Second of two editorials
In arguing in support of a U.S. attack on Iraq, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has raised Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians in the 1980-88 war as evidence of his perfidy. Although true, there is a problem with this as a justification -- and it is indicative of many arguments raised in support of a war.
The problem is that the United States -- led by President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush -- was fully aware that Iraq, which the United States supported against what it considered to be an even-worse Iran, was using chemical weapons while it also received and used U.S. military intelligence and other support.
That fact brings us back to the question we raised in an editorial yesterday: Why does the Bush administration persist in trying to roll this rock up the hill?
One possible explanation is that this president sees himself as somehow obliged to finish the work of his father, work left undone when Saddam was permitted to remain in place at the end of the 1990-91 war. If that were the case, the defection of Gen. Scowcroft, his father's national security adviser and family friend, could now serve to take any such obligation off the younger Bush's back.
There is also the argument that the Israelis, made nervous by the evenhandedness implicit in the current American approach to arranging peace between them and the Palestinians, want to tie the United States more closely to them, through an American-launched war against Iraq. Such a war would annihilate current American relations with countries like Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.
The irony is that Israel is, in fact, safer with America having a reasonable relationship with the Arab states of the region, than it is with the United States in the process of waging a solo, hot war against an Arab state, even one as unloved as Iraq.
The third theory as to why the Bush administration is continuing to beat the drums for a war with Iraq is the popular -- but to us slightly loony -- claim that oil barons in the administration want to grab control of Iraq's oil production, to anchor the world energy market against potential instability in Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing states.
The trouble with that argument is that the level and nature of instability introduced to the Middle East and its oil market by a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq would be immeasurable. The governments of all its oil producers would shake and shudder. The only guarantee against such instability would be the introduction of even more U.S. troops to the area as occupiers.
Sound U.S. policy at this point would be to let the current reverberating threats against Saddam Hussein serve as incentives for him to permit resumed U.N. inspections of Iraq's weapons capacity; to maintain vigilance over what Iraq is actually doing through overflight and satellite surveillance, in case a pre-emptive strike against its facilities becomes necessary; and to continue to rattle the nerves of Saddam's regime through contacts and some help to his opposition, feckless though most of them appear to be.
But no unilateral, solo U.S. attack on Iraq should occur, no matter how evil it or its leader may be. The case for such a momentous undertaking has not been made.
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