If I Were President
August 15, 2002
If, my fellow Americans, you should see fit to
elect me your president in 2004, I will take office with one thought
uppermost: No man on earth should have this much power. No man should be
able to determine the fate of millions. In particular, no man should have
the life-and-death power to plunge the United States into war.
President Bush has
proved this. Not because he is an evil man, but because, like all other men,
he has his oddities. His judgment is highly questionable. He knows little of
history, geography, or foreign cultures. Worse yet, he seems not to realize
his shortcomings. Let me recall an old saying: He who is unaware of
his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge. Why should the
lives of thousands, or even millions, be at the mercy of one mans
idiosyncrasies?
In other words, if I had
his power, I wouldnt use it. I would remind Congress that the
authority to declare war belongs to it, not to the president. And Id
make it clear that I think going to war is generally a terrible course to
take; in the case of Iraq, surely imprudent and very likely disastrous
as well as criminal.
I would refuse to
prosecute such a war, even if Congress declared it. If I were impeached
for this, so be it. Declaring war should not mean making an arbitrary
decision to attack a foreign country, but recognizing that a state of war
already exists, requiring, in the plain English of the Constitution,
the common defense of the United States.
The whole principle of
American government is, or used to be, quite simple: Divide
Power. The Founders of this republic often said that the very
definition of tyranny was the concentration of all power into a
few, or the same hands. Bush seems to think thats the
definition of democracy.
There is nothing
defensive about Bushs proposed war on Iraq. Iraq poses no threat to
us. Even its neighbors, who ought to feel threatened by Saddam Hussein if
anyone does, are begging Bush not to attack Iraq! Iraqs chief
regional enemy is Israel, which is always quick to respond to a perceived
(or even suspected) threat; yet the Israelis arent preparing to
attack Iraq. The governments of Europe are virtually unanimous, and
passionate, in their opposition to Bushs war. And they are much
closer to the Middle East than we are.
Because its so obvious that Iraq has no
intention of attacking us, Bush has cobbled the excuse that if not stopped
now, it may attack us in the remote future, when it has acquired
weapons of mass destruction. He also charges, without
credible evidence, that Iraq was somehow complicit with the terrorists
who attacked this country last year. For good measure, he calls Saddam
Hussein a mass murderer of his own people, as if this fact somehow
fortifies his other reasons for war. It doesnt. And besides, one
good reason would be enough. Three feeble excuses dont add up to a
single good reason for this oddball war.
So Bush insists that
the war is defensive in the sense that it is pre-emptive.
That is nothing more than a very strained euphemism for
aggressive. It could be used to justify attacking almost any
foreign country.
In fact, by
Bushs logic, the Japanese were justified in launching a
pre-emptive strike against Pearl Harbor in 1941. After all, the United
States had its own designs in the Far East, posed a danger to Japanese
ambitions in the region, and was clearly hostile to Japan. Better to cripple
the U.S. Navy sooner than allow it to dominate the Far East later.
But Japans
pre-emptive strike not only failed, it backfired. Not only was the U.S. Navy
quickly rebuilt and immensely increased; the United States also built an
air force that ruthlessly annihilated the civilian populations of
Japans great cities.
And in the greatest and
most instructive irony of all, from todays perspective, the United
States soon developed weapons of mass destruction and
used them to destroy two cities, even after the war was essentially won.
So the seemingly prudent pre-emptive strike turned out not
to be such a bright idea.
War is not only evil,
its supremely unpredictable. A wise critic summed up the great
tragic lesson of Shakespeares tragedies: that men may set
off a course of events which they can neither calculate nor control.
This is also the eternal lesson of war.
Joseph Sobran
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