So far I’ve argued (hardly in an original fashion) that geo-politics is the only thing that explains the administration’s push for war - why this oppressive dictator of all oppressive dictators, or why this threat of arms proliferation out of all threats. To which point the liberal hawks might argue: so what? If Bush and company gets rid off an awful dictator with deadly arms, shouldn’t the left be cheering?
There are, besides the awfulness of war, a couple of reasons for why our response is not and should not be that simple. Point One: Even if one cedes (as I do) that overthrowing dictatorship in Iraq reduces the threat of use of terrible armaments, no one seems to be making a case that Iraq is the most effective use of economic, diplomatic and military resources to stop the chance that arms get in the hands of non-state actors. For an administration fond of the rhetoric of cost-benefit analysis, measurably results and government accountability, the omission is glaring. A report by the Brookings Institute outlining the particular risks that weak states pose to global security notes, “Despite acknowledging their importance the administration does not propose to direct new resources to failing states. Indeed, with a few important exceptions (e.g. in Colombia, parts of the former Yugoslavia, and now Afghanistan), most of these states, especially those in Africa, receive little from the United States except emergency humanitarian assistance.” Particularly given the budgetary straightjacket the tax cuts have put us in, the tradeoffs involved in pursuing Iraq and pursuing weak-state avenues for terrorism are real.
Point two: While Iraq is guilty of horrible attacks on ethnic groups in and out of its borders, and while I think that intervention to stop genocide in Kosovo was, on balance, a good thing, Iraq is closer to the situation in Vietnam than in Yugoslavia in one crucial sense: we (the US) are going in less with a well-defined sense of stopping genocidal acts in the process than in the expectation that our notion of democracy will spread across the region like so many toppling dominoes once we invade the least democratic country. The lesson to learn from Vietnam is how dangeous our combination of do-goodism and imperialist ideology are: dangerous because it blinds us to nationalism that doesn’t want to be ‘liberated’ at least not in the way we’re doing the liberating. It may be that the Shiite majority in Iraq has more in common with the groundswell of democratic sentiment we’re seeing in Iran. If so, great. But don’t expect the Arab world to see this other than a calculated attempt at imperialist mapmaking. Because fundamentally they’d be right.
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