“The Communist leaders say, `Don’t interfere in our internal affairs. Let us strangle our citizens in peace and quiet.’ But I tell you: Interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The New Republic on the Left and The Weekly Standard on the Right rarely have the same perspective on substantive policy issues. Whether it is Clinton’s impeachment, the 2002 elections, or tax cuts, the two political rags usually slug it out in the ring of ideas. It is, therefore, rare and surprising when a senior editor at The New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan, and the editor of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, team to present the case for war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission. Since both are disciplined by writing regularly for magazines, their prose does not meander lazily around issues. They make their concise and direct case for war to take down Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime in 125 quick pages.
Kaplan and Kristol lay the foundation for their argument by documenting the internal tyranny of Hussein’s regime, Hussein’s history of aggression against his neighbors, and his relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Hussein’s cruelty and immorality is so often conceded in debate, that we sometimes forget just how grisly the regime has been. For completeness, Kaplan and Kristol recount Saddam’s regime’s brutal repression of religious and ethnic minorities, his torture of women and children as a means to punish dissent, and his use of chemical weapons to suppress rebellion among the Kurds. Kaplan and Kristol remind us that Hussein has launched attacks against at least three of its neighbors. Most troubling of all, we are reminded of evidence of Hussein’s inexorable desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, Hussein believes that one of his key mistakes in attacking Kuwait more than a decade ago was that he should have waited until he had acquired nuclear weapons. Such weapons would have shielded the regime from attack.
Kaplan and Kristol’s real contribution is placing the war over Iraq and the war on terror in context. The real issue is more than just Iraq. “It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the twenty-first century. And it is about what sort of world Americans intend to inhabit a world of civilized norms that is congenial to the United States, or a world where dictators feel no constraints about developing weapons of mass destruction at home and no compunction about committing aggression and supporting terrorism abroad.”
On one side of the foreign policy debate are the Conservatives of the elder George Bush’s generation, the Henry Kissingers, the Brent Scrowcrofts, and the Lawrence Eagleburgers, who practice realpoltik, the balancing of international relationships to maintain stability and protect vital interests, even if at times it means overlooking American values and ideals. Such an approach is an outgrowth of 19th century European power politics and grew in importance during the Cold War, where stability, i.e., preventing an escalation to a nuclear exchange, was the primary imperative.
Under this paradigm, the purpose of the Gulf War after Iraq’s attack on Kuwait was to return the Middle East to the previous status quo. This approach also meant that the US failed to support authentic internal rebellions in Iraq lest they succeed and disturb the status quo. Kaplan and Kristol argue that such a short-sighted emphasis on stability has led to what is now a far more instable and dangerous Iraq.
On the other side are the “wishful liberals” who are so instinctively distrustful of American power that they excessively rely on multilateral institutions and when these fail on the hope that the gentle soothing hand of commercialism and globalization will moderate brutal regimes. Such a policy led to the gradual expulsion of international inspectors charged with verifying Saddam’s compliance with the regime’s agreement to disarm. This failure was punctuated with fretful launches of sporadic cruise missile attacks. What the “wishful liberals” do bring positively to foreign policy is a concern about wedding American foreign policy to American values, sometimes irrespective of self-interest.
Kaplan and Kristol articulate a third way now practiced by George W. Bush. Actually, they argue for a return to a “distinctively American internationalism,” a practice akin to the approaches of Presidents Harry Truman and John Kennedy. After World War II, Truman realized that America’s vital interests could not be narrowly defined only in terms of access to natural resources and strategic waterways. Truman recognized that a world that nurtured freedom and democracy was also in America’s long-term interest and that America should do what it could to spread democracy. Kennedy was so convinced of this proposition that he promised that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” While the US cannot go willy-nilly intervening against despotic regime, the encouragement of liberty and democracy is no less a vital interest than freedom of the seas.
Moreover, Kaplan and Kristol argue that in the age of weapons of mass destruction, the doctrine of preemption needs to be explicitly expanded to not only include imminent threats, but also longer-term threats that would be far harder to deal with later if allowed to fester. Indeed, President Kennedy articulated such a policy during the Cuban missile crisis. He argued that the US had a right to preemptively halt, if necessary through the use of force, the deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba, even if there were not any immediate prospect for their use.
