TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091090/0910640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.3 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 94

The Case Against Going to War


By Otto Friedrich


    It is hard to remember a time when such influential American
opinion molders were so frantically demanding that the U.S. go
to war, and the sooner the better. "The ultimate goal now,"
writes A.M. Rosenthal, columnist and former executive editor
of the New York Times, "has to be the elimination of the
incurably murderous Baghdad dictatorship by Western . . .
economic and military reprisals." His fellow columnist at the
Times, William Safire, even offers a game plan: "Our
declared-war strategy should be to (1) suppress Iraqi air
defenses; (2) take out war production at the 26 key targets;
(3) launch a three-front land  war at the Turkish, Syrian and
Kuwaiti borders . . . Our great danger is delay." A Wall Street
Journal editorial writer daydreams: "If we take Baghdad and
install a MacArthur regency, that is the optimum."

    Will such people never learn? The scenarios for war never
do justice to the real thing, which is far more horrific than
pundits imagine. A war against Iraq would not be like attacking
Grenada or Panama. It would almost certainly involve hundreds
of thousands of people dying, soldiers and civilians alike.
Generals like to talk of "surgical strikes," but surgical
strikes usually hit the wrong targets -- like the misguided air
raid on Libya in 1986 that wrecked the French embassy and
killed Colonel Gaddafi's daughter.

    Aside from all the bloodshed, wars waste vast quantities of
money -- which this government hasn't got. Just preparing the
intervention to protect allegedly threatened Saudi Arabia is
costing about $46 million a day (and has just about killed all
hope of a post-cold war peace dividend). So far, the valiant
resistance to higher oil prices has substantially increased the
price of oil, and an actual war with Iraq would undoubtedly
increase it a great deal more. The impending recession would
deepen and spread around the world. So how is President Bush,
who can't even keep the budget deficit much under $150 billion
(not to mention the S&L disaster), going to pay  for all that?
More fund raising among the Germans and Japanese?

    President Bush has repeatedly declared that his goal is to
overcome Iraq by economic pressure, as authorized by the U.N.,
but the bomb-Baghdad enthusiasts generally base their more
aggressive arguments on two kinds of speculation. The first is
that Americans like short battles but don't have the endurance
for protracted conflicts (remember Vietnam). That may be true,
but it seems a poor excuse for rushing into an attack on Iraq.
More serious is the concern that Saddam Hussein might acquire
nuclear weapons, a danger that the Israelis offered as the
justification for their 1981 air raid on an Iraqi nuclear plant.
It is worth emphasizing, though, that Iraq does not now have
a nuclear weapon. Western intelligence agencies estimate that
Saddam could build one in something like five years. A
nuclear-armed Iraq is a scary possibility, but is it beyond the
mind of man to try negotiating the creation of an
internationally inspected nuclear-free zone throughout the
Middle East? If so, and if the Israelis insist on their right
to be the only nuclear power in the region, then they can
probably be expected to deal unilaterally with any Iraqi
attempt to join the nuclear club -- with unforeseeable
consequences. But all these speculations hardly justify a U.S.
pre-emptive strike now.

    It is not to be denied that Saddam is a brutal dictator,
already responsible for many deaths. But that does not make him
either irrational or the incarnation of human evil. There are
many people throughout the Arab world who regard him as a hero
standing up to the imperialist West. And while Washington
announces that the Iraq-Kuwait conflict should have been
negotiated and that nothing justifies invading another country,
we seem to have forgotten that President Bush sent 24,000 U.S.
troops to invade Panama just eight months ago in violation of
several treaties. Although Bush offered various legal pretexts
for his very understandable wish to get rid of the loathsome
General Noriega, the U.N. General Assembly condemned the U.S.
aggression by a vote of 75 to 20 (with 39 abstentions). Moral
preachings wear a little thin here. What country indeed has not
used force in recent years to protect what it considered its
interests? Britain in the Falklands? France in northern Africa?
The Soviets in Afghanistan? Israel in Lebanon?

    Though the conventional wisdom regards Iraq's seizure of
Kuwait as purely a demonstration of Saddam's wickedness, there
are extenuating circumstances. Since the map of the Middle East
was largely drawn by the European powers that had defeated the
Ottoman Empire in World War I, the British arbitrarily created
a kingdom of Iraq but maintained their separate protectorate
over Kuwait. Iraq never accepted Kuwaiti sovereignty, even
tried more than once to recapture the territory, but the main
try was beaten back by the British. In the recent quarrel,
Saddam accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil by drilling at a
slant into disputed oil fields. Kuwait's semisecret violation
of OPEC production agreements also helped drive down the price
of oil. This was fine for American motorists, but it deprived
Iraq of badly needed funds. Such conflicts have traditionally
been regarded as fairly legitimate grounds for war -- the U.S.
acquired California in 1846 on thinner pretexts.

    Saddam miscalculated in thinking the rest of the world would
not react so swiftly and vehemently against his seizure of
Kuwait. But once he had made his move, all his supposedly
heinous next moves seem perfectly understandable. If taking
hostages would help fend off threatened U.S. air raids, why
not? And to show they are not being harmed, why not exhibit
them on TV? And so on.

    Bush and Saddam have both made compromise difficult by
stating their demands in the most extreme terms. Saddam not
only annexes Kuwait but actually changes its name. Bush
intimates that he may not be satisfied even by the restoration
of the emirate to its opulent emirs. Both sides suggest that
compromise is cowardly, not negotiable. It is obvious, however,
that compromise is the only alternative to a disastrous war.