Some miscellaneous thoughts. As long-time readers know, the posts have been a bit more sparse for the last three or four months. And the reason has been that I’ve been preparing the final draft of my dissertation manuscript. And tonight I finished it. That doesn’t mean the whole thing is done. It still needs to be approved and revised and defended and other miscellaneous stuff. But it’s a big hump. So I’m sitting here with a few moments free for the first time in months it seems like and looking at the news over the wires about the imminence of war. It’s a weird mix of feelings.
I was just reading several articles in the Washington Post about what’s going on in Iraq right now. And they have an interesting piece about how everyone is stocking up on 
guns. In public, they say they’re buying them to fight the Americans. The reality is that everyone wants to be armed when things go crazy and the looting and the vengeance and the mayhem starts.
It made me think of a conversation I had when I was writing my first article about Iraq almost a year ago now. The conversation was with a retired career military officer with a lot of experience working the Iraq file at the Pentagon and, let’s say, in other parts of the world. One of the lines that stuck with me from that interview was how he described what will happen when the cork is finally popped on the extreme repression Saddam has held this country under. These are from my notes of the interview …
Changing the regime is not the biggest problem. It’s what happens afterwards ⦠you’re dealing with an uncontrollable event … the physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression. This is an extremely repressive regime. Even to say those words doesn’t do it justice. When it breaks … it’ll give off absolutely no sign at all that it’s about to fail … [and then] Ka-Wammo! And it just goes crazy. That what’s gonna happen here. You may have control over how the things start … There are a variety of ways to do [it] … You may have a horse you’re going in with. But that guy isn’t gonna survive first contact.
This isn’t pro-war or anti-war. It’s just a sense of what this place is like or about to be like. When we talked further about this, one of the subjects that came up again and again was revenge. So many bad things have happened for such a long time that you’re just going to have tons of people out for blood and revenge when the secret police or their families or their cronies or whomever suddenly lose all their power. It’s going to be daunting. And a hell of a situation to control. Like he said, a steel beam under compression.
The White House put out a list of 30 countries that constitute our ‘coalition of the willing.’ The presence of Montenegro on the list doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence. But then I saw that the list includes Turkey. What am I missing? Turkey? They’re part of our coalition?
And as long we’re on the subject, Prime Minister Aznar of Spain announced today before his parliament that Spain would send no troops to fight alongside the US in Iraq. I’m not sure what I think about that. “Spain will not participate in any attack or offensive missions … As a result, there will not be any 
Spanish troops in the theater of operations.” He did say, however, that if Turkey is attacked he will mobilize the Spanish Air Force. There’s only so much levity that’s appropriate at a moment like this. But this one pretty much comes with the levity already installed.
At this point, obviously I hope this goes quickly and as cleanly as possible. Getting rid of Saddam will be a very good thing as will getting rid of his WMD and ambitions to get more. I was long for something like this. I changed my position because in the course of moving in this direction we incurred an even greater risk to our security than Saddam himself was. Clearly, though, that conversation is over. The one bright sign today was watching Tony Blair, who remains an inspiration.
For people who oppose this war I strongly recommend moving on from it in this very specific sense. This war is about to happen. But there are still two very important issues that hang in the balance that deserve serious attention. The first, though more long-term, is the necessity of as rapidly as possible restoring our relationships with our historic allies and beginning to repair our standing in the world. This makes the 2004 election far more important than it was before. But we’ll get into that later.
The second is the one that deserves your serious attention. Despite the certainty of war, this administration remains divided about the purpose and aftermath of this war. One camp sees this as a fairly limited, surgical effort to get rid of Saddam, put a reasonably democratic government in its place and then move on. Another camp sees this as only a first step. After this comes Iran, Syria, perhaps also Southern Lebanon, and more. And I don’t mean calling them names. I mean, taking them out.
The vision of what we’re trying to get is go out and give the hornets nest a few whacks and get them all out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. If that sounds scary to you, it should.
That camp in the administration would like to prosecute this war in such a way as to invite those further confrontations.
The question of whether we go that route is still to be decided. Unfortunately, the group that ended up winning the debate on Iraq inside the administration is one the that favors that future. So if you want something to work against, that’s what should be on your mind…
