Politics: Clarity
Colin Powell’s speech may have done its job for many luminaries of the world. It may have convinced the Washington Post Editorial Board (though that isn’t exactly shocking) and Bill Safire. Hell, it appears to have wooed over Mary McGrory (which is disappointing), but I think it requires some clarity.
What Colin Powell proved beyond a shadow of a doubt yesterday in his speech was that the unbelievably low threshold for “material breach” that America forced through in its UN Security Council resolution of last year had clearly been met. That’s all it did. Apply those standards to just about anybody and they would all be in material breach. Our closest ally, Israel, maintains an utterly un-secret nuclear weapons program whose 20-year history of clandestine development would clearly pass the threshold established by UN SC resolution 1441. There’s a good chance that Iran and Syria have all reached or passed the threshold. There’s no question that North Korea, Pakistan and India have all breached that threshold, and have functional weapons to show for it. (Additionally, North Korea is a communist nation, which was once all you needed to be to get your ass kicked by the United States.)
So Powell didn’t go to the UN to convince Mary McGrory and Bill Safire (and just about every other American too lazy to read a newspaper, vote, or think for him- or herself) that Iraq wasn’t happy about having the US go through it’s dirty laundry. Pretty much everyone knew that already. I haven’t been sitting here thinking all along that the Iraqi government was a peaceful idyll where Saddam Hussein and his fearful bootlicks killed thousands because they were misunderstood. Everyone knew Hussein was a bad man. Hussein killed lots of people. Hussein bombed Israel during the first Gulf War, gassed Kurds, slaughtered the Marsh Arabs, hunted Shiites, all of it. And he is hiding weapons, no doubt, because that’s what people do when they have weapons. They hide them.
But why now? Why are we going to war with Iraq now? Why didn’t US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte make the presentation yesterday? Why doesn’t anyone ask these questions?
Thomas Friedman makes a case in this column that going to war in Iraq will lead to a wonderful future for the Middle East. The logic is tortuous. Friedman says that the threat isn’t Iraq, or any other nation really, but the un-nationalized and undeterrable young people who feed into the belly of terrorism by providing its hands, its eyes and its legs for traversing the world. But, Friedman argues, the only way to stop the seemingly endless flow of these young men into the terrorism machine is to “transform these Arab states — which are also experiencing population explosions — to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible media that won't blame all their ills on others…” Otherwise, Friedman reasons, “we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they [the Arab States] need to shrink their output of undeterrables.”
Bravura reasoning, Mr. Friedman. Interesting that this handsome goal has never been elucidated by a member of the Bush administration. Intriguing that the President’s least-liked media outlet is the only source for this thought-provoking argument.
Interesting, also, that I don’t for one second believe that anyone in the Bush administration has offered this level of thought to the Iraq question. Instead, they are functioning now as they have all along. As DiIulio said, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm.” This is Karl Rove’s war. It helped President Bush beat the dreaded mid-term retreat in Senate and House seats that has haunted every president for decades. Every single thing that happened in America from July 2002 onward was tainted by the fact that questioning the administration, demanding any kind of explanation, demonstrating any kind of backbone was construed as weak on the war on terror and soft against the imaginary threat of Iraqi aggression.
But Rove won the elections, and still had a war on his hands. What to do now? Sell the war. Sell it harder than before, because there is no way to go back now. That’s why widely-respected Secretary of State Colin Powell makes the pitch at the UN, doubtlessly only days before we wade into battle. Negroponte is a schlub occupying a patronage position like so many Bush appointees. He covered up stunning human rights abuses and fronted for the men who executed the illegal arms sales that become the lynchpin of the Iran-Contra affair. He, like many of the people in this administration, doesn’t have or deserve any credibility in the world’s eyes.
So there is Colin Powell, finding it increasingly difficult to hold on to his ever-shrinking mote of dignity. He didn’t go to the UN and lie. He just passed on the lies that Karl Rove, George Bush, Dick Cheney and everyone else has been repeating since day one.
But the proof will come later. We will invade Iraq, without a doubt. We will bully the UN, threaten the French, whatever it takes, but the invasion force will still be 99 percent US and UK. We will go to Baghdad, we will kill Saddam Hussein (though his body won’t be found), we will secure the capitol and the nation’s oil fields. Iraq will fulfill its long-standing international obligations, and the oil will flow within a few years, to the Russian, British and American companies that have still-valid contracts with the nation of Iraq.
