Why This War?

“And a man’s foes shall be they of his own house,” says the Good Book. Similarly, a man’s own government is apt to be his enemy. That’s why the Founders of the U.S. Government came up with the quaint notion of limiting the powers of that government and making it answerable to the people it ruled.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it hasn’t quite worked as planned. Domestic rulers, elected or not, aren’t necessarily better than foreign rulers. King George III, as I point out from time to time, didn’t rule his 13 American colonies anywhere near as harshly as the present U.S. Government rules us.

Think of it this way. Would you rather deal with a tax on the tea you drink — even if you drink a lot of it — or with the Internal Revenue Service?

That’s why I was skeptical, back in 1990, when our rulers were trying to convince me that Saddam Hussein was my enemy. Sure, he was a tyrant, but that meant only that he was the enemy of the people of Iraq. He wasn’t hurting or threatening me or my family, and I saw no reason to send my son to fight him. Our own government was robbing us every week.

Among the reasons our rulers gave for the Gulf War was that Saddam Hussein, if allowed to keep Kuwait, might raise oil prices. How much? An economist I trusted calculated that even if he also conquered Saudi Arabia, the effect on oil prices would be slight. Not that it made much difference to me. I’d rather pay $5 a gallon at the pump than risk losing my son Mike. And I’m sure most fathers felt the same way about their sons.

Now as then, we have a President Bush warning us that Saddam Hussein is evil. Well, most rulers are bad enough, but that doesn’t mean they threaten us. But isn’t Saddam Hussein trying to develop nuclear weapons? Maybe so. But he won’t live long enough to be able to hit the United States with them; and even if he did, he would be insane to do so.

The European governments aren’t unduly worried about a Saddam Hussein with nukes, even though they live a lot closer to him than we do. But the U.S. Government is indignant at the very idea of his acquiring these “weapons of mass destruction.” Our rulers talk as if the only regime that can be trusted to possess such weapons is the one regime that has actually used them — namely, the U.S. Government. Oh, and Israel, of course.

All this alarm over Iraq rings false when you consider that we lived for forty years with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. The Soviets were infinitely more menacing to us than Iraq is now. They trained nuclear missiles on dozens of American cities. Yet after an initial surge of fear, we learned to play ball with them. Why the rush to smash Iraq?

A growing number of states now possess nukes, and the number will keep increasing. Obviously there is a danger that some of these bombs will eventually be dropped. But for the most part they are like the queen in a game of chess: she exerts power even when she isn’t actually moved, forcing one’s opponent to be cautious in his attack. It’s doubtful that Iraq would be eager to nuke Israel, which has its own fearsome nuclear arsenal, but a nuclear Iraq might feel safer from Israeli assault and be able to play a larger role in the Middle East.

But unless the Bush Administration strikes soon, it will lose support for its planned war. That support, so far, has been fueled by the dubious claim that Saddam Hussein had something or other to do with the 9/11 attacks, so that knocking him out would be a triumph in the “war on terrorism.”

But the only evidence for this claim is an unproven report that an Iraqi diplomat had a single meeting with an al-Qaeda representative in Prague. Even if true, that by itself hardly warrants war on Iraq.

When the reasons that are given for war are so feeble, you can be sure they aren’t the real reasons. The war Bush wants will intensify, not lessen, the danger of terrorism against Americans.

Why does he want it? What is his real reason? Who is our real enemy?

Joseph Sobran