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Get Four
|  | OCTOBER 22, 2003
By Stan Crock Preemptive War Is the Wrong Weapon Team Bush's rationale for invading Iraq -- to thwart terrorists before they strike -- runs dangerously counter to international law If you want to see how cynical President Bush's growing legion of critics are about the Administration's Iraq policy, take a gander sometime at the electronic newsletter sent out by Chuck Spinney, a retired Pentagon analyst. He starts out with a quote from the late journalist H. L. Mencken: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Spinney then quotes Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, who explained at his Nuremberg trial how easy it is for leaders to get the people to do their bidding. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger," Goering said. "It works the same way in any country." APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC. Spinney's perspective is clear, if a bit overstated. Still, even if you don't share this malevolent view of what the Administration has done, you have to wonder if Bush's notion of preventive warfare matches the real risks the nation faces post-September 11. More and more, I fear Team Bush needlessly challenges the 350-year-old foundations of international order. Take Vice-President Dick Cheney's Oct. 10 speech at the Heritage Foundation defending the decision to topple Saddam Hussein in the pursuit of a safer American homeland. The specter he evoked -- of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- could not have been more apocalyptic. "Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of lives in a single day of war," Cheney said. He declared that the strategy of Cold War deterrence used against the Soviet Union no longer is viable: "There is only one way to protect ourselves against catastrophic terrorist violence, and that is to destroy the terrorists before they can launch further attacks against the U.S." A STRETCHED POINT. O.K., but what does that have to do with toppling Saddam? Cheney connected the threat of terrorism not just to possible nurturing from brutal dictators but to those who "would prevent our own country from acting with friends and allies, even in the most urgent circumstances." No mistaking the target of that jab: the U.N. Security Council, whose rules allow any one of its permanent members to veto resolutions and whose mission is to protect members' sovereignty. Easy, Mr. Vice-President. That's stretching the point too far. Did the U.N. stand in the way when the U.S. wanted to respond after the September 11 attacks? Hardly. It quickly passed several resolutions condemning the attacks and recognizing the right of self-defense. After the U.S. went into Afghanistan, the U.N. moved quickly to help restore the country. So when the circumstances were urgent, the U.N. was no obstacle. Cheney's remarks were a cheap shot. Without the imminent threat of biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq ever having been truly established after the U.S. invasion, the Administration is still trying to justify the military action by linking it to the war on terrorism. Fighting terrorism, however, has nothing to do with invading another country. It involves a broad campaign to get countries to cooperate on intelligence and law enforcement, and to crack down on the financing of terrorist organizations. And which institution, less than a month after September 11, set up a mechanism for monitoring cooperation with these efforts and insisted it's the obligation of all countries to root out terrorism? The U.N.
BW MALL
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