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Edward Jayne
January 4, 2003

Saddam Hussein may pose a long-term threat to world peace, but I am not convinced by President Bush's arguments for an immediate invasion of Iraq. Too many other countries could be described as oppressive dictatorships, and those that pose a comparable threat to their neighbors include Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and China. Even the U.S. could be included in this list if Bush makes good on "confronting the remaining despotic regimes of the world" (NYT, 12-6-02). What nations does he have in mind? Where would he end? Unlike these other "rogue" states, ours is the only nation that can pose any threat on an intercontinental scale.

We have tolerated Iraq's supposed military buildup for eleven years now without trying to stop it, and during this period Iraq was mostly kept on a back burner by the international press. But in September Bush demanded an immediate invasion without any provocation by Iraq and without having first made any effort toward a diplomatic solution. Then almost as quickly he reversed himself in response to pressure from Tony Blair and others by permitting U.N. inspections in order to justify such an invasion. However, Bush added new conditions tantamount to Saddam Hussein's total surrender. He demanded, for example, that human rights infractions be terminated in Iraq, knowing full well that this sweeping injunction could be applied to almost any nation today, including the United States because of its indiscriminate detention of suspected terrorists. Obviously, Bush used such a broad and empty requirement to stonewall a diplomatic settlement, letting him proceed with invasion plans.

Bush also insisted on U.N. compliance with his demand that Iraq's scientists be removed from the country with their entire families in order to be interrogated on "neutral" ground, thus totally subverting Iraq's national sovereignty. The U.N. agreed, and now that a month of surprise inspections has proven to be fruitless, Bush has both renewed and intensified this demand on the premise that nothing short of these interrogations can expose Iraq's duplicity. Yet U.S. spokesmen boasted just weeks ago of top intelligence to be shared with U.N. inspectors only after Iraq furnished its own full catalog of weapons sites. Bush's tactic was apparently to unveil this evidence once Iraq turned over its records, thus exposing Saddam Hussein as a liar and presumably justifying an invasion--case closed--no further detective work need be sought. However, there has been a total news blackout about inspections now that this top intelligence has been checked against Iraq's suspected sites, suggesting that this information is no more useful than data already in the hands of U.N. inspectors. So at last, it seems, the entire justification for war depends on the testimony of Iraq's scientists.

As requested, Iraq has provided 500 names of scientists to be interrogated, though it is not clear yet whether any individuals would consent to testify outside of Iraq in presumably noncoercive circumstances. The indignant response of the two or three Iraqi scientists who have already testified also suggests that this approach might turn out to be just as much a failure. The U.S. war machine would be left totally empty-handed in its pursuit of a casus belli except for Prime Minister Sharon's self-serving last-minute suggestion that perhaps Syria has been hiding Iraq's secret weapons for the duration, implying the necessity to invade Syria as well. It might also be useful to interrogate truck drivers between Iraq and Syria, or perhaps even their families. One wonders what else can be scrutinized before U.N. inspectors submit their final report to the U.N. on January 27. It also seems an open question whether Bush would have the audacity either to appeal to the U.N. for its support of an invasion without any weapons sites having been found, or, worse yet, to launch a unilateral invasion without once again consulting the U.N.

As a rule of thumb, nations that pose a major threat to others--such as Germany preceding World War II, and even, for that matter, the U.S. today on the brink of invading Iraq--are relatively obvious in their military preparations. Their factories and storage sites, their ports, airfields and military bases would be only too plain to international inspectors assigned the task of conducting on-site inspections with the authority to seek out evidence wherever they choose to go. However, nothing of the sort has yet been found in Iraq despite this unprecedented intrusiveness by a couple hundred inspectors. One suspects that there is no smoking gun because in fact Iraq is not building a substantial future war machine, and that Bush and his foreign policy team have been totally bluffing for the past four months.

