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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
It did not do so, he argued, because invading and occupying a major Arab nation was likely to destabilize the region and lead to further terrorist attacks against the U.S. "Al-Qaida cannot defeat the U.S.," he said. "But United States can defeat the United States. It can defeat the United States by occupying a major Arab country and serving as a major target for al-Qaida." Indeed, Danner argued, this outcome was precisely what bin Laden had wanted: His attacks were designed to lure the U.S. into a massive military retaliation against the Arab and Muslim world, which would blow up in America's face.
Instead of pursuing this catastrophically risky course, Danner advocated continuing with a beefed-up containment policy -- more inspectors, unlimited time -- combined with smart sanctions (targeted only at imports that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction) and a tough new policy allowing U.S. or allied air forces to bomb sites to which Saddam did not allow inspectors access.
This latter provision is key: It was clearly designed to get around the central problem, outlined in painful detail in Kenneth M. Pollack's important book "The Threatening Storm," that Saddam never gives an inch until an army stands at his door. But since the costs of maintaining such an army are prohibitive -- hence Bush's current hyperactive trigger finger -- "we cannot hold the gun to Saddam's head for as long as it would take to actually disarm Iraq," in Pollack's words. But Danner's proposal addresses that problem: maintaining a much larger number of inspectors in Iraq would not be prohibitively expensive, and bombing noncompliant sites could be done by the planes currently protecting the Kurds by patrolling the northern no-fly zone.
Containment, Danner argued, was working: Saddam's much-touted nuclear program was nonexistent, his army was half the size it was after the Gulf War, and his ability to make WMD was severely compromised by the presence of the inspectors. To pull out the inspectors precipitously would simply confirm the suspicions of the rest of the world that the U.S. never intended to disarm Iraq, but merely wanted to invade it.
Hitchens' major counterargument to Danner's sobering scenario of a post-invasion world, full of seething anti-U.S. resentments, seemed to be the same one Bush used, and which is also made, in frightening fashion, in Pollack's book: it's more dangerous to not act, because Saddam is insane and unpredictable and might do something evil at any time, and time is not on our side. (Perhaps aware of the shakiness of the evidence, Hitchens did not try very hard to link Saddam to international terrorists, although he did bring up his alleged ties to the radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which has been battling the Kurds.) But Hitchens spent less time making that counterargument, and considerably more time enunciating the "moral imperative" that he passionately believes requires us to remove one of our age's most loathsome leaders. His argument was driven less by fear than by idealism.
Hitchens' position can be summed up as follows: It is our moral duty to strike down evil tyrants like Saddam Hussein whenever we can. We should finish the job we started in 1991. The status quo is too risky to preserve, and inspections will not work. Saddam is going to fall soon anyway, and it would be better for us to push him to avoid the mess of his implosion. The war will be short and painless, we will be greeted as emancipators, and rebuilding Iraq will not be that difficult. The Arab world will not turn against us; moderates and democrats will be strengthened, and radical Islamists who said we would never fight back will be discredited even before we hunt them down and kill them.
Hitchens opened by saying that those arguing against war were missing the point, because "the engagement with Saddam Hussein has already begun" -- i.e. the allied enforcement of the no-fly zone, with bombings against Iraqi targets. "There is no escaping this, there is no neutralist or abstentionist position," he said. As war loomed, "in some ways I find myself exhilarated," he said. Drawing on the moral capital of his longtime support for the Kurds, who suffered heavily under Saddam and were betrayed by the U.S. after the Gulf War, he said that any of the millions of Kurdish exiles "could tell a story that would chill the blood of anyone in this room. They have the right of return. And it's a privilege to be able to say that one is on their side."
Hitchens acknowledged that the United States had not historically played such an admirable role in the region. We had propped up corrupt client or enforcer states like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, turning a blind eye to their brutality. (Hitchens later commented that the real axis of evil should have been Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.) In a caustic reference to the antiwar slogan "no blood for oil," Hitchens said, "Blood for oil was when Saddam gassed the Kurds and nothing was said by the administration. That was when blood was shed for oil."
How, then, had the U.S. overcome its imperial past to become the shining force for historic good that he said it had now become? Here Hitchens performed a bit of high-flown razzle-dazzle out of Chapter 36 in Hegel's "Philosophy of History." "It does seem to me that by what might be called a Hegelian moment, in his famous phrase the 'cunning of reason,' by a long series of mistakes and crimes and blunders, the United States has placed itself on the right side of history."
Moving smartly on before it occurred to anyone that perhaps even Hegel's all-encompassing World-Spirit might have rebelled at using Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as its instruments, Hitchens argued that the U.S. had a moral imperative to fight the likes of Saddam. "Ever since the 1989 revolution (that toppled the Soviet empire), our hopes of peace and of peace dividends have been repeatedly spoiled by the revival of the one-party state megalomaniac despot. Slobodan Milosevic. Saddam Hussein. Kim Jung Il."
