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.