Then again, if it turns out that Saddam Hussein retains a cache of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), say chemical weapons (forget atomic weapons, which now seem highly unlikely), one can understand why he he has resorted to this extreme measure as the only effective defense he could deploy against an American invasion. Granted, the possession of such weapons might justify an invasion, but the possibility of invasion by a more powerful enemy--the U.S. no less than Iran--can also be seen to justify the possession and use of such weapons, the poor country's equivalent to the atomic bomb.

In any case, Hussein now finds himself between the horns of a dilemma. If he complies with current U.S. demands by disclosing the existence of these weapons and cataloging their sites, he makes his nation far more vulnerable to attack, but if he does not and, heaven forbid, is exposed as a liar, Iraq may also be attacked because of his misinformation. He is thus confronted with a no-win choice, a "regime-change" double-edge sword that could be used against any number of nations in the world today. Imagine the outrage that would be voiced if Israel or the U.S. were confronted with similar demands regarding their own stockpiles of WMD arsenals, by any account far bigger and more terrible than anything to be found in Iraq.

Some of Bush's accusations stretch the imagination, for example when he warned in his October 7 speech of Iraqi drones flying over America and, with only slightly better credibility, of Iraq's likely possession of "nucular" [sic] weapons as early as 2003, although most independent estimates project another six to ten years and recent findings suggest there is no nuclear project in Iraq for which a timetable would make sense.

Moreover, we know today that North Korea, also part of Bush's designated "axis of evil" (states which, incidentally, have little connection with each other), already possesses two nuclear bombs and can now produce five or six more in the next six months. Yet the Bush team chooses to tolerate North Korea's greater and more imminent threat while waxing indignant about Iraq's potential threat. Why this double standard? Why is there no "hard" evidence to incriminate Iraq comparable to the evidence against North Korea--for example the travel record of atomic physicists flying to and from Pakistan? And why did the Bush administration suppress reports of North Korea's nuclear program for twelve days while Congress debated whether to support his plan to invade Iraq? Was the Bush team afraid that obvious comparisons might heighten Congress's doubts?

Bush also claims that Iraq harbors many al-Qaida refugees from Afghanistan, yet nearby Muslim nations harbor many more, and it seems most al-Qaida refugees in Iraq live in the Kurdish region protected from Iraqi sovereignty by U.S. planes. Bush likewise claims that Iraq can use ballistic missiles with a range of several hundred miles, yet most of its missiles are limited to not much more than 100 miles. True, they could be retrofitted to fly farther, but there is no evidence this has been done.

On the other hand, many have speculated that Bush wants to invade Iraq because it is relatively defenseless resulting from Bush pere's invasion a decade ago, the inspections campaign that followed, and the December, 1998, Desert Fox air attacks. Unlike North Korea, Iraq cannot strike back with compelling effectiveness, since it lacks both atomic weapons and an adequate missile capacity. This means that Bush can gain an "easy win" while it's still possible, exactly as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz first argued prior to 9/11 when he promoted the invasion of Iraq because of its military weakness, not its strength--contrary to the arguments intended for public consumption that it should be attacked because its WMD menace the rest of the world. Moreover, the excuse that Iraq's potential future capacity is the primary issue, not its current strength, can be applied with equal validity to justify the invasion of any number of other nations, especially in the Muslim world. Where is one to begin? Where would one stop?

It is important to remember that Bush makes no claim that Iraq had any part in the 9/11 attack. Nor does anybody else in his administration despite their best efforts to find such a connection. Instead, Bush repeatedly asks us to share his sense of outrage that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against both Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels during the war against Iran. What Bush neglects to mention is that Saddam Hussein was our ally at the time, and that we provided him with the technology to do this. We also had more than sixty military advisors in Iraq, some of whom probably rendered supportive advice regarding the use of this technology at least against Iranian troops (see NYT, Aug. 18). Of course Hussein has inflicted many other atrocities as well, but one cannot forget our own Phoenix program in the Vietnam War, which entailed comparable atrocities that remain unrequited even today.

