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Dreams and Nightmares


September 26, 2002

At last we are beginning to have a real public debate about the imminent war on Iraq. Senator Tom Daschle has charged that the Bush administration is exploiting the war for political purposes and defaming its Democratic critics by implying that their concern for national security isn’t all it might be.

Daschle may have a point, but he might achieve more by demanding that President Bush take responsibility for the war’s outcome. Can Bush assure us that defeating Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein will make Americans safer from terrorism? Will he admit failure if the result is an increase in terrorist attacks on Americans, at home and abroad?

A year ago Bush warned that the war on terrorism would be long and hard, and that we might never know when we had achieved victory. Such a potentially endless war against an elusive and ill-defined enemy calls for a high level of sustained morale, something Americans aren’t noted for. But Bush assured us that our will and resolve were up to the task.

But hasn’t Bush himself essentially admitted the futility of that war by changing his target from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein and Iraq? He has made fitful efforts to connect Iraq to al-Qaeda, but they have convinced nobody. Even British prime minister Tony Blair, one of Bush’s few allies, supplied no evidence of such a connection in his recent address to Parliament.

Under what conditions would Bush admit a mistake? The philosopher Karl Popper said that scientific propositions are meaningful only when they are falsifiable. A theory is empty unless it is possible to prove it wrong.

If the war on Iraq fails or backfires, resulting in a new surge of anti-American terrorism, is Bush prepared to admit he was wrong? Of course not. He is a politician, and politicians don’t confess mistakes (except when caught taking bribes or committing adultery — then they call their crimes and sins “mistakes”).

[Breaker quote: The certainty of the unexpected]Bush’s apologists in the media should also be forced to say what they think the war on Iraq will achieve. Will it reduce the danger of terrorism? Will they admit error if it has the opposite effect, or if it proves to be a military disaster, or if it makes this chaotic world even more chaotic? Or will they try to claim some sort of vindication no matter what the outcome is?

Probably the latter. If Bush loses his war, the journalists who now support him will turn against him, arguing that he didn’t fight the war the way they urged him to fight it. Many of them still complain that his father didn’t “follow through” on his victory in the 1991 Gulf War by capturing and occupying Baghdad, thereby allowing Saddam Hussein to survive defeat.

Unlike victory over terrorism, victory over Iraq should be fairly easy to recognize. But the incumbent Bush still hasn’t explained what the one war has to do with the other. Besides, the defeat of Iraq, in the narrow sense of toppling its government, may be attended by costly side effects that Bush hasn’t acknowledged. He seems to assume that Iraq can be defeated with surgical precision, without creating unpredictable ripples throughout the Middle East.

What if, for example, Ariel Sharon seizes the opportunity of a U.S. war on Iraq to drive all Arabs out of Israel and the occupied territories? This is not only possible but probable, given Israel’s record of exploiting American preoccupations elsewhere and Sharon’s special penchant for murderous aggression. So much for the Palestinian state Bush says he believes in. Israel already has the weapons of mass destruction Bush accuses Saddam Hussein of coveting, and Sharon is just the man to use them.

This is only one of many possible nightmare scenarios. But Bush doesn’t seem to have any nightmares; he lives in a dream, in which military action has only the desired consequences and no allowance is made for possible surprises. The most frightening thing about him is his apparent assumption that everything will go exactly as planned.

It won’t. The only certainty of war is the unexpected. Even the staggering military power of the U.S. doesn’t guarantee control of events once the shooting starts. This is why Bush should be forced to tell the American public just what he expects.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2002 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
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of Griffin Internet Syndicate

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