OP/ED The Michigan Daily - Thursday, February 13, 2003 - 5A Inevitable? Necessary? Outlooks on war NATO's saboteurs and the lessons of war ZAC PESKOWITZ TiE LOR FREQUENCIES With the Senate Armed Services Committee holding hearings on the possibility of war, NATO bitterly divided over the security concerns of Turkey and Osama bin Laden urging an Iraqi uprising against Americans - the shadow of war is now looming over the breadth of the entire globe. VIEWPOINT Has the Left lost it? Saddam needs ousting Th e prophe- cy of Robert Kagan is now appear- ing before us. Kagan set off a fire storm across Europe " M last summer with his essay "Power and Weakness." The neoconservative intellectual argued that Europe and America no longer share a common worldview, casting into doubt the future of the ven- erable Atlantic alliance. The combined efforts of France, Germany and Bel- gium to deny military assistance, in the form of AWACS surveillance planes and anti-missile batteries, to NATO member Turkey as a defense against moniker, "Chemical Ali," said of the Kurds, "I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community, and those who listen to them!" Imperial ambition, war crimes and a multilateral effort to oppose Iraqi aggression means a just war, QED. But maybe I was missing something, a few details that had been lost over the course of a decade. Looking back on the opinion pieces and arguments against war from that era, it looks as though the cognoscenti had become stuck in time for 20 years. AP Photo Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and NATO Secretary-General George Robertson address reporters Saturday. possible Iraqi, an intractablec We're unc will eventually tions in Turk the creditabili undergone ir how this week affect the futu detour for a m A few wee der what mo oppose the P incredibly vag were some,p challenging the Gulf War, but t h e s e seemed to fizzle out as the war pro- gressed. In retrospect, the conflict appears unequivo- cally justi- fied. Iraq had violat- ed the terri- t o r i a 1 integrity of a sovereign state for the aggression, have created Looking at newspaper coverage of the deadlock. time, allegations of imperialism and certain if these nations racism were pervasive. A sense of y live up to their obliga- fatigue and powerlessness marks the ey, but we do know that historical record. Washington Post ty of NATO has already columnist William Raspberry wrote, reparable harm. To see "Increasingly it appears that there can k's events in Brussels will be no military solution." Vietnam re of conflict, let's take a Syndrome infected the arguments oment. against war and prevented opinion eks ago, I began to won- makers from discerning the true )tivated individuals to nature of Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. 'ersian Gulf War. I had Surely, there would be numerous gue memories that there references to the Kurdish genocide in rotests in Washington the popular media. A Lexis-Nexis search of for both 1990 and M ;L 1991 finds just six entries with the w o r d x "An fal ' Even more troubling - all six appeared following the con- AP Photo clusion of Secretary of State Colin Powell takes his the Gulf case to the U.N. Security Council last week. War. A some from Kosovo (the editors of The New Republic), others seek their oracle in Vietnam (Immanuel Wallerstein) and one person has even looked to the Roman invasion of Iraq in 53 B.C. as the key to predicting the result of a contemporary intervention (she seems a bit batty, however). Returning to the original purpose of this exercise, if NATO and the U.N. Security Council fold to-the advocates of unconditional peace, liberal multi- lateralists will have lost the pragmatic appeal of their position. The memo- ries of this failure will set back the mission of international organizations indefinitely. Go to NATO, they said. Go to the Security Council, they said. A reasonable solution will be bro- kered. Now, these promises look like naive wanderlust. On the Security Council, France, Germany and Russia agitate for more weapons inspectors in Iraq, yet Hans Blix has no interest in more inspec- tors, knowing that they will be utterly ineffective. They have no interest in reinforcing the authority of the Untied Nations, instead they strive to thwart the United States by any means necessary. They dismiss the United States as unilateral cowboys, even as the rest of Europe coalesces behind the United States. What lessons will future leaders learn from the first months of 2003? Eschew coalition building, reject cal- culated diplomacy, act unilaterally and mobilize rapidly. Are we witness- ing the disintegration of 50 years of international cooperation? The fate of these institutions now rests with Ger- man Foreign Minister Joschka Fisch- er and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Forgive me, if I lack hope. BY JOSEPH TORIGIAN Last fall the College Democrats organized a forum with U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D-Dearborn) about Iraq. Near the end of the forum, a man rose and said he visited the country himself. He informed us of his opinion that no weapons of mass destruction existed. He then told us that the Republican Guard looked so hungry due to the "imperialist" sanctions that he raised a pot of money for them. The man sat down to a raucous applause. His state- ments and the following reaction made me ask: Has the Left lost it? The answer is that a true progressive would be begging President Bush to stop Saddam. Yet because of the far Left's love of rhetoric and an automatic negative response to all "King George" says, it has made its opposition to the war founded on ideological cynicism rather than compassion for humanity. Saddam has violated 16 U.N. reso- lutions and is in the process of violating another, flouting