I wrote a blog entry titled “Eve of Destruction” late Monday night, after watching Bush’s speech, driving home from the office and putting my kids to bed. I hadn’t planned on it, it just sort of tumbled out, and it was not prepared with any kind of extra care; it was more of a snapshot of a moment, for me, and a chance to pull together some of the strands of arguments I’ve developed here over the past nine months.
Dave Winer liked the post and asked me if he could redistribute it on his DaveNet mailing list. Since I’ve been reading DaveNet forever — my god, close to 10 years now! — I told him sure, I’d consider it an honor. And I welcome the chance for my writing and ideas to be placed under the noses of a different group of readers. In retrospect I wonder just a bit about the wisdom of pulling a single, heat-of-the-moment posting like this out of context; but on balance I’m sure it’s worth it.
Anyway, the little essay generated some heated response in e-mail to Dave that he has forwarded to me. It’s not worth trying to respond to every argument, and some of the criticism is just name-calling, but there are some points I want to address.
(1)The election. Several readers complained about my line about the 2000 election (“the electorate that did not really elect him”), with variations on “Get over it.” Well, I am over it. My purpose in bringing this up was not to reopen a heartbreaking old argument but to remind us all that the very closeness and contested nature of Bush’s election puts that much more burden on him to be the kind of president who works overtime to persuade doubters and to build coalitions. Instead we have a leader who behaves like he has the Mandate of Heaven. Rather than reaching out to those who oppose him, both at home and abroad, he and his lieutenants choose to thumb their noses at their allies (“old Europe,” etc.) and paint their political opponents as traitors. This would be bad behavior in any president; in one who attained office under such clouded circumstances it is inexcusable.
(2) The chances of war. My charge that Bush has failed to prepare the nation for possible setbacks yielded a range of retorts: From “How dare Scott Rosenberg assume to know that the President has not prepared the ground for setbacks. On what fact is this based? This is pure rhetoric” to “My What a weenie. Waah, waah, oh my god, things might actually get tough…”
The “fact upon which” this argument “is based” is pretty obvious. The word from this administration is loud and clear: “This will be over soon and it won’t hurt much.” No one, not least President Bush, has faced the American people and said, “War is dangerous and unpredictable and we do not know how this one will end. We hope this one will be short and limited in its bloodshed. But anything can happen once the fighting starts. And we do not know how long this war will last or how long our troops will need to remain in Iraq afterwards.” Bush acts as though victory is guaranteed, and victory is never guaranteed. Meanwhile, he has done nothing to build and buttress deeper support for his policies should they face unexpected setbacks. That is a matter of public record, not “pure rhetoric.”
In fact, the president and his allies in Congress have not even had the guts to tell us that the war is going to cost money and we are going to have to pay for it somehow. Their budget pretends that the war doesn’t exist. Why? Because at the same time we are spending hundreds of billions on this war, Bush wants to cut hundreds of billions from the tax bills of the wealthiest Americans — and leave his successors to worry about how to pay for Social Security and health care for senior citizens. This isn’t a mature leader calling for wartime sacrifice; it’s craven, reckless irresponsibility.
This has been Bush’s pattern from the start of the “war on terrorism.” After 9/11 the president had a rare opportunity to pull a wounded nation together in a cause that might have genuinely bolstered the security of future generations. He could have told us, like JFK and the race to the moon, “Energy independence before the decade is out!” And the American people would have pulled together, tightened their belts and done whatever was necessary to move us away from dependence on shaky, authoritarian governments in volatile nations full of people who want to kill us. A scenario like this would hold real hope for reducing the long-term threat of terrorism. But it’s simply unthinkable to Bush and Cheney.
(3) Playing into bin Laden’s hands. My discussion of the likely aftermath of American victory in Iraq drew comments like the following:
“Then, a gradual awareness: . . . That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists…” Sitting ducks? They have no capability to defend themselves? Believe me, when I was in the Marines, I knew how to call in mortars, artillery, air strikes and even naval gunfire from the USS New Jersey, which fired a round as big as a Volkswagen. And what was pounded into us in our training was to do exactly that, call in everything you can and wreak havoc on the enemy. I date myself with the description above. Now they put a laser beam on a target and it gets blown away. |
This is precisely the problem — this letter-writer could not have done a better job of explaining it. After the war we will have tens if not hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq, ostensible to guarantee democracy. It seems entirely realistic to assume that the same Islamic terrorists who wish to blow up Americans in the U.S. will wish to blow them up in Iraq. The trouble is, in Iraq American forces will be surrounded by Iraqi Muslims. When the terrorist attacks begin, their training and impulse will indeed be to “call in everything we can and wreak havoc on the enemy.” But the “enemy” in this case will be almost impossible to distinguish from the Iraqi populace.
Americans will start blowing up Iraqis. Before you know it, the “liberating” force will become an occupying force, and Americans in Iraq will risk landing in precisely the same quandary as Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.
All of which is exactly what Osama bin Laden hopes will happen. On the larger chessboard, President Bush is getting trounced, because he’s only looking one move ahead.
(4) Appeasement all over again. Some readers raised the old “appeasement” comparison: “This [the invasion] must be done. Appeasement will only breed terrorists. Hitler is the best example.”
I feel like I’ve already knocked down this false historical analogy once, but let’s do so again. In the 1930s, European leaders faced a German dictator who made a series of demands about reparations, rearmament and territorial claims. Their response of giving in or compromising, in hopes that each new concession would be the last and finally put Hitler’s ambitions to rest, was a disastrous miscalculation for which the world paid a tragic, awful price. In every international conflict since, anyone who proposes a less than maximalist military response has been accused of being an “appeaser.”
Saddam’s regime may resemble Hitler’s in its totalitarianism and its cruelty, but beyond that the analogy simply falls apart. Iraq in 2003 is not, like Hitler’s Germany in the late ’30s, a mobilized military powerhouse seizing its neighbors’ territories; it is a nation hobbled by sanctions, chained down by international inspections and surrounded by hostile armies. Saddam has no demands that any other nation is paying any attention to; the world is united in the goal of disarming him, and divided only on the best means toward that end.
Troops are rumbling toward the border as I write this, and I can hear the voice of a “man in the street” interview on the radio this morning, saying, “This was going on too long — it’s time to end it.” And that seems to be the chief argument of those who feel that Bush is doing the right thing: Let’s get on with it. Enough, already. We’re tired of waiting.
Is that an adequate reason to begin a war, with all its attendant bloodshed, as long as a peaceful route remains open — as long as all other avenues have not been closed? If you want to disarm Saddam Hussein and make America safer, as of this week, you could still make progress toward that goal without sending the troops in. I don’t see how anyone can defend impatience as justification for an invasion.
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