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January 21, 2003
Did you march?
Did you march for peace over the weekend? Is so, read this post on tacitus. Then read this:
Peace is a wonderful idea--but it is an idea for those who have better options than war. Sadly not everyone does. It's clear who people were marching AGAINST this weekend--George Bush and the US--but who were you marching FOR? The Iraqi people? Their lives can only be improved. American soldiers? How many casualties do you expect?
The same people who will march for the sake of education, health care, civil liberties, racial equality, etc. only seem concerned about these issues when it effects Americans. What about the human condition of the Iraqi people? Did you support the American Revolution or are Americans the only ones allowed to break the peace for the sake of liberty? Why free Tibet but not Iraq? Where are the liberal core values when it comes to Iraq?
And here is my prediction: Iraq will be liberated without a shot. Saddam is a survivor and the administration's "march to war" that has prompted these protests will have proven to be the only way to apply enough pressure to oust Saddam. If there is a shot fired, it will be quick and to the point--that is to Saddam--and a coup will soon follow. Even though Bush’s tough stance—as with Reagan and the cold war—will turn out to be what was needed, no one on the left will give him credit. They will claim he was lucky. They will claim that he finally listened to reason. And they will congratulate themselves for their part, even though their role was simply to convince Saddam Hussien that Bush may not have had the support to take him out.
Should we be going to war with Iraq? It is a difficult issue but I have been unimpressed with the intellectual vacuousness of the anti-war movement. I have heard not even a whimper of the value of liberating a country from those who seem intent only on criticizing a Republican president and a proud country. This is intellectually dishonest. I have heard no honest admission of the threat that a nuclear armed Saddam would present. No admission from the left that North Korea provides a chilling example. The Democratic leadership seems to have satisfied itself with nit picking and whimpering--desperately trying to agree with a popular president while establishing their own campaign positions in 2004.
The brilliant insight of the left is that this isn’t about disarming a madman and liberating a country but about oil. If that were true we would be cutting deals with Iraqis like the French and the Russians for their oil, not invading them. Does it make sense to spend billions of dollars to invade a country when we could use that money to simply buy the oil?
And let’s get real about oil. Arrianna Huffington and the “Detroit Project” seem to think poverty is the solution to the middle east problem. Poverty will solve our little terrorist problem. If only the Middle East didn’t have as much money they would be much happier and love Americans. And apparently the fraction of money that ends up in the Middle East from the fraction of gas used by SUVs (the money from gas used in other cars doesn’t seem to count) is the money that is enabling this terrorism. (As an aside, there is merit to the idea that oil money has kept corrupt regimes in power and removed the incentive of authoritarian governments to reform, but you won’t change this by driving a Honda—not even one little bit.) More wealth is needed in that region, not less, and more freedom to go along with it. Sadly, freedom may only come with force.
Oil independence—in the short term—is a fantasy and it certainly won’t be accomplished by fuel efficiency or even drilling in Alaska. It won’t be accomplished at all by any short-term move because oil is a global commodity. We can tax foreign oil at the border, but that won’t reduce our dependency—only increase our costs. Oil independency in the long term is a certainty—clean technologies will prevail and it will be a better day when they do—but that is decades away. Meanwhile, the call for independence from foreign oil is used cynically and shamefully by a group that wants to exploit our fear of terrorism to advance a completely separate agenda (such as the fight to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.) I’d love for us not to be dependant on foreign oil, but that means not being dependant on oil, and that ain’t happening any time soon, I’m sorry to say.
Let’s hear a rich debate about America’s proper role in the world, the best way to improve life in the middle east, the best way to conquer to roots of terrorism—but most of all lets hear alternative solutions from the left, not just hatred for a President they don’t like.
Tom Daschle appears on TV and spares Saddam Hussien his wrath—saving it all for George Bush. That’s Tom’s job, of course, but his job is also to be a leader of the country, not just the opposition. He has a political agenda to imbalance him: what’s your excuse?
This is an extraordinarily disingenuous and tendentious characterisation of those of us (some 150,000 in San Francisco alone) who marched against the War in Iraq.
As a former British Army officer, and a military assistant to the Joint Defense Intelligce Staff at the Ministry of Defense, I have no seated moral objections to war per se.
Neither do many of those who marched.
What we all have in common in this, however: We believe the president has presented no clear causus belli. I suspect that there is a case for war that has been argued by Rumsfeld and Wolfwowitz--and that is one that has convinced the Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell and Dick Armitage, and the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. It might even convince me.
But that case cannot--at least I hope it does not!--center merely on the argument that we must not permit Saddam Hussein to possess WMD. We know he has no, or few, such weapons readily to hand; we know that he is some years from making a nuclear bomb; and the CIA itself says that the most likely scenario in which he would use them would be if threatened with invasion.
There is further no clear linkage whatsoever--or none that the administration has been willing to leak in its usual sly way--between the terrorists of 9.11 and the Iraqi government.
Now, I assume that there is a Hawkish argument that goes something like this: Iraq is a destabilising influence in the region; Saddam is unpredictable; we need a new, compliant state in the region now that the Saudis are so undependable; and we need to safe-guard our supply of oil.
I suspect there is also a crack-pot conservative emotive argument that goes someting like: America must regain the virtue it lost in Vietnam, and its military leadership must get over the "trauma" it sustained in South East Asia.
Finally, it is not overly cynical, I fear, to suspect that the "War on Terror" is such good domestic politics for the G.O.P., that they will take it to any easily deposable State--particularly one with which we have unfinished business.
All this is well, if not good. But what I violently object to--so much so that it made me join the marchers--is that a war is being waged without honest public debate, clouded in propoganda and lies, and with marked, twinkly contempt to for the American people. I refuse to be identified to the World as supporting a War waged for the reasons we are publicly avowing.
Two final notes, which are unrelated to my arguments abive. I find it indescribably disgusting that the most hawkish members of the adminstration--Cheney, Wolfowitz, and BUsh himself--are all draft-dodgers, and have the temerity to ridicule the justified fears of uniformed officers that this is a military adventure with some rsik.
The dialogue you call for is a worthwhile one. I'm not sure if that was the dialogue that the marches produced, however.
In the absence of dialogue, it was necessary to protest. There are coherent reasons for a military adventure in Iraq. I don't much like them, but what we know something of them from what does leak from this extraordinarily secretive administration. But how can there be an examination of the adminstration's reasoning--some of it very worrying--if we are to be fed nothing but emotive lies and propoganda. For a conservative adminstraton that in theory despises big government, it is extraordinary how much the Bushies despise ordinary Americans, and how little they trust them to make up their own minds.
This is drivel. I find nothing in it even worth discussing since it seems to be based simply on paranoia and an innate hatred of Bush. The Bush team have stated their case quite clearly and there are plenty of voices of dissent--we live in a free country. The supposed ulterior motives, such as this is all about oil, don't even pass the laugh test. And, to be honest, that fact that the anti-war movement seems whole focused on invented sins of Bush, and never on the sins of Saddam Hussein, makes me question their motives. Invent these straw men all day, if you like, and tear them down with self-rightousness, but I think you marched to meet chicks.
There were some hot chicks, that is true, but that was not my reason for going.
I am back from London yesterday, and the hatred for Bush, Texas Republican politics, and America in general was very striking--even amongst my friends, who as establishment Britons, could normally be counted on to support America.
Even my friend Michael Gove, who is deputy editor of The Times, and the last Unionist (that is, a supporter of The Union of Great Britain, Northern Island, Scotland, and Wales), was troubled by the "arrogance and deceit" of the Bush administration.
Jason