who?
december thirty | ten thirty post meridiem
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"'Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam,' said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. 'Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation.'"--from The Washington Post (my emphasis)
"On Iraq, the left finds itself in a quandary, torn between two fundamental principles. One is anti-imperialism--a deep suspicion of US military action abroad, especially when undertaken unilaterally. The other is humanitarianism--an impulse to see America use its influence to promote freedom and human rights around the world. In some cases, like Vietnam, the left has united under the anti-imperial banner; in others, like Bosnia, it has largely embraced the humanitarian standard[?! - me]. In Iraq, both principles seem to apply. How to weigh them? Only by coolly assessing the validity of the humanitarian and anti-intervention arguments can liberals hope to develop a position that is both coherent and defensible.
[...one cool assessment of the validity of the respective arguments later:] One nonviolent alternative, proposed recently in these pages by Andrew Mack (a former aide to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan), would seek to bolster the internal Iraqi opposition by lifting most of the sanctions on Iraq and opening up the country to foreign investment and other forms of international engagement... The great drawback of such an approach, of course, is that it would do little to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people. Sadly, one might simply have to live with that. In the end, the moral case for intervening in Iraq is very strong, but not strong enough."
--Michael Massing, in The Nation (my emphasis again)
Though one of these statements is retrospective and the other speculative, I think they go a long way towards illustrating a fantastic breach that exists between American (and European) liberals, and the conservative policies of the Republican administrations which have dealt most intimately with Iraq over the last 20 years. This isn't necessarily an ideological breach; it can certainly be construed as one, though I think that's missing the point. Instead, it's a breach in responsibility, and the power that comes with it, and the way this power affects both the decisions that are made and the manner of reasoning behind those decisions.
The first quote would seem to contradict the logic of the proposal in the second. I'm not familiar enough with the Iraqi economy to have an opinion (no wonder I can't pull the ladies), but you'd have to question the wisdom of resuming foreign investment when dealing with a dictator who has built himself 50 palaces in the last 20 years while allowing his people to succumb to starvation and disease, sanctions or no sanctions (palaces he cannot even sleep in, ironically enough, due to security concerns). Misguided and illegal as it may have been, Reagan's (and Rumsfeld's) boostering of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war was a pragmatic response to what they perceived to be a crisis. The highlighted part of Wilson's statement - "History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation" - is a mushmouthed way of passing over a major error, but it was an error of action; of a responsibility undertaken and acted on.
This is the breach. Massing can create a neat division between "imperialism" ("empirism" would be a better word, if it was a word) and humanitarianism because he, and those who think like him, do not have to make a decision, and decisions always undermine "fundamental principles". As much as we may want to deny it, humanitarian intervention is still a new, messy, confused, and relatively untested affair. Thus my punctuated surprise over the assertion that the left "largely embraced" a common standard re: Bosnia (could someone please explain what this standard was and whether NATO's actions were also "largely embraced"? I thought this was an issue that divided the left more than any other during the '90.) It's nearly indisputable that removing Hussein - notorious for doing anything to protect his own ass - will require violence in some form. What is the best way to go about this? Should we go about this? Who will do the going about? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Or do we continue to do nothing? Massing's highlighted statement about having to live with continued Iraqi suffering is chilling, and not least because this is the reluctant outcome of all opposition to invasion so far, as well as the legacy of the Clinton administration. It's chilling to me personally because - lest you think I've turned into Christopher Hitchens - it's the outcome of my own continued uneasy opposition. The reasons for this are many and familiar, but I think we on the left have to look at that sad dismissal of a monumental suffering, and weigh it, and begin to feel it as a burden. As a responsibility; one that requires realistic action on the part of a national and international collective; a collective that includes conservatives, profiteers, and armies. And not just in the US: France, China, and Russia all have signed contracts with the Iraqi regime to mine oil reserves, and it's difficult to see their capitulation on Resolution 1441 as anything other than an economic compromise: better to get a slice of the pie than none at all (mmm, oil pie). They've adhered to the sanctions so far, but don't doubt for a second that, given the opportunity, they wouldn't keep a tyrant in power to advance their own economic prosperity as quickly as any American administration would, or has.
I don't believe in the notion that if you don't have anything constructive to add, you shouldn't criticize something. But this dynamic of criticism without even the possibility of action is now so chronically ingrained in the left that I think it's applicable here, if for no other reason than to develop the argument past the "fundamental principle" (aka, reflexive unthinking pose) of opposition to any American involvement abroad. Saddam Hussein is, to an extent (certainly not to the same extent as bin Laden), our creation; Iraq was on the verge of defeat when the CIA began feeding them intelligence reports on Iranian troop movements. Any chemical or biological weaponry he once possessed were developed with American assistance. Our half-assed intervention in 1991 ended with the slaughter of thousands of Kurds and Arab resistance fighters. At the very least we have the responsibility to discuss the issue as if it were still alive; as if there was still something to be done.
Something big is going to happen in this area (it's the second largest source of known oil reserves, after all), whether it's now or 20 years from now when Saddam has a heart attack while doing laps in one of his hundreds of swimming pools. Are we going to watch another 20 years of torture, murder, and starvation go by? Irrelevance is an easy habit to fall into; it can be a form of absolution, of self-righteousness, of neglect (hello Europe). I don't have any immediate answers other than this: that the conversation has to start from a point of active and pragmatic responsibility. Now.