the demands of the Security Council. This man's actions have done more to invalidate any con- cept of international law, a progressive ideal, than any other leader since World War II. If the council's resolutions are not implemented seriously with regard to an evil dictator, isn't its future about as bright as the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson's liberal dream of world order? In order for the United Nations to remain relevant in the 21st century, its resolutions must begin to be enforced, especially when those resolu- tions deal with international security. An American attack on Iraq would not be a rejection of international law; rather, it would be a triumph of a 21st century that no longer tolerates the vio- lation of those laws. The anti-war movement qualifies its statements of opposition to a war by admitting that Saddam is a tyrant. How bad is he really? Evil. Liberals in the United States should demand this sinis- ter man be removed from office for vio- lating almost every human right. Allowing a man with a regime like the one in Iraq to rule during the present. day is a status insult to any hopes of a future in which sovereignty is no longer a shield that can be used to justify horri- bly inhumane acts. When the anti-war movement argues against a war in Iraq, it is in essence making an argument that a man who does the following things has a right to remain in power on the basis of international law: rapes, removes tongues, uses WMDs on his own people, canes the national soccer team after a loss, gouges eyes, electri- cally shocks genitals, tortures with acid. The Left should dream of a world in which the world community no longer tolerates such acts. The activists would also claim that Iraq poses no security threat. However, if Iraq had WMDs, it could blackmail the United States and attack its neigh- bors. Remember, Hans Blix has stated unequivocally that Iraq has not cooper- ated with inspectors. The second and scarier possibility is that it could give WMDs to terrorists. The New York Times reported Sept. 24, 2001 that "the clear link between ... Osama ... and Saddam can be found in Kurdistan ... [where] the Iraqi dictator has armed and financed ... al-Qaida mullahs." These terrorists, the Ansar cell of al-Qaida, have begun producing poisonous chem- icals for export. Iraq has also given sanctuary to one of bin Laden's agents, a weapons expert named Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. So what's the deal? The deal is that some on Left have subsumed the war issue and interpret- ed it to support its own agenda. The simple theory of Bush is bad has lead to an interpretation of the Iraq policy as just a manifestation of his idiocy. I heard a girl say Bush was a hypocrite for fighting in Afghanistan.and being pro-life. Someone at the Dingell dis- cussion said that Dingell would bettet understand the Iraq issue by reading a non-biased communist daily. Consider Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. These two issues have nothing to do with each other. Their lumping together makes them seem like a "we are opposed to whatever part of the status quo is controversial" group. Yes, protesting is cool and has a time and place. But when the allure of protesting the entire status quo becomes too strong, then totally illogical supposi- tions are created (communism, fascism). There are plenty of things for which the Left should crucify Bush, like the Information Awareness Office. This domestic organization is the largest threat to American freedom ever. The IAO will record your every credit card purchase, magazine subscription, med- ical prescription, website, academic grade, bank deposit and trip. Bush said if Saddam wasn't evil, then "evil has no meaning." If the IAO starts, the Consti- tution will have no meaning. Yet an important civil rights group, the Insti- tute for Public Accuracy, decided not to raise hell about this violation of liberty, but to send its weapons inspector, Sean Penn, to Iraq. In the tradition of Hanoi Jane, Baghdad Sean was able to assure us that he didn't see anything bad. I just hope he didn't raise a pot for the Republican Guard. Before I finish, I want to say I love the Left. I shook former Vice President Al Gore's hand. I wrote this because I care about progressive ideas and hate what's happened to them. Yet there is one group that I want the Left to remember. When the forum ended, Din- gell asked those in favor of war to raise their hands. Myself and one other man did so. While people were beginning to file out of the room, I asked the man why he raised his hand. The answer: "I am an Iraqi." A Torigian is an LSA freshman. sole purpose of economic gain. The United States and its allies won the approval of the U.N. Security Council to repel Saddam's forces from Kuwait. Simultaneously, the Iraqi govern- ment represented an unrestrained form of barbarism. Witness the Anfal cam- paign against Iraqi Kurdistan. Human Rights Watch estimates about 100,000 Kurds were killed with weapons as gruesome as mustard gas and the nerve agent Sarin. The mastermind of the Anfal campaign, Iraqi Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid better known by the charming calm, objective, rational analysis of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would have demanded action against Saddam. Instead, the chattering classes were reliving the experience of Vietnam, attempting to divine the probable out- come and possible consequences based on a past conflict that had no relation- ship to the Gulf War. We can see this form of behavior right now as writers struggle to find the historical analogues of the current Iraq crisis. Some thinkers get their lessons from World War II (Andrew Sullivan), U U C1~ezq date 101. 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