a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Saturday, March 15, 2003 Just to be clearWhether an invasion will lead to a third world war or "another Vietnam" is just speculation. I'm a hawk, but not an optimistic one. I understand the war will be a season in hell for the Middle East. The goal of this blog is just to see the thing clearly: Is offing Saddam worth it? He really does have chemical weapons, and the means to distribute them; he really has made a fool of Hans Blix as well as the United Nations -- the White House is not lying about that. "Containing" Saddam will involve years of more sanctions, which haven't worked. And an oil-motivated war to topple a Nazi-style totalitarian state and install a democracy is, anyway, not the worst thing the U.S. has ever done. (World War II had its economic motivations, too.) The real question is: Would it be a sane response to September 11? At Radio Free Mike we mainly want to avoid a random swing of American power that uses September 11 as a phony pretense to wage a decades-long war of imperialism around the globe. That would not only be a disaster for the U.S. as a nation; it would also let the real crooks get away.So is Saddam a real crook? I started forming my opinions on September 11, with open-minded research, long before the conservative and liberal sides took shape. What I learned was that Saddam had every logical reason to work with terrorist fronts like al-Qaeda. He probably did work with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and various idiots from Baluchistan in a plan to collapse the World Trade Center in 1993. He really might have helped organize 9/11. So ending Saddam's regime might really be a logical response to an anonymous act of war. It might really weaken al-Qaeda. It might not all be about oil. The nation hasn't had a serious debate about this, frankly, in part because the White House tends to treat its citizens like children. The Iraq invasion's rank unpopularity may be the best thing about it. Bush has almost no chance of extending the official war beyond Iraq — thanks to the protesters — especially if Bin Laden gets caught. The state sponsors of September 11 are probably more varied and obscure than Saddam, but if the War on Terrorism stops with him, fine. It's more than we could hope for a year ago. Of course, Gore Vidal thinks even an Iraq invasion would be a random swing of American power that uses September 11 as a phony pretense, etc., but it's amazing how incoherent and basically emotional he can be on this point in interviews. He won't even deal with the idea that Baghdad might have terrorist agents. He ignores Afghanistan and Germany as models for rebuilding Iraq. And he suggests that any free-thinking writer who fails to agree with his vision is either a professor trying to keep his job or an undereducated product of failing American public schools. He's been saying this for generations, not that he spent much of his own time in school. He seems to think no one but Gore Vidal can be self-educated. These days he sounds more and more like an old man, mouthing a yellowed script from his better days as a cocktail-party controversialist. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:23 AM | |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