Why, then, is there a compelling need to promote the invasion of Iraq? I can think of four reasons, two of which do not oblige taking immediate steps:

(1)It has become plain in recent years that Iraq possesses enormous oil reserves, second only to those of Saudi Arabia. How convenient that presumably the most dangerous partner in the so-called axis of evil happens to sit on these reserves and can be justifiably attacked and occupied because of its weapons program. Granted, it would take time to raise oil production to its full capacity, and French and Russian oil interests would need to be appeased because of their previous investment. However, nobody denies that the U.S. oil industry would suddenly play the biggest role in the development of petroleum resources that have lain dormant over the last decade because of our economic embargo on Iraq. To capture and put these untapped oil reserves under the authority of U.S. oil companies would both destroy the economic grip of OPEC and guarantee bigger oil profits to the American oil industry. What a marvelous opportunity for our nation's Chief Executive from Harken Oil and all his good friends from the oil state of Texas! Unfortunately, this is not the way to run the world economy based on international law.

(2)Israel would clearly benefit from the neutralization of Iraq as a military threat, as has been argued behind the scenes by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and other Zionist-dominated think tanks active in Washington politics today. However, an invasion of Iraq can only aggravate the grievances of the Muslim population in the region, thus supplying an even bigger pool of future terrorists hostile to Israel. Moreover, there are too many other nations that pose almost as much of a threat: Iran, Syria, Libya, and even Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan if their governments are overthrown by fundamentalist extremists stirred to insurrection by an Iraqi invasion. There would ultimately be little gain for Israel if our defeat and occupation of Iraq leads to the overthrow of any of these governments by Muslim extremists. Hints of a backlash can already be seen in the terrorist attacks of Bali, Kuwait, Kenya, and, most recently, Yeman, as well as the attack on a French freighter and pivotal elections in Turkey and Pakistan's two western provinces, in which Muslims came to power contrary to earlier expectations.

In the long run, the best and only way for Israel to defend itself from potential enemies would be to resume the peace negotiations that Sharon automatically suspended when he was elected in February, 2001, less than a month after Bush took office. A diplomatic settlement was on the brink of acceptance at Taba, Egypt, but Sharon renewed hostilities in order to impose more favorable terms. Israel launched a series of air attacks on automobiles carrying Palestinian officials, Palestinians shifted from the Intifada to suicide bombings, and Israel invaded West Bank towns and cities to destroy the Palestinian Authority, thus obliterating any trace of national sovereignty for the Palestinians.

Now it is Israel that must redress this tragic chain of events without resorting, for example, to such extreme measures as the transfer of Palestinians to adjacent nations, which would provoke hostilities with the entire region, Iraq included unless occupied by U.S. troops. The U.S. military should not be used in this fashion to support Israel's current expansionistic strategy in the West Bank.

But why an immediate invasion? This brings us to the third and fourth reasons, both of which have more to do with domestic priorities than the external threat of Iraq:

(3)The Bush presidency was losing popularity in late summer of this year because of the economic recession and the issue of corporate greed that eventually brought to light President Bush and Vice President Cheney's dubious business practices at Harken Oil and Halliburton Industries just a few years earlier. Bush needed to shift public opinion to a new and different headline issue in order to win Republican seats in Congress in November, and Iraq was at the top of the list. The transition occurred in less than two weeks, and Bush's popularity rating, which had dropped to 60 percent, the lowest since 9/11, was restored to 70 percent by incessantly beating the war drums to invade Iraq. As recommended by Karl Rove, Bush's chief White House advisor, Republican candidates for office could improve their chances in November by "focussing on war." Unfortunately, this is not the best and most appropriate way to win elections in a democratic society.

In any case the strategy succeeded, giving Bush control of both Houses of Congress, letting him resume his pursuit of a right-wing agenda for the next two years as long as public attention is focussed on Iraq and other foreign policy crises. Now the American public can expect rampant industrial deregulation, the quick appointment of numerous pro-life judges at all levels of our nation's judicial system, enormous tax reductions for the very wealthiest segment of our society, and a "unilateral preemptive" foreign policy that bullies the rest of the world at unprecedented levels. One can only hope that the destructive impact of the Bush agenda can be minimized until Republicans lose office either in 2004 or 2008.

