Letter to a Democrat
The case against a vote for Kerry
During the long run-up to the Iraq war, we heard a lot of Democrats say that it would be "Karl Rove's war"something the White House had cooked up for partisan gain. We have heard rather less of this line in recent months, as the war has come to threaten Bush's re-election. The president may have taken an overly optimistic view of postwar Iraq, but he always knew that he was risking his presidency on the war. Now he must stand or fall on it.
I think you ought to stand with him.
The Ba'athist regime in Iraq was a threat to American interests. Its expansionist ambitions had drawn us into a war before. Enforcing an uneasy "peace" with the regime still in power (and still firing on our planes every week) was undermining our position in the Middle East. It required us to station troops in Saudi Arabia. Over the course of the decade before 9/11, the international coalition for sanctions on Iraq had grown weaker. If President Bush had not threatened war with Iraq, and then followed through on that threat, Saddam Hussein would before too long have slipped out from the sanctions.
What would he have done then? He had gassed the Kurds. He had tried to assassinate a former American president. His regime's official ideology was explicitly expansionist and anti-American. It was reasonable to worry that he would reconstitute his weapons programs, and unreasonable not to. What would he have done if he had gotten weapons? Sell them, perhaps; or maybe use them to intimidate his neighbors. (Imagine assembling the allied coalition of 1990-91 against a nuclear-armed Saddam.)
As President Bush was preparing to go to war, the Iraqi threat looked more imminent than it appears to have been. The case for going to war in March 2003 looks less urgent. But if we had not acted when we did, we would still eventually have had to deal with Iraq - and probably under worse circumstances. September 11 had also changed the calculus. It made it harder for a president to ignore or downplay threats to America emanating from the Middle East. It also made the case for a dramatic intervention into the political culture of the region more compelling.
That Bush has made mistakes in Iraq is an understatement. Defense and State blame each other for the initial botch of the occupation, but it is a president's job to impose coherence on his administration. The Fallujah climb-down in April sent a worse message to the Iraqis than even Abu Ghraib did. But successful war leaders make mistakes, even big ones. The political evolution of postwar Iraq has gone better than we could have expected, and we have a good shot at democratic elections in January. Libya's agreement to defang itself has been an important side-benefit of the war.
John Kerry, too, thought Iraq was a threat. He voted for regime change in 1998, and he voted to authorize war in 2002. He says that Bush should not have exercised that authority without more allies. You do not have to be an unqualified fan of this administration's diplomacy to find the critique unpersuasive. Would a few more months at the U.N. have bought us many more allies? Does their absence undermine the case for the war by substantially reducing the threat from the regime, the strategic value of changing the regime, or the likelihood of success? I think the answer to these questions is no.
What would John Kerry do in Iraq now, and in future crises we can only dimly perceive? We know that much of his base, and an increasing number of foreign-policy intellectuals, wants to cut and run in Iraq. We know that he is very attentive to that base: He voted to deny funds for Iraqi reconstruction, just weeks after saying that such a vote would be "reckless" and "irresponsible," because he was afraid of Howard Dean in the primaries. We know that his general instincts are dovish: He voted against the first Gulf War and seems (understandably if misguidedly) to view all foreign-policy questions through the prism of his interpretation of the Vietnam War. And we know that his election would be a stunning American repudiation of the Iraq war and a warning that no American president should risk another foreign interventionat a time when the difficulties in Iraq have already increased our inhibitions in this regard to a dangerous degree.
Kerry recently said that "we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." Republicans jumped on the word "nuisance," but it is not the most disturbing element of the comment. Going back to the 1990s, when the terrorists were paying more attention to us than we were to them, is not desirable, and it is hard to believe that Kerry really means it. But to the extent he fights the war on terrorism, he will also have to fight his own instincts. I would prefer to re-elect a president who does not labor under this burden.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410u/pp2004-10-22.
Politics & Prose | by Jack Beatty
Letter to a Republican
The case against a vote for Bush
A vote for George W. Bush will make you an accomplice after the fact in the death of thousands and the maiming of thousands more an infliction of suffering unexcused by justice or necessity. As theologians argued before the invasion of Iraq, preventive war is justified only on grounds of self-defense. But we know now, through the President's own inspector, Charles Duelfer, that Iraq posed no threat to the United States, or to its neighbors. In saying he would launch the war knowing everything he knows now, President Bush has endorsed a principle that most Americans would denounce if other countries espoused it: Might makes right.
Bush could (but doesn't) claim he was misled by bad intelligence into believing that Saddam possessed WMD. But you know better. In voting for Bush now, you would be taking a position you would not have taken before the war that even if Iraq had no WMD and no connection to 9/11, the U.S. should invade and occupy it; that even without justification, we should kill from ten- to twenty-thousand Iraqis; that even though self-defense does not require it, we should will the death of over 1,000 U.S. servicemen and women and the wounding of 7,000 more. Bush is stuck with that position. He is a politician; you are not. He is asking you to endorse all that has happened knowing that none of it was necessary. Won't that be worse than endorsing what the Pope called the war before it began "a defeat for humanity"? Won't it be more like endorsing a crime against humanity?
But, you say, Saddam is in jail. His regime is gone. The Iraqis are free. Toppling his regime, however, was not an end in itself but a means to the end of securing Iraq's WMD. Which did not exist. Such threat - faint, almost notional - as Iraq posed was contained before the war. And now? Osama Bin Laden wanted to provoke Western intervention in an Arab country and Bush played into his hands. How much will Iraq help Bin Ladenism? We can't know. But, from the point of view of U.S. security, the cost of removing Saddam exceeds the short-term benefit, and weights the odds against realizing any long-term gain by way of "democracy" in Iraq.
As for the Iraqis, they are free of Saddam, but at what cost? Put it this way. The U.S. population is roughly twelve times Iraq's. How would you feel if, in liberating us from an oppressive government, a foreign invader killed 120,000 Americans? If your son or daughter was among those killed, your loss would be absolute; beyond balance by any future gain for the country. That is how it is for many of the Iraqis we have "liberated." Life was hard under Saddam, but it was life nonetheless. Saddam was not perpetrating genocide, which would have given the intervention a humanitarian justification, allowing us to claim we killed thousands to save hundreds of thousands. But you know better.
A vote for Bush promises the absolution of denial - and that, I think, explains his otherwise inexplicable hold on the electorate. The President cannot face the truth, but his moral blindness won't excuse yours. Our soldiers have done their duty. No dishonor attaches to them. It attaches to Bush; and it will attach to you if you vote for him.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410u/pp2004-10-19.
No comments:
Post a Comment