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Wednesday, September 11, 2002
07:28 p.m.
'War Party' still unpersuasive (example: Shultz)
In general, the line taken by Republican old-timers in the op-ed columns has been to urge caution on Bush Jr in his dealings with Iraq.
Reagan's Secretary of State Shultz, however, took pretty much the line of the War Party in his advice over the weekend.
Personally speaking, I'm completely open to be convinced that any means - up to and including thermonuclear - should be available for use against Saddam if the circumstances demanded it. But nothing so far from the War Party has persuaded me even as far as favouring stepping up the air war as currently being waged. Shultz does no better.
He spends most of his Post article arguing for the danger that Saddam poses, and for the position that 'getting our retaliation in first' is legitimate under international war.
On the first, I'm happy to give the benefit of the doubt to any nefarious scheme attributed to Saddam; and international law is something made up as they go along by the victors of history. Nothing in either point to deter action. (If possible, I'd reserve the point about pre-emptive self-defence - this seems like the blue touch-paper for an Indo-Pak war we can well do without. But it wouldn't stand in the way to my agreeing to action against Iraq.)
I'm happy to do what works - however many Iraqis are killed.
But that's only dealt with preliminary qualms and quibbles: two substantive points remain:
- How will it be done?
- What will happen afterwards?
On these questions, Shultz - in common with the rest of the War Party - is utterly unconvincing.
The first point he doesn't deal with at all: in a 1,500 word article entitled Act Now, one might have hoped for a few specifics on exactly how he proposed that we 'act' to achieve the, no doubt, desirable end he seeks. But, no: we're presumably supposed to imagine - as in a movie - an American montage of nondescript battle scenes ending up with a triumphant march into Baghdad.
No sale! The guy, by his complete lack of comment on means, evidently unthinkingly assumes an easy US victory - and that places him firmly in the dumb-as-shit column.
On the second point, he's positively Pollyanna-ish.
"Following the end of the current Iraqi regime, a new Iraq can emerge as a territorially integral sovereign state with a federal-style form that respects the Kurdish, Sunni and Shia communities."
Not since Wilson and his wretched Fourteen Points have cynicism and naivety nuzzled so lovingly!
Just to take the first party on Shultz's list: the Kurds. It's surely notorious by now that, far more than Turk or Persian or Iraqi, the Kurd hates his fellow Kurd. During the Iran-Iraq war, both sides were able to recruit Kurds - who often found themselves fighting against Kurds on the other side!
Even after the no-fly zones were established following the 1991 war, the Kurds in their zone couldn't leave peaceably amongst themselves: fighting flared up in both 1994 and 1996 between the KDP faction under Massoud Barzani and the PUK under Jalal Talabani.
Following 9/11, as war against Iraq has become more and more likely, the factions have miraculously come together to implement the Washington Agreement which they signed four years ago at the end of the last episode of inter-necine warfare.
Are we to imagine that they have in mind some
"federal-style form"
of government, sitting down with the other ethnic groups like Alexander Hamilton with Ben Franklin to work on elegantly turned clauses of a constitution? Is it not more likely (on their past performance) that they are keeping their powder dry for the inevitable civil war following Saddam's demise to decide who runs an independent Kurdistan?
The rest of the rag, tag and bobtail the State Department has been assembling have, so far as I can see, yet to impress the world with their ability to run a whelk-stall, let alone a country.
As I've suggested before, the main problem the US would have with its chosen government would be legitimacy: since the Yanks would have done all the fighting for them, the Iraqi parachutists would lack the legitimacy of victors; and, given the utter lack of democratic institutions, there would be no source of political legitimacy either.
Yet the War Party persists in addressing ad nauseam matters on which most people are agreed (eg, Saddam is dangerous) instead of demonstrating that they have a grasp of the detail of the situation, and of the precise means whereby their altogether laudable objectives might be achieved without the active intervention of the Almighty, Superman or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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