And (4) The current recession, of the so-called "W" variety, shows no sign of full reversal within the next year or two. Because of excessive inventories, industrial productivity has sunk from over 80 percent to less than 75 percent, and overall economic improvement cannot be expected until it has been restored to former levels. Thus the value of military conflict in buttressing aggregate demand. Just as the Afghanistan invasion combined with a low-income tax rebate helped to renew productivity on a temporary basis at the beginning of this year, a new invasion--this time of Iraq--might do the same at the beginning of next year, its $50-to-200 billion expenditure finally providing the neo-Keynsian starter motor to get our economy on its feet once again. Unlike "labor-intensive" anti-terrorist defenses, an invasion of Iraq would serve the "capital-intensive" goals expected of Star Wars preceding 9/11, once again providing--if by different means--an opportunity to funnel federal expenditures into defense industries that offer kickback campaign donations as well as trickle-down benefits to the nation as a whole. The acquisition of Iraq's oil fields would also provide an additional bonus by keeping oil prices low and oil profits high for the U.S. oil industry. The strategy worked among both axis and allied nations during the thirties in preparing for war to recover from the Great Depression--why not something of the sort today? But for obvious reasons one can only deplore the use of such an extreme measure to remedy economic dislocations.

A fifth objective can also be suggested as a fallback strategy now that it seems U.N. inspections and the interrogation of Iraq's scientists can no longer be used to justify a full-scale invasion. If nothing else, current preparations for war have necessitated the construction of enormous new military facilities in Qatar and Kuwait that may be retained as permanent sites in order to enforce oil diplomacy in the Persian Gulf and help support Israel in future conflicts with its eastern neighbors. Our controversial military bases in Saudi Arabia can also be reduced, if not eliminated, thus enhancing our relations with its orthodox Sunni leadership. Nevertheless, such a strategy might finally backfire. Just as 37,000 U.S. military personnel in South Korea are now hostages to a North Korean nuclear attack, the new Qatar and Kuwait bases could soon enough provide similar targets in the Persian Gulf.

In sum total, none of these ends justifies the invasion of Iraq, and for pragmatic as well as moral reasons. For one thing, most of the fighting would take place in or near Iraq's cities, especially Baghdad, with a population between four and six million, equivalent to the total Jewish population of Israel. The Pentagon might duplicate its success in Afghanistan by conducting large- scale air attacks before a land invasion that culminates in the relatively bloodless surrender of Iraq's major cities. However, there might be more resistance than anticipated, and if fighting erupts on city streets our superior fire power would not prevent significant casualties among our forces as well. Hundreds of Americans might die as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and military conscripts.

True, the U.S. very likely improved its chances of a quick and surgical invasion when its U.N. representatives confiscated the single copy of Iraq's complete report of its defensive weapons capability. This quick maneuver gave the U.S. government sole access for an entire day while xeroxing its contents to be provided to others on the U.N. Security Council--plenty of time to provide the Pentagon with up-to-date intelligence useful for mounting an invasion. Not that unpleasant surprises can be totally discounted in carrying out any major military campaign, such as occurred in 1991 during Bush pere's original war against Iraq, when an air attack scored a direct hit against a civilian bomb shelter, killing a couple hundred Iraqi children.

Despite our defense establishment's best efforts, it may not be possible to censor daily TV coverage of casualties from air attacks or bloody combat from house to house. Both Muslim and non-Muslim public opinion would be outraged by President Bush instead of Saddam Hussein, and already rising U.S. unpopularity ratings abroad would escalate to unprecedented levels. The axis-of-evil concept would revert from the supposedly "rogue" nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to the U.S. itself and its two staunch allies, Britain and Israel, or, even more specifically, to the persons of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld along with their satellite cronies, Rove, Rice, and Wolfowitz, not to mention Admiral Poindexter and Elliot Abrams, both of whom so tellingly exemplify Republican diplomatic excesses of less than two decades ago. That Abrams, a convicted perjurer and arch-Zionist, has just been chosen to serve as Bush's special White House advisor on Near Eastern affairs both diminishes the inhibitive role of the State Department and further confirms the Arab world's worst suspicions that the Iraq invasion is primarily intended to serve Israeli interests.

