Finally, after weeks of tortued, incoherent, meandering opportunism, the editors of the New York Times have come to their finger-in-the wind conclusion. No war against Saddam. Here’s their reasoning:
[A] far larger and more aggressive inspection program, backed by a firm and united Security Council, could keep a permanent lid on Iraq’s weapons program. By adding hundreds of additional inspectors, using the threat of force to give them a free hand and maintaining the option of attacking Iraq if it tries to shake free of a smothering inspection program, the United States could obtain much of what it was originally hoping to achieve. Mr. Hussein would now be likely to accept such an intrusive U.N. operation. Had Mr. Bush managed the showdown with Iraq in a more measured manner, he would now be in a position to rally the U.N. behind that bigger, tougher inspection program, declare victory and take most of the troops home.
Let’s unpack that paean to wishful thinking. At bottom, the Times editors believe Hans Blix rather than Colin Powell. They believe that what Saddam is doing – dismantling a few al Samoud missiles – is real progress. They believe the inspections are working in getting Saddam to disarm his chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons. And they think that a few hundred more inspectors would finish him off. Well, not quite. They think the threat of force is also a necessary complement to the U.N.’s almighty suasive power.
SHEER ESCAPISM: How does recent history come to bear on this argument? Saddam has given up a couple dozen already declared al Samoud missiles under threat from 250,000 allied troops. The Times wants us to believe that after the United States has taken “most of the troops home,” Saddam will then do everything else we need to keep us and the region secure. Huh? If anything, the reverse will surely happen. As the Times itself reports, Saddam has already interpreted the divisions on the Security Council as an opportunity to demand that economic sanctions be lifted. In other words, even with a quarter million troops breathing down his neck, and war potentially days away, Saddam is confidently demanding a global reward for the minuscule disarmament he has fitfully done. What is the likelihood that after we withdraw most of our troops, he would then do what he has refused to do so far? I’d say: zero. Yet that’s the essential logic of the Times’ editorial. Surely they are not so divorced from reality as to actually believe that. Or do they think that Dominique de Villepin is so intimidating a figure that in conjunction with a few hundred Swedes and Finns, Saddam will buckle?
THE HOME FRONT: The Times also fails to answer an accompanying basic question: do we then retain the sanctions? I see no rationale behind this editorial – except fear of American isolation and what the Times calls the need for a “strong international body to keep the peace and defuse tension.” Somehow, the Times believes that the U.N. will be strengthened by a tyrant observing U.N. Resolution 1441 being abandoned. And such a policy does mean that. 1441 demanded immediate and complete disarmament. Not a new process of years of U.N. “policing” – effectively using the United Nations as a legitimizer of Saddam’s regime, just as it became a legitimizer of Milosevic’s genocide in the Balkans. What, after all, is the difference between this and the 1990s? Nothing. But somehow we all knew it would come to this, didn’t we? The Times has been campaigning for appeasement of Saddam for over a year. The hawkish pirouettes in between were diversions. What this editorial is really about is the first shot in the coming domestic war – to undermine this military campaign once it begins, to bring down this administration, and to advocate the long-term delegation of American power to an internationalist contraption whose record has been to facilitate inaction and tyranny. The Times, in campaigning against war, has actually fired the opening shot in the coming domestic war. Hostilities have begun.
The Dish 