The Empire Talks Back 
August 27, 2002 

by Joe Sobran

     With domestic and even Republican support for war on 
Iraq starting to crumble, the Bush administration is 
trying to quell doubts. 

     First, the White House announced that President 
Bush's legal counsel has reached the conclusion -- 
surprise! -- that the president is constitutionally 
entitled to attack Iraq "pre-emptively" without a 
declaration of war from Congress. This is the same 
George W. Bush who claims to believe in the "strict 
construction" of the Constitution. 

     Second, Vice President Dick Cheney told a convention 
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Iraq poses such a 
"mortal threat" to the United States that such a war is 
not only justified but urgently necessary. 

     Note that Cheney, like all the top hawks in this 
extremely hawkish administration, is not eligible for 
membership in the VFW. All of these tough guys managed to 
avoid military service during the Vietnam War. You might 
expect this fact to make them blush before sending others 
to fight, but it doesn't seem to. Like liberal 
compassion, conservative courage is chiefly vicarious. At 
least the first President Bush had been a combat pilot, 
and young soldiers and pilots could respect him for 
having done what he was asking them to do in the 1991 
Gulf War. 

     But give Cheney this: he is a forceful speaker who 
makes his boss seem like a pitiful dolt. George W. Bush 
starts a sentence without knowing how on earth he's going 
to finish it. Cheney talks as if he knows just what he 
means. 

     "Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will 
acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon," he told his VFW 
audience. "Many of us are convinced that ..."? On what 
evidence? How does the opinion of an unspecified "many of 
us" justify aggressive war? One could retort with as much 
reason that "many of us are convinced that" the real 
purpose of the proposed war would be U.S. control of 
Middle Eastern oil. 

     And what if Saddam Hussein did acquire "weapons of 
mass destruction"? "There is no doubt," says Cheney, 
"that he is amassing them to use against our friends, 
against our allies, and against us." On the contrary, 
there is plenty of doubt. How could he deliver such 
weapons against us? Would he dare to do so? No country 
has ever used nuclear weapons against another country 
that possessed them, for fear of retaliation. Only one 
country has ever used them at all. 

     "The risks of inaction are far greater than the 
risks of action." This sentence has a nice aphoristic 
neatness; but is it true? Nobody can know; but the 
history of warfare suggests that these fall under the 
heading of famous last words. The U.S. Civil War, both 
World Wars, the Vietnam War, and many other conflicts 
were begun by men who feared "the risks of inaction" and 
expected quick victories. 

     If Cheney were candid, he would spell out the "risks 
of action" as well as the alleged "risks of inaction." 
Instead, he ignores and belittles them. This is exactly 
what makes most of the world, and a growing number of 
Americans, afraid of the reckless enterprise the 
administration is rushing into, with minimal reflection 
and debate. 

     Cheney says Saddam Hussein poses a "mortal threat" 
to the United States and that "nothing in the past dozen 
years has stopped him." Nonsense. Nobody in his right 
mind believes that Hussein is a "mortal threat" to this 
country, and the first Gulf War certainly stopped him 
from attacking even tiny Kuwait, let alone this country, 
which he never meant to attack. 

     Laying it on thick, Cheney says Iraq has a 
"totalitarian regime." Again, nonsense. Brutal as it is, 
the Iraqi government permits, among other things, freedom 
of religion; its ruling class includes Muslims and 
Christians. Its former UN ambassador was a practicing 
Catholic. 

     Yet Cheney says the goal of war on Iraq will be to 
create "a government that is democratic and pluralistic, 
a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and 
religious group are recognized and protected." Why 
doesn't he apply this standard to Israel, a mock 
democracy that is anything but "pluralistic" and holds 
the human rights of non-Jews in contempt? Israel has 
never had a single Muslim or Christian in its cabinet, 
and it stockpiles "weapons of mass destruction." 

     No wonder most of the world regards the United 
States as arrogant and hypocritical. And as the real 
threat to peace. 

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