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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 man’s idiosyncrasies?

In other words, if I had his power, I wouldn’t use it. I would remind Congress that the authority to declare war belongs to it, not to the president. And I’d 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 that’s the definition of democracy.

There is nothing defensive about Bush’s 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! Iraq’s chief regional enemy is Israel, which is always quick to respond to a perceived (or even suspected) threat; yet the Israelis aren’t preparing to attack Iraq. The governments of Europe are virtually unanimous, and passionate, in their opposition to Bush’s war. And they are much closer to the Middle East than we are.

[Breaker quote: The logic of "pre-emptive" war]Because it’s 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 doesn’t. And besides, one good reason would be enough. Three feeble excuses don’t 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 Bush’s 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 Japan’s 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 Japan’s great cities.

And in the greatest and most instructive irony of all, from today’s 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, it’s supremely unpredictable. A wise critic summed up the great tragic lesson of Shakespeare’s 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

Copyright © 2002 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
Internet publications without express permission
of Griffin Internet Syndicate

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