There will be massive, bloody conflict in the northern part of the country between rival Kurdish factions and possibly between Kurds and Turks. There will be old and ghastly atrocities revealed. There will be new ghastly atrocities engaged in. The Shiites in the south will slaughter Iraqi soldiers who are trying to retreat from the US air assault. Bombs will fall where they aren’t supposed to, and alongside weapons depots and intelligence ministries, hospitals and orphanages will be destroyed. Mobs will kill hundreds in cities where heavy armaments are the only American things that touches the ground. Massive statues of Saddam Hussein will be pulled down, in media moments that Rove and Cheney will want played again and again on Fox News Channel, and they will be.
But check on Iraq later. After we’ve grown frustrated with the infighting and essentially hand-picked the interim president. After we’ve shrunk our force in Iraq because new elections are looming and nobody wants to talk about 50,000 Americans occupying a new country. After a string of European/Central Asian/South Asian terrorist attacks triggered by opportunists who don’t care about Iraq but know that their message of hate will sell regardless. After at least one poorly executed but ultimately embarrassing Congressional inquiry into something or another that happened during the fighting in Iraq. After Iraq has become essentially identical to the Afghanistan of right now, early 2003. The cities outside of Baghdad will be in chaos or controlled by warlords who hoard food aid and menace aid workers. Religious fundamentalism will find new inroads in a land peculiarly denied access to any god other than “the Great Uncle” Saddam Hussein. The cost in American life will be small, but the cost in America’s budget will be staggering. As a result, we will abandon much of Iraq, like we have abandoned much of Afghanistan already.
Maybe then, people will vote. Maybe we’ll ask the hard questions. Maybe we’ll notice the resounding lack of credibility that all our leaders seem to share. Maybe we’ll demand that our newspapers focus on reporting information we should know rather than telling us what they think we want to know around the department store ads and touching stories of dog rescues and inexplicable news coverage of reality programming. Maybe we’ll wake up and realize that democracy is a hands-on game and everything you do, every word you speak, is and should be a celebration of the freedom democracy delivers us every day. And maybe, just maybe, people won’t have write this story again and again.
But frankly, I’m not holding my breath.
Colin Powell’s speech may have done its job for many luminaries of the world. It may have convinced the Washington Post Editorial Board (though that isn’t exactly shocking) and Bill Safire. Hell, it appears to have wooed over Mary McGrory (which is disappointing), but I think it requires some clarity.
What Colin Powell proved beyond a shadow of a doubt yesterday in his speech was that the unbelievably low threshold for “material breach” that America forced through in its UN Security Council resolution of last year had clearly been met. That’s all it did. Apply those standards to just about anybody and they would all be in material breach. Our closest ally, Israel, maintains an utterly un-secret nuclear weapons program whose 20-year history of clandestine development would clearly pass the threshold established by UN SC resolution 1441. There’s a good chance that Iran and Syria have all reached or passed the threshold. There’s no question that North Korea, Pakistan and India have all breached that threshold, and have functional weapons to show for it. (Additionally, North Korea is a communist nation, which was once all you needed to be to get your ass kicked by the United States.)
So Powell didn’t go to the UN to convince Mary McGrory and Bill Safire (and just about every other American too lazy to read a newspaper, vote, or think for him- or herself) that Iraq wasn’t happy about having the US go through it’s dirty laundry. Pretty much everyone knew that already. I haven’t been sitting here thinking all along that the Iraqi government was a peaceful idyll where Saddam Hussein and his fearful bootlicks killed thousands because they were misunderstood. Everyone knew Hussein was a bad man. Hussein killed lots of people. Hussein bombed Israel during the first Gulf War, gassed Kurds, slaughtered the Marsh Arabs, hunted Shiites, all of it. And he is hiding weapons, no doubt, because that’s what people do when they have weapons. They hide them.
But why now? Why are we going to war with Iraq now? Why didn’t US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte make the presentation yesterday? Why doesn’t anyone ask these questions?
Thomas Friedman makes a case in this column that going to war in Iraq will lead to a wonderful future for the Middle East. The logic is tortuous. Friedman says that the threat isn’t Iraq, or any other nation really, but the un-nationalized and undeterrable young people who feed into the belly of terrorism by providing its hands, its eyes and its legs for traversing the world. But, Friedman argues, the only way to stop the seemingly endless flow of these young men into the terrorism machine is to “transform these Arab states — which are also experiencing population explosions — to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible media that won't blame all their ills on others…” Otherwise, Friedman reasons, “we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they [the Arab States] need to shrink their output of undeterrables.”
