Politics:
Middle Ground
Oliver makes a point below, that we're backed into a corner, that we've got nowhere to turn. As distasteful as it is to him, he makes something between a suggestion and a plea that America limit its military assault to a tactical war instead of the stunningly-named 400 cruise missile a day "shock and awe" approach. Reaching this point was probably hard for Oliver. I'm not there yet.
I've got a middle ground proposal of my own. (All of this is keying off
Josh Marshall's
personal struggle to find some center on this war.) It's scary for me, but I don't think it's as scary as it could be.
The two things I believe are: 1) war shouldn't be an option; and 2)
Saddam Hussein is a bad man who shouldn't be in charge of Iraq.
How do we get them both? Earlier talk about exiling Saddam Hussein hasn't really gone anywhere, mostly because the Arab world is so divided and conflicted that they aren't ever able to meaningfully propose a real exile plan. But there is still a chance that this could work. It has never been clearer to people everywhere that the United States has a pistol to Iraq's head and an itchy trigger finger. Shouldn't an exile plan be floated right now, by someone who has the integrity, contacts and muscle to make it happen? Doesn't the Arab world have an elder statesman who can team up with
Jimmy Carter or somebody to get this thing going on? What about
King Abdullah of Jordan. (Carter's got uber-cred in the Middle East, folks. Basically, Jimmy could take anybody with him to make an honest go of this. Who's got his number?)
If that isn't something really close to viable, try this. We've got 250,000 American soldiers and sailors waiting to fight a war under circumstances the American people (as well as the European people, and their leaders) don't like (without UN help). This war, even if it goes swimmingly by military standards will leave a lot of dead Iraqis and quite a few dead Americans (which nobody likes to talk about). Oliver's plan,
outlined here, makes for probably less death, but as I've said, I'm not ready for a slightly-less-death plan. I want much less death. Here's my plan (remember the goal: no war, no Saddam Hussein).
Special Forces go all the way to Badghad and kill Hussein. Send a team to each palace, and get the job done. We declare victory, (more on that later) and go home. The rationale is this: If we do the war we're talking about doing, we're going to have deaths like we haven't seen in some time. We're going to have 19 year olds who don't know war from Chee-tos getting killed in the desert, and families who didn't ask for this and who have been starving for a dozen years getting caught in the crossfire. We're going to have a humanitarian disaster in six places and bloody reprisals in three more. We're going to leave our children with a splintered international community and a life-sentence to prop up whatever next government we put in there with a destroyed infrastructure and a decimated nation. Who needs this?
The lives of many Iraqis will be spared with this approach. Special forces will take casualties, and some will die. But if we can do it with only these deaths, isn't it better? When they agreed to become special forces wet operatives, these soldiers stopped being regular American military. They agreed to do unsavory and very dangerous things for our government, often-times without credit for their achievements or opportunity for escape. I don't think their lives are worth any less, but I do believe that they're prepared for this type of outcome, unlike the reservist from Cleveland or the
water purification specialist who went to my high school and who was killed by a Scud missile in 1991 (Frank Keough).
So we've got intelligence assets in Iraq (or Powell wouldn't have all that information he is so sparing with at the UN). Why don't we hit each palace/compound, kill whatever Saddam Husseins we see (you know the decoy thing), and get out of this nightmare. Meanwhile, our intelligence folks start spreading the rumor that the military, in a bid to protect their nation, families and colleagues from utter military domination, pulled a coup and killed The Great Uncle. If we got the right one, great. If not, let the fervor take over. Hussein will be long gone, dead or in deep hiding. Watch the soldiers shave their mustaches, see the people sing and dance in the street, take credit for freeing the grateful Iraqis, and send some teams from Halliburton to start rehabilitating those oil fields. Let the French and Russians get their long-standing oil contracts honored, and the rift in the UN is healed. Bring in the Iraqi National Congress jokers from London to make some speeches (and protect the hell outta them) so nobody gets any big ideas. Make the Kurds happy somehow (perhaps extracting INC pledges for Kurdish autonomy). Food comes in from all four corners of the globe, the plight of Iraqi people ends at last! Face is saved, on middle ground!
I know this is too utopian, but it isn't bad. If we attack Iraq, win and kill Saddam Hussein in the process, we've got the entire Arab world ready to kill us, probably a hostile, nuclear-armed Islamist regime in Pakistan, a bunch of attacks on U.S. targets abroad (a la the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998), and about 50 liters of bad blood each between us and the French and Russians. My plan avoids some of this, and we can get down to the brass tacks of rebuilding Iraq as some kind of Arab model of democracy. (We'll see how committed Bush really is to this idea; I know a guy named Karzai who says don't trust the
president's handshake when nation-building is at issue.) Plus, with my plan, international opinion is more apt to swing back in our favor, as opposed to be grudgingly nudged back to dead center. Everyone wants to get in on dancing liberated people in the streets. They'll have a little more hesitation if those people are dancing amid the totally obliterated rubble that included their homes and family members.