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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Won't superior American forces quickly overwhelm the Iraqis?
You can't move and employ these kinds of weapons in a peaceful way. Last week, I interviewed the field commander of one of Britain's legendary armored corps in the first Gulf War and he said, 'This is not a good idea. When you employ military power on this scale, you kill a lot of people.'
One thousand two hundred-odd cluster munitions were used in Afghanistan, 60 times what were used in the first Gulf War. These cluster munitions kill a lot of people, and they leave a lot of unexploded bomblets and submunitions around that kill people for years. The war in Iraq is going to be a very intense, violent campaign.
Will the U.S. and its allies face much resistance from the Iraqi people?
After Saddam Hussein, the United States, Britain and other Western countries are large hate objects in the minds of most Iraqis. Look at 12 years of sanctions, 12 years of the people starving, while Saddam Hussein cheats the system and builds his weapons. We've known about it. Our governments have done nothing. It's naive in the extreme to expect the people of Iraq will welcome American troops the way the people of Afghanistan welcomed Western forces after the Taliban's collapse. Western countries have been directly damaging the Iraqis for more than a decade. We will not be seen as white knights who have come to rid them of their evil dictator, as I'm afraid the policy makers in Washington would have us believe.
Why do you think the Bush administration is reluctant to give the U.N. inspectors more time?
Too many advisors, too many policy makers within Bush administration appear, by the substance and the inflexibility of the policy collectively, to be doctrinaire political fundamentalists. They have a very fixed, inflexible political and social mentality, and a very limited knowledge of how complex the world is and how great a role nuance and inconsistencies play in the world's different regions. They have a lack of sensitivity to cultural, religious, social, economic disparities around the world. In other words, you have very determined, stubborn and simple-minded people pursuing policies in spite of international resistance, objections by America's closest traditional allies, and the great discomfort of a good portion of the American public. I think the Bush administration proceeds at its own peril.
Look at what is happening across town at the United Nations. Russia and France taking a very stiff line against the Bush administration. They want weapons inspectors to have perhaps months, years. They want containment of Saddam Hussein, not war. They have their own interests in doing so, but largely they have an immense groundswell of public opinion behind them. Even among the Bush administration's allies--Spain, Italy, Great Britain--between two-thirds to 80% of the public is against war with Iraq. Countries, like Canada, are saying, let's have a solution that comes half way between what France and Russia are saying, let's compromise, let's give them another deadline: maybe the end of March, maybe the end of April. Still, the Bush administration says, no.
The U.N. pulled its inspectors out of Iraq in 1998, fearing U.S. military strikes. At that time, Saddam banned further inspections until the U.N. set up a timetable to lift sanctions. What's happened in the past five years to change U.S. policy?
We've known Saddam Hussein's character for decades. Mr. Rumsfeld, in particular, worked with and supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war as a member of the Reagan administration. Saddam Hussein was an ally. We've known what Saddam has been up to since the Gulf War. He takes our economic sanctions, distorts them, redirects their worst impact on his own domestic enemies, cheats the embargo, and enriches himself to invest in his weapons program. The West has known this for years. Why suddenly do we have the right to announce, no, the deadline's today: It's disarmament, or war, and the deaths of thousands of people?
It's rash amateurism, a doctrinaire, hard, right-wing attitude on the part of the Bush administration and its advisors. There are other explanations of ulterior motives related to the exploitation of oil resources, or the redrawing of the political map.
Why are Bush administration's policies amateurish?
I'm still trying to shake from my mind the disbelief that a modern American administration can be as clumsy, as brusque and as crude as this one. Think back to Sept. 12, 2001: Kids in Paris were wearing American flags out of solidarity with the American people. Countries were lining up, tripping over one another, to come and touch the hem of the cloak of power in Washington D.C. The Bush administration had allies and support and emotional empathy from people around the world. It's gone. Where has it gone? It hasn't disappeared by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein pouring a potion over people. It's gone because the administration has so offended the sensibilities of peace-loving, democracy-loving people that they simply have to take to the streets, or demand of their leaders to tell the Bush administration to stop and to think.
I don't want to see a "coalition of the willing." We need a coalition of the thinking. We need countries and leaders to get together and think. The campaign against terror is a battle of ideas. We have better ideas; we have better societies. You outthink terrorists and you outmaneuver them, economically, socially, politically, diplomatically, as well as militarily. We have got to get into the Muslim world and the Third World in a nonviolent fashion and outperform the al-Qaidas and Saddam Husseins of the world with the promise of a better tomorrow for those people, as well as our own. Otherwise, we lose.
Americans should ask themselves: Whose agenda, besides the Bush administration's, is served by a rush to war? The answer is Osama bin Laden's and those of the people like him. They don't care about the Iraqi people, or Saddam Hussein, but they are confident a deployment of raw, American military power in the Middle East will create more anti-American sentiment, which will help them. If you're falling into your enemy's trap, what's the hurry? Why aren't there smarter solutions? As journalists, these are the questions that we should be prompting the public to ask. Instead, I see coverage about the inevitability of war and the deployment.
Why isn't the media taking a closer look at Bush's foreign policy and its ramifications?
We get news overseas mainly in reaction to what the White House or the Pentagon has said that day. Foreign correspondents and people in different countries appear as bit players and hecklers of the official Washington line. The administration is not in the business of telling American people all the information. It and the Pentagon are in the business of narrow-casting, of public relations, of releasing information that they gauge will produce the desired effect. Which is support for the Bush administration policy. It's a sales job. It's like being on a used car lot.
News organizations are more reliant on the Bush administration official line than ever. That's a dangerous thing when you have an administration more determined than ever to go to war quickly, and with more overwhelming military force than we've ever seen before.
