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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
So humanitarian issues are paramount in your argument for war?
Yes. I blame the Bush administration for not successfully making that case. The president has emphasized to a fault the threat to America, but the threat to America is far less important a justification than the case that I just made. The moral justification for war is the correct justification. It's not nuclear, biological and chemical weapons -- deterrence works there. We have enough force capability to deter Iraq from using any weapons of mass destruction.
Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraq National Congress, reportedly has been promising Iraq's oil to various American companies. Doesn't this undermine the credibility of the Iraqi opposition?
No more and no less than congressman Mike Oxley [R-Ohio], taking a million dollars from the financial services industry and then chairing the House Financial Services committee, undermines Congress. Damage to political credibility is a constant and Chalabi is no exception. I don't think Chalabi has much chance at all of being democratically elected in Iraq, but it's a false choice to undercut the moral authority [of the INC]. It's one of those attacks typically made by people who want to fail to liberate Iraq.
Most experts seem to agree that rebuilding Iraq is going to take billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of troops and several years. Bush hasn't prepared the public for that kind of commitment. Aren't you worried that once America overthrows Saddam the public will insist we pull out as soon as the costs get too high, leaving the country in chaos?
Oh sure. That's a real worry. The worry is connected to the 2000 presidential campaign, when Bush was saying we're stretched too thin and he favored pulling troops out of Bosnia. We'd gone through years of waiting, waiting, waiting [while the genocide in Bosnia went on]. We'd heard that quicksand argument -- that they'd been fighting for hundreds of years, that we couldn't solve the problem of ethnic rivalry. We finally overcame that after the hell of Srebrenica. We organized a multilateral force and today you can fly to Sarajevo and shop there. Prior to that we had diplomats dying there. And in spite of that success, Gov. Bush was saying we ought to get out of Bosnia?
The fear that America will not stay the course is justifiable. However, it cuts against those who argue that America has this great imperial ambition. People who want America to be constructively engaged in the world should fear our isolationist tendency more than our interventionist tendency. You don't have to go any further than Afghanistan to see that.
But isn't the chaos engulfing Afghanistan an argument against invading Iraq?
It argues only that we should intervene correctly. It's false that this is a choice between intervention or no intervention. We have intervened. We've been intervening for 11 years with limited success. President Bush was thinking about stopping the intervention in Iraq, stopping this quite dangerous and expensive military operation that has pilots flying these no-fly zones. It's not terribly constructive to criticize Bush for that other than to make the point that Americans are far more reticent to use military force than the world thinks we are.
Then why does the world see the United States as such an aggressive bully?
With all we've done to tell the world we're going to go it alone, saying no to Kyoto, to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the International Criminal Court ... We said no to immigration reform to help Mexico, and then we're surprised that Mexico might not vote with us on the Security Council? If you go out and tell the rest of the world you're willing to go it alone and your dominant concern is your own safety and security, don't be surprised if the rest of the world isn't interested in participating. If you say our dominant concern is the people of Iraq, that we understand it's got to be multilateral -- we need Arab participation -- we're much more likely to get other countries' support.
So would you still support a war on Iraq if the U.S. were alone?
It's unlikely that that would happen. But given all the other things going on in the world, if we went in unilaterally, the risk is too great we'll stop [before its finished] and the risk is too great we'll fail. But that situation is very unlikely -- though [a few months ago] that sure as heck was where we were headed.
What can we do to help repair our credibility in the eyes of the world?
We need to expand our military presence beyond Kabul, to accelerate training of the Afghan army, to do everything we can to support the democratic development of that nation, to recognize it's going to be exceptionally difficult and to take a long time.
