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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The former New York governor argues that Saddam must go -- but now is not the time for war.
Feb 10, 2003 | When New York's Mario Cuomo delivered the keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he spoke powerfully about the need for caution in U.S. foreign policy. "No martial music will be able to muffle the sound of the truth," he said. "Peace is better than war because life is better than death." At the height of Reaganism and the Cold War, he called on the Democratic Party to save the nation from the fear of a nuclear holocaust, to go back to the root of social values.
The Democrats listened, almost reverently.
Back in those days, Cuomo was a moral center of gravity in the Democratic Party. The son of Italian immigrants, he was the first Italian-American governor of New York. He was the longest-serving Democratic governor in the state's modern history. He was a clear front-runner for the party's presidential nomination in 1988, but after a period of highly public indecision, he bowed out.
He had captured the party's imagination as a thoughtful and passionate speaker, an eloquent intellectual, and someone very sure of himself. In a telephone interview with Salon last week, those traits were still very much in evidence in the 70-year-old former governor. So, too, were his values.
Talking from his office in Manhattan, he offered a nuanced liberal analysis of the looming war against Iraq. Saddam should be taken out, he says, and no reasonable person could think otherwise. But now is not the time for war -- the cost is too great, he says, not just in money, but also in lives.
Should the U.S. invade Iraq?
I think the question is easy to answer, and I think all reasonable people would answer it exactly the same way.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is brutal and dangerous and should be removed. I think that's clear. There's not a respectable opinion the other way. But in removing him, should you start a war except as the utterly last alternative? And the answer by all reasonable people would be no, you shouldn't do it except if you're absolutely certain there isn't any other reasonable way to do it. And I think we're a long way from establishing that the only alternative is a war. Because the cost of a war -- and once again this is almost inarguable -- the cost of a war is so great, not just in dollars. If we were to have a war, we would of course win it, that seems clear. But then we would be there for five to 10 years, that's the best guess. And the last numbers I saw, the cost was $1.6 trillion. When you consider that the current budget estimate, which is $300 billion already in deficit, is for a $1.3 trillion deficit in five years, and that does not consider the Iraqi war, the dollar cost is --
But more important than the dollar cost, you will kill people, some of whom are innocent.
You will have your own people, some of them, in prosthetic devices and in body bags. You will not end violence with a war. You will precipitate it, because the hostility that already exists in much of the Arab/Muslim world will be exacerbated, and many of the people who are further angered are religious zealots who believe it is glorious and rewarding to give up their life to take yours. When you're dealing with people like that, the 19 people who brought down the twin towers, it's very hard to frighten them with the threat of death, when they look forward to it as an opportunity to visit the 72 virgins.
And you can go on and on with the sequelae of a war that would be destructive. What will it do to North Korea, a non-Muslim country? What will the Arab/Muslim world say about the fact that you let the non-Muslim nation with a much greater threat of nuclear power, you let them go, you settled for diplomacy there, but you took the Muslim people and killed them in a war? And what will it say to the people who are already our enemies, who have nuclear capacity, about the importance then of insisting on their nuclear capacity and expanding it? On the grounds that look, it's obvious that when you face a nation with nuclear capacity you won't go against them -- especially one that defeated you in a previous war, like North Korea, or at least stymied you? So the cost of a war is so great, that until they convince me that there is no other way to defang him --
