The Empire Talks Back

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.

Joseph Sobran