—no one else can or will. So the duty falls to us, and the time has come to stop playing games with national security and—by extension—the lives of not only Americans but those of oppressed innocents across the globe as well.
That’s what this war’s about. It’s not somehow “all about oil,” which plays, at best, a minor role in all of this, insofar as Hussein uses money and influence from Iraq’s vast oil reserves to support his despotism. It’s not about a personal vengeance that the Bush family has against Hussein. Bill Clinton certainly had no such beef, but he too recognized the threat.
While it’s a shame that we don’t have the support of nations like France and Germany in this endeavor, it certainly isn’t for a lack of trying. Eventually, though, it became painfully obvious that they were more concerned with making the United States look bad (and, we will probably find, postbellum revelations about their financial dealings with Iraq) than they were with the very resolutions they supported as recently as five months ago. To say that the war will lead to a more unstable Middle East is to project a doomsday on an Arab region that has long since been doomed by systematic oppression of people, repression of political thought and a brutality the likes of which is notorious around the world. The cowardice cries that the United States has broken international law ring hollow. It is Hussein who’s done so, and the world delegation that is supposed to castigate such acts—and that promised to do so in resolution 1441—instead chose inaction.
Meanwhile, it’s American and British men and women putting their lives on the line in this war. French and Germans are nowhere to be found, except perhaps in European cafés tsk-tsking the Ugly Americans and the Lapdog Brits, all the while turning a blind eye to the atrocities of the Iraqi regime. But some four dozen other nations, both small and large, are also part of the coalition. Interestingly enough, the Bush detractors—synonymous with war critics—criticize the coalition as laughable because it includes some small nations. These are the very same critics who thought that the war vote of U.N. Security Council member Guinea—about the size of Nashville’s planned public square—was so crucial.
In the end, the United States will sacrifice to make the world a better place for everyone (including the French and Germans) to grow, to work, to play and, ultimately, to live. We should make no apologies for it.
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