Bravura reasoning, Mr. Friedman. Interesting that this handsome goal has never been elucidated by a member of the Bush administration. Intriguing that the President’s least-liked media outlet is the only source for this thought-provoking argument.
Interesting, also, that I don’t for one second believe that anyone in the Bush administration has offered this level of thought to the Iraq question. Instead, they are functioning now as they have all along. As DiIulio said, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm.” This is Karl Rove’s war. It helped President Bush beat the dreaded mid-term retreat in Senate and House seats that has haunted every president for decades. Every single thing that happened in America from July 2002 onward was tainted by the fact that questioning the administration, demanding any kind of explanation, demonstrating any kind of backbone was construed as weak on the war on terror and soft against the imaginary threat of Iraqi aggression.
But Rove won the elections, and still had a war on his hands. What to do now? Sell the war. Sell it harder than before, because there is no way to go back now. That’s why widely-respected Secretary of State Colin Powell makes the pitch at the UN, doubtlessly only days before we wade into battle. Negroponte is a schlub occupying a patronage position like so many Bush appointees. He covered up stunning human rights abuses and fronted for the men who executed the illegal arms sales that become the lynchpin of the Iran-Contra affair. He, like many of the people in this administration, doesn’t have or deserve any credibility in the world’s eyes.
So there is Colin Powell, finding it increasingly difficult to hold on to his ever-shrinking mote of dignity. He didn’t go to the UN and lie. He just passed on the lies that Karl Rove, George Bush, Dick Cheney and everyone else has been repeating since day one.
But the proof will come later. We will invade Iraq, without a doubt. We will bully the UN, threaten the French, whatever it takes, but the invasion force will still be 99 percent US and UK. We will go to Baghdad, we will kill Saddam Hussein (though his body won’t be found), we will secure the capitol and the nation’s oil fields. Iraq will fulfill its long-standing international obligations, and the oil will flow within a few years, to the Russian, British and American companies that have still-valid contracts with the nation of Iraq.
There will be massive, bloody conflict in the northern part of the country between rival Kurdish factions and possibly between Kurds and Turks. There will be old and ghastly atrocities revealed. There will be new ghastly atrocities engaged in. The Shiites in the south will slaughter Iraqi soldiers who are trying to retreat from the US air assault. Bombs will fall where they aren’t supposed to, and alongside weapons depots and intelligence ministries, hospitals and orphanages will be destroyed. Mobs will kill hundreds in cities where heavy armaments are the only American things that touches the ground. Massive statues of Saddam Hussein will be pulled down, in media moments that Rove and Cheney will want played again and again on Fox News Channel, and they will be.
But check on Iraq later. After we’ve grown frustrated with the infighting and essentially hand-picked the interim president. After we’ve shrunk our force in Iraq because new elections are looming and nobody wants to talk about 50,000 Americans occupying a new country. After a string of European/Central Asian/South Asian terrorist attacks triggered by opportunists who don’t care about Iraq but know that their message of hate will sell regardless. After at least one poorly executed but ultimately embarrassing Congressional inquiry into something or another that happened during the fighting in Iraq. After Iraq has become essentially identical to the Afghanistan of right now, early 2003. The cities outside of Baghdad will be in chaos or controlled by warlords who hoard food aid and menace aid workers. Religious fundamentalism will find new inroads in a land peculiarly denied access to any god other than “the Great Uncle” Saddam Hussein. The cost in American life will be small, but the cost in America’s budget will be staggering. As a result, we will abandon much of Iraq, like we have abandoned much of Afghanistan already.
Maybe then, people will vote. Maybe we’ll ask the hard questions. Maybe we’ll notice the resounding lack of credibility that all our leaders seem to share. Maybe we’ll demand that our newspapers focus on reporting information we should know rather than telling us what they think we want to know around the department store ads and touching stories of dog rescues and inexplicable news coverage of reality programming. Maybe we’ll wake up and realize that democracy is a hands-on game and everything you do, every word you speak, is and should be a celebration of the freedom democracy delivers us every day. And maybe, just maybe, people won’t have write this story again and again.
But frankly, I’m not holding my breath.
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