On the Right - war with Iraq; anti-smoking regulations - Column

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Iraq: How Are the Advocates Stacking Up?

NEW YORK, AUGUST 23

The variety of opinions on Iraq stimulates the search for ideological affinities. A political position taken merely at random, unrelated to motherboards, doesn't sink deep roots. Free or cheaper pharmaceutical medicine comes in off Medicare, a child of federal welfare parentage. We hear calls for invading Iraq, for tightening sanctions against it, for forcing our way to inspection of its war-making facilities, for organizing regional alliances against Saddam Hussein, and for simply doing nothing.

We run into the formative division of post-war policy.

-- If the troublesome country was directly or prospectively related to the Soviet enterprise, we were ready to go to war (Korea), or the nearest thing to it (Cuba). The most vivid evidence of where the distinction was blazingly observed was the Dominican Republic, 1965. We sent the Marines there because President Johnson had reason to fear that the pro-Communist movement would end in the satellization of one more Caribbean country by Moscow. Of paramount interest: We invaded the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola -- the Dominican Republic. We did nothing to disturb the western half, a slave state ruled over by Papa Doc Duvalier. We knew that he engaged in torture and voodoo and murder, but Haiti was not prospectively a part of the Communist world enterprise. Would a revived Haiti-type country in the Caribbean bring on the Marines, sent by Johnson to the Dominican Republic, by Reagan to Grenada?

-- Toward the end, in Vietnam, we were prepared to go it alone with our policy of standing in the way of Vietnamese-Communist conquest of the south. Finally, we gave up, but in doing so, nurtured a resentment. Congress has several times registered its determination to go it alone if necessary to defend Taiwan.

-- The anti-Communist catalyst hasn't worked in re Iraq because it is no longer really relevant. The Chinese are ideologists in the same sense that the French are Catholic. The development of the animus against Iraq was fed mostly by our longtime resentment of brutal dictatorships.

But important differences individuated Iraq. We established that Saddam Hussein was developing ABC (atomic/biological/chemical) weaponry, and we knew that Saddam was capable of using such stuff (he did, against the Kurds). Moreover we faced an enemy we had already fought and defeated, but inconclusively. And we are looking into the face of a country that dispatched missiles into Israel ten years ago.

So we had an agglomeration of Americans concerned 1) to move preemptively against a country developing apocalyptic weaponry, 2) to make an example of the country symbolizing the most extreme form of Islamic aggressiveness, and 3) to protect the strategic interests of Israel. Plus those Americans who feel an inclination to use American military power to forward American interests, here defined as bequeathing to the Mideast such relative stability as would ensue on ending the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Add to these, those Americans who are fired by the Wilsonian imperative: Americans should exert themselves to do good work in the fields of the Lord.

The other side is coalescing around other traditional U.S. positions. The first of these is that we do not go lightly into war, not since abandoning imperialism a hundred years ago. A second is that any U.S. target in alien cultural territory, to which access is difficult, calls for special care. Iraq is not Grenada. It is landlocked, with Syria on the west, Turkey on the north, Iran on the east, and Saudi Arabia on the south. And, these demurrers stress that this is not just a cruise- missile war, like Kosovo. Another reservation is that with progressive detachment from the Eject Saddam project by people we tended to count on in the past to help out before the war is born, while it is being waged, after it is over (pre partu, in partum, post partum), it is simply imprudent to proceed in the absence of persuasive evidence that a failure to proceed would be irresponsible. The consolidation of views of this kind has resulted in present policies on North Korea. Over there are starving zombies who can't make cornflakes but can make atomic weapons and nuclear missiles. One Reagan, one Clinton, and two Bushes have opted not to invade North Korea.

The galvanizing ideological positions are perplexing, with Democrats preponderantly anti-war, Republicans marginally in favor. Obviously Congress should be officially consulted. It is not obvious at all how Congress would come out.

Iraq: Question Closed?

NEW YORK, AUGUST 27

The key sentence in the speech of Vice President Cheney in Nashville was, "The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action."

In this intense address, in which words and sentences carry huge freight, we are asked to attend scrupulously to what Mr. Cheney is saying, and of course the very first question becomes: Risks to whom? Is it possible to distinguish between the threat Iraq poses in the Mideast and the threat it poses to the United States? Cheney answers that question as follows: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." But if there is "no doubt," as averred here, then it follows that there can be no excuse for putting off preemptive action. And that concern about American casualties in the operation becomes idle, because however many lives are lost, they are as nothing up against a nuclear attack.