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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 5, 2003
A glance forward
Last week I was looking backwards at what was as close as we get to an insignificant year. This week I'm looking forward to a year that I expect to be much different. I was anticipating many things (while being wise enough to make few specific predictions) this time last year. But I am frankly surprised that Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq. However given that he is still in power I am not surprised that Yasser Arafat is still in power on the West Bank that the ayatollahs are still in power in Iran (despite major and continuing popular demonstrations against them) that anti-Americanism is still growing in Europe and throughout the Middle East and that North Korea is openly threatening to mass-produce nuclear weapons. The argument against deposing Saddam has been made on the assumption that he has nothing to do with anything. Opponents of the use of force agree that he is a monster but claim he is an isolated monster. They could not be more wrong. Theirs is essentially the same argument the last Bush administration made when it walked away from its various promises to act -- after Saddam attacked Shias in the south of Iraq Kurds in the north Turkomans in the middle; after he left oil derricks burning in Kuwait refused to return stolen property and did not clearly disavow his territorial claims on Kuwait; after he fired missiles at U.N.-sanctioned U.S. and British air patrols over the no-fly zones; and finally after he played outrageous games with United Nations weapons inspectors finally kicking them out. For while it was the Clinton administration that systematically let the side down it was the administration of Bush "41" that set the precedents for looking the other way. That in short is the history of the present mess in Iraq. The current President's father was justified in stopping U.S. and allied military operations after they had achieved their stated purpose -- to remove the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. He was not however justified in failing to act against Saddam shortly thereafter when Saddam went back on each of the agreements he had made expressly to avoid a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq proper. Bush fils has by a little accident of history inherited the consequences of Bush p?re's omissions. The sins of the father are visited on the son. But the consequences are much larger than first appear. They go well beyond Iraq. And the damage to the interests of the free world -- to the countries that recognize democracy and the rule of law including international law -- was greatly increased through the subsequent Clinton eight-year "holiday from history" as the U.S. repeatedly failed to stand its ground in unpleasant but unavoidable encounters. As no less an authority than Osama bin Laden has argued the cause of international terror was advanced by the Americans' tail-between-legs retreat from Mogadishu; by the aimless firing of cruise missiles into empty tents in Afghanistan and empty office buildings in Baghdad; by the refusal to respond decisively to everything from the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 (almost certainly Iraqi-directed) to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden. Indeed the retreat from Lebanon ordered by President Reagan after the truck-bombing of U.S. barracks in Beirut in 1983 was the second in the long series of bad foreign policy mistakes. The first was President Carter's refusal to consider using the full force of the military when hostages were taken at the U.S. embassy in Tehran moments after the first "Islamist" regime came to power. By contrast the U.S. willingness to go into Afghanistan promptly after the terror hits of 9/11 began to turn the tide. As we now know for several months after the fall of the Taliban with the current President Bush using such phrases as "axis of evil" Al Qaeda and even Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah were in disarray. And North Korea had never been so outwardly accommodating. This advance is now lost. The apparent U.S. willingness to dicker before the U.N. to pull punches and hedge bets in the hope of maintaining an "international coalition against terrorism" is now counter-productive. Progress has certainly been made in rounding up and rooting-out Al Qaeda and allied terror cells -- but this would have been made anyway. The argument that Europeans and others would refuse to co-operate with international police action if the U.S. were a bully in Iraq is moronic. Such countries as France and Germany are equally threatened by the terror underground; they fight against it in their own self-interest not in the American interest. Ditto every regime in the Middle East that feels itself threatened -- example Yemen. Those that still think they can "ride the tiger" (example Saudi Arabia) are continuing to try to ride it and thus failing to co-operate -- again in what each regime considers to be its own self-interest. It is necessary to change perceptions of self-interest. And in the present circumstances of the world this can only be achieved through brute force. So long as "the worst regimes with the most lethal weapons" are capable of believing that the U.S. is not serious their interest lies in arming themselves with genocidal weapons. This is their assurance that the U.S. and allies will indeed leave them alone to pursue schemes of regional hegemony and international subversion at their own speeds. For here is the hard truth. Crazy as they may be it is unlikely the North Koreans would have made their present nuclear threat had Saddam gone down many months ago. It is unlikely they would be so confident if the U.S. had been willing to impound that shipment of Scud missiles bound for Yemen last month. The "window" for removing Saddam's regime in Iraq was not the Iraqi winter. It is instead the amount of time action on that front can be deferred before failure on every other front becomes inevitable. If the year 2003 begins with the removal of Saddam there will be great and largely peaceful progress on the other fronts. If it does not we are bound towards a human catastrophe the like of which this planet has not seen. My own guess is that the current President Bush fully understands this reality. Therefore my own guess is that 2003 will be a reasonably good year. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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