Now that Bin Laden turns out to be very much alive, it seems plain the Al Qaida would be able to use Bush's invasion to justify major terrorist attacks and to foment widespread radical insurrection throughout the Near East. If anything, the current respite in Al Qaida operations would suggest that major attacks may be planned in response to the invasion, tentatively scheduled to occur in February between Valentine's Day and Lincoln's birthday. If true, we would be fighting our latest (and least justified) world war on multiple fronts, in Iraq and anywhere Al Qaida chooses in the rest of the world, including New York City, the White House, and Golden Gate Bridge. Nor can we ignore the possibility that Hezbollah and numerous other terrorist organizations might expand operations to play their own part in the conflict. As with the inception of World War I, conflict might escalate much more quickly and unpredictably than anticipated.

Should Iraq be invaded and defeated, its later occupation would be difficult, probably necessitating repressive measures not entirely dissimilar to Saddam Hussein's in curtailing traditional hostilities among Iraq's rival ethnic and religious groups, including Shi'ites, Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Assyrians, the Turkomans, as well as competitive factions within these groups. As a matter of history, nobody yet has been able to govern Iraq's mixed population except on a totalitarian basis since it was first patched together as a kingdom by Great Britain after World War I. It has been estimated that the chronic threat of civil conflict would necessitate an occupation army of 100,000 troops, costing from $5 to $10 billion per year into the indefinite future.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz's Panglossian plan to convert Iraq into an unprecedented state-of-the-art Arab democracy once we defeat Saddam Hussein is utterly misguided. Nothing like this happened in other states we have invaded in recent years--Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Kuwait, Somalia, Kosovo, or Afghanistan--after we supposedly liberated them from the forces of evil. So why would Iraq be an exception? Having reneged on most of the reconstruction funding we promised Afghanistan after we occupied it, how can our government expect anybody to believe us to be more generous with Iraq? Would the U.S. oil industry be prepared to share a substantial portion of its Iraq profits with the nation's impoverished host population? One doubts it.

The destabilization of international relations outside the Near East resulting from Bush's preemptive strategy presents another problem. North Korea, for example, has chosen to push forward its nuclear program on the assumption that the U.S. would be too distracted by Iraq to start a second campaign in Asia at the same time. It also seems plain that North Korea's hostile steps have been in response to clumsy U.S. diplomacy. Bush first linked North Korea with Iraq in the "axis of evil," then displayed in its treatment of Iraq what it intended sooner or later for North Korea itself, and finally imposed an oil embargo sufficient to destroy North Korea's economy, thereby producing regime change by peaceable means. North Korea's government was certainly dishonest in its continuing effort to build a nuclear program, but U.S. tactics have been ham-handed, and North Korea's predictable reaction necessarily augments the risks involved when invading Iraq, Bush's presumably surgical attack complicated by North Korea's unwillingness to wait its turn to be destroyed.

Another relevant example is the general strike in Venezuela that cripples its oil industry at the same time as Iraq's oil production levels have been lowered, thus bringing current U.S. oil prices to something in the range of $32 per barrel, potentially deepening our current recession. At this point we can only guess whether this strike was set in motion by the Bush team, fine tuned by Otto Reich, hitherto notorious for his effort to purge Latin American of communist sympathizers. However, chances are excellent our government seeks a "quickie" coup d'etat in Venezuela to gain better control of its oil reserves in line with the invasion of Iraq, but of course through regime change by different means--national strike, as opposed to Iraq's invasion and the international boycott of North Korea. If true, it seems clumsy on the part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that all three of these takeover strategies unravel at the same time, especially if the intended outcome in Venezuela has been thwarted by Brazil's willingness to provide oil to its government on an emergency basis, thus prolonging its existence long enough to catapult oil prices to unacceptable levels during the invasion of Iraq. One suspects Brazil could only have provided this relief in response to mounting public anger against U.S. foreign policy in South America--partly in response to Iraq, partly in response to Argentina's economic collapse resulting from its U.S. connection.