Perhaps the clearest case of effective preemption was the Israeli destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor before it went online. At the time, the entire international community, including the United States, condemned the action, but in retrospect, the destruction of the reactor delayed Hussein’s nuclear program. If Hussein had had nuclear weapons at the time of his invasion of Iraq, it is likely that the rest of the world would not have intervened for fear of initiating a nuclear (if limited) exchange. Kuwait would now be a province of a stronger, wealthier, and more dangerous Iraq.
The liberation of Iraq has now begun. Kaplan and Kristol help explain why such a war is justified both as a way to prevent proliferation of weapons-of-mass-destruction capability to a vicious and aggressive regime and as a way to promote the advancement of liberty and democracy. A peaceful and democratic Iraq is good for America and even better for Iraqis.
Listening to Elie Wiesel
Sunday, March 9th, 2003Elie Wiesel was born in a small village in Romania on September 30, 1928. He had the traditional upbringing of an Eastern European Jew in pre-World War II Europe. His Jewish faith and his family were at the center of young Wiesel’s life. This life was lost forever in 1944, when 15-year old Wiesel and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz in Poland. His mother and a sister were gassed to death and his father died of starvation in detention. Wiesel was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp where, on April 11, 1945, he was finally liberated by American troops. For years he dealt with the trauma of this experience by maintaining a silence. After studying at the Sorbonne and working as a journalist, Wiesel broke this silence with the haunting book, The Night. Wiesel’s prose is poetic in describing he jolting experience of his brutal detention. Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. Since then, Wiesel has acted as a moral sentry guarding the memory of those years. He has used his influence on behalf of Jews persecuted in the former Soviet Union and oppressed peoples elsewhere. He has always made clear that the victims of the Holocaust will win an ultimate victory only if we the living never forget the horrors of those years; if we never forget the depravity and evil to which a modern civilized nation can fall; and if we never forget that “…to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all…” For his work, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Wiesel is not the typical self-congratulatory moral nag à la Jimmy Carter, rather he is a quiet moral conscience. He is confident that if good people are presented directly with the proper moral choice, they will generally choose to do the right thing. This makes his moral authority that much more compelling. Unfortunately, this quiet moral force did not work in 1985, in what in retrospect remains a clear mistake by Ronald Reagan. In 1985, Ronald Reagan planned to visit Germany to celebrate the fact that since World War II the Germans and the Americans had managed to nurture a friendly and peaceful relationship, becoming steadfast allies. Sometime after the visit was planned, it became apparent that a German cemetery Reagan planned to visit contained not only the remains of typical German soldiers but also the graves of the notorious Waffen SS. A clearly pained Wiesel explained to Reagan “I am convinced … that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course you didn’t know. But now we are all aware. May I … implore you to do something else, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place.” An equally pained Reagan, was torn between his desire to assuage the feelings of an important ally, while at the same time avoiding the terrible symbolism of an American president paying respect at the graves of SS troops. Reagan unfortunately chose to visit Bitburg cemetery. According to the New York Times, “President Reagan’s regret at having promised such a cemetery tribute was palpable. He walked through it with dignity but little reverence. He gave the cameras no emotional angles. All day long he talked of Hell and Nazi evil, to submerge the event … Not even Mr. Reagan’s eloquent words before the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen could erase the fact that his visit there was an afterthought, to atone for the inadvertent salute to those SS graves.” We are now faced with a new and far more consequential moral choice. Do we allow a vicious Fascist dictator, who has used weapons of mass destruction and been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths to use dilatory tactics and the natural reluctance of democracies for war to avoid disarmament? Recently, Elie Wiesel made the observation that “If there had been a united front and Saddam Hussein didn’t think he could win through public opinion, he would give in and there’d be no war.” Wiesel concluded, “Saddam Hussein is a murderer. He should be indicted for crimes against humanity for what he has done… I am behind the president totally in his fight against terrorism. If Iraq is seen in that context, I think [Bush] can make a case for military intervention.” Wiesel remembers the cost and has personally paid the price of not dealing with aggressive dictators soon enough. It is clear that France, Germany, and many of those protesting the potential for war with Iraq have forgotten such costs and seem to believe that freedom and safety are natural gifts requiring no special protection. It is clear that many who oppose the Bush efforts in Iraq are doing so out of constructive concern and genuinely positive motives. Nonetheless, one would hope that these people would also have sufficient self-awareness to be terribly torn and concerned by the obvious fact that their actions of protest and disunity remain the sole encouragement for an isolated, murderous, and Fascist dictator.
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