Just a couple months ago Bush was able to link nuclear containment and a guaranteed oil supply for industrial nations in justifying our invasion of Iraq as a "one-store shopping expedition" that solves both problems in a single trip as well as giving Israel more latitude in its creation of new settlements in the West Bank. Now, with at least two of these issues brought to the fore in two new and entirely separate global situations, it seems necessary to jettison Bush's invasion strategy for Iraq as a brainstorm with all the limitations of a premature chess attack. Granted, the three specific crises with Iraq, North Korea, and Venezuela might be dealt with in short order by extraordinary means, but the damage to our nation's image as a peace-loving nation would be irreparable, and new and interesting surprises could be expected elsewhere in the near future once the U.S. has destabilized world diplomacy by its willingness to militarize its policy objectives presumably in order to fight terrorism on a preemptive basis.

There are other ramifications to this policy. It seems, for example, that Bush has "given away the store" with governments both in the Near East and in the U.N. Security Council in order to neutralize their opposition to the invasion. Mexican trucking, for example, will soon be operating on U.S. highways, and Wolfowitz (as much as anybody, the principal architect of the Iraq invasion) has made at least one passionate speech in Europe advancing Turkey's addition to the E.C., though it seems at this point that Turkey's current Muslim government--thanks to popular reaction against U.S. foreign policy--refuses to let U.S. bases be created on its territory in order to attack Iraq from the north. We can only guess what else has been promised, and to whom. Meanwhile, international public opinion worsens, and its impact can be expected to be felt in the economic arena. Will U.S. tourists and aid workers still be welcome? When will American products be boycotted abroad to protest U.S. imperialist excesses? When will foreign investors withdraw their money from Wall Street based on any combination of moral and pragmatic concerns? Can our stock market recover without their investments?

And why would the rest of the world's population feel anything but threatened by our military occupation of Iraq? A brand new domino effect would suddenly present itself, with U.S. imperialism supplanting communism as the inkblot geopolitical menace to be defeated. Everybody in the Near East would fear new adventuristic invasions by the U.S. justified by pseudo-libertarian idealism rooted in barely concealed economic greed--the same greed already encouraged by the Bush administration in California's energy crisis, when Enron executives frequented the White House while fuel costs skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The two World Wars plus the Cold War would seem but an interlude between a relatively civilized nineteenth century British imperialism and its twenty-first century American equivalent that justifies itself by the current surge of terrorism it has provoked and helped to arm with sophisticated hardware its military-industrial complex both designed and shared with the rest of the world.

From 9-11 to the invasion of Afghanistan, the American flag was displayed on automobiles from coast to coast to demonstrate patriotic solidarity. Today, on the brink of a new and more problematic invasion, many fewer such flags are to be seen, and with good reason. Does our current President (lest we forget, appointed by the Supreme Court) think he is really protecting the American people from terrorism? Does he suppose his unilateral preemptive strike totally escapes comparison with Germany's unilateral preemptive invasion of Poland? Doesn't he realize the extent to which the blitzkrieg success of his two quick victories in Afghanistan and Iraq would antagonize the entire Muslim world from Casablanca to Bali? Is he blind to the obvious logic expressed by Archbishop Renato Martino, prefect for the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, "that a preventive war [is] a war of aggression and therefore not a just war"--especially if there is little, if anything, to prevent in the nation under attack? [NYT, Dec. 26, 2002] At this point it seems plain that President Bush's clumsy and opportunistic venture in nouveau-American imperialism can only be a disaster for our nation--for the world as a whole.