The New Republic

When President Bush first publicly contemplated going to war with
Iraq, some members of his administration said he need not obtain
approval from Congress before doing so. But liberals insisted,
rightly, that a war would lack constitutional or popular legitimacy
if the president did not first receive explicit authorization from
Congress. Bush complied. Later, some administration officials
maintained that the United States could attack Iraq without giving
Saddam Hussein one more chance to disarm peacefully through U.N.
weapons inspections. But liberals argued, again rightly, that a
final push for inspections was necessary to demonstrate that the
United States desired war only as a last resort. And Bush complied
again, persuading the U.N. Security Council to unanimously approve
Resolution 1441, which offered Iraq a "final opportunity" to
dismantle its nonconventional weapons. Bush may now dismiss the
importance of these steps--"America's purpose is more than to follow
a process, " he said in his State of the Union address. But, in
fact, so far the process of disarming Saddam has gone exactly as
liberals rightly demanded.The day before the president's address, the world received what
should have been the final word on that process in the form of a
report by chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. Blix's verdict is
positively devastating. Iraq, he writes, "appears not to have come
to genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was
demanded of it." Blix produces a litany of noncooperation: Iraq has
failed to provide a full accounting of its weapons, as demanded; it
has denied private interviews with its scientists; it has hidden
crucial documents in private homes; and it has whipped up
demonstrators to harass the inspectors with slanderous charges.
(Some, hilariously, have described this report as "mixed." By this
standard, Saddam's record of aggression is also mixed--we must
consider the lengthy list of countries he has not invaded.) All
these actions unquestionably fulfill the definition of a material
breach agreed to under Resolution 1441.

So we now have reached the conditions under which, according to the
standards once urged by most liberals, the United States must disarm
Iraq by force. Yet the moderate, respectable opponents of the
war--those who claimed they would favor military action if other
steps failed--remain, for the most part, unmoved. Their predominant
view now is that the only thing preventing a bloodless disarmament
of Iraq is Bush's precipitous rush to war. Senate Minority Leader
Tom Daschle summed up this sentiment when he asked this week, "How
are our efforts to deal with this threat helped by short-circuiting
an inspections process we demanded in the first place?"--as if the
inspections were being stymied by Bush rather than by Saddam. It is
now clear that Bush's critics didn't mean what they said all along:
The mask of nuanced criticism has been pulled off the moderate
antiwar position, exposing it for the abject pacifism it truly is.

The editorials of The New York Times are a good showcase of the
intellectual incoherence of the liberal war critics. The Times is
worth dwelling on not only because of its great influence but also
because its opposition to war is carefully calibrated, closely
matching the views of mainstream Democrats rather than those of
angry street demonstrators. In fact, as the Iraq debate raged last
fall, the paper's editorials professed to share the same goals as
the administration. Last September the Times declared, "What really
counts in this conflict ... is the destruction of Iraq's
unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to
develop nuclear arms." The Times stressed that Iraqis must
cooperate actively, not merely fail to put up resistance, in order
to avoid war. Iraq "must provide a full and accurate list of its
unconventional weapons programs," the Times insisted on November 9.
The following month it added that, to succeed, the inspectors "will
need cooperation from knowledgeable Iraqis." Indeed, in its
November editorial the Times explicitly sanctioned a unilateral war
if Iraq failed to actively disarm: "If Baghdad violates any of
these provisions [emphasis added], Washington should insist that
the Security Council enforce its decision. Only if the council fails
to approve the serious consequences it now invokes--generally
understood to be military measures--should Washington consider
acting alone."

The time to "judge Baghdad's overall cooperation and decide whether
Iraq can be disarmed by peaceful means alone," the Times noted in
late December, would be when Blix offered his report to the
Security Council after the first 60 days of inspections. Now that
moment has arrived-- and with it undeniable proof that Baghdad has
not offered the active cooperation deemed essential by the Times.
You might think, then, that the paper would cite its previous
criteria and endorse war. Not at all. Instead, the Times has
already raised the bar. An editorial published the day after Blix's
report pleaded that "the inspectors should be granted additional
time" so they can "produce evidence that would mobilize an
international consensus for additional steps." This echoed the
logic of the previous Sunday's editorial, which declared, "There are
some threats and some causes that require fighting even if America
has to fight alone, but this isn't one of them." Disarmament, which
the paper previously called "the unwavering goal" and "the lodestar
of American and United Nations policy," has been reduced to a mere
preference to be undertaken only if or when international opinion
embraces it.

The most curious feature of moderate anti-war sentiment, at the
Times and elsewhere, is its refusal to engage with the central
question: Would Iraq, if permitted to rebuild its nuclear,
biological, and chemical arsenal, pose a threat to the United
States? We believe the answer is yes. The example of North Korea
demonstrates that when a hostile, irrational state obtains nuclear
weapons, it immediately intimidates its neighbors, opens the
possibility of passing such weapons to terrorists or other enemy
regimes, and leaves the United States with few diplomatic tools to
work with other than appeasement. Saddam's megalomaniacal
aspirations and repeated pattern of aggression make him an even
less attractive candidate to join the nuclear club than Kim Jong
Il.

Antiwar liberals do not dispute this logic, they elide it. Liberals'
most pervasive intellectual tic has been to argue against war on
the grounds that somebody else is against it. Usually, that
somebody else is our international allies, whom war critics have
granted not merely consultation but full veto power over any
military action. Earlier this week, the Times threw up another
impediment: "The American public has not signed on," argued Sunday's
editorial-- an odd new standard, given that the paper has
previously endorsed interventions both real (Kosovo) and
hypothetical (Rwanda) that notched even lower levels of public
approval. But if a nuclear-armed Iraq does pose a threat, then
surely it's a threat worth diffusing, not only through inspectors
but, if need be, unilaterally or without overwhelming public
support.

Recently antiwar liberals have found yet another way to oppose the
war without seeming to oppose the war: They say the United States
should wait and "let the inspections work." Waiting would indeed be
worthwhile if it boosted the odds of gaining world support for war
or of Iraq's agreeing to disarm. But the truth is that, in either
case, delaying is likely to have the opposite effect.

Nobody seriously disputes that Iraq is in material breach of the
U.N. disarmament resolutions. The logic of waiting, after a dozen
years of Iraqi refusal to disarm, is that somehow Saddam will
become "more" in material breach. But Iraqi violations to date
hardly constitute a technicality. Weapons inspections simply can't
work against the will of the host country. Previous inspectors owed
whatever breakthroughs they achieved to conditions--such as the
unexpected defection of Saddam's brother-in-law--that are unlikely
to be repeated. It would be ideal if Saddam could be persuaded to
make a clean breast of it and disarm voluntarily. But letting his
current recalcitrance continue indefinitely is probably the worst
imaginable strategy to persuade him to do so.

Allowing Iraq's current noncooperation to go unpunished would codify
it as the new baseline, and only a more flagrant defiance would
then constitute a casus belli. The level of defiance most objectors
seem to have in mind is the "smoking gun." But the chance of
finding such a thing without Iraqi help is small. For one thing,
Iraqi intelligence may well have infiltrated the weapons
inspectors, as it did with previous U.N. teams. For another, it
would take an astonishing blunder by Iraq to allow inspectors to
uncover a weapons program of real note. Suppose the inspectors did
get a tip on, say, a nuclear weapons plant and managed to descend
upon it unannounced. No doubt the Iraqis would simply refuse the
inspectors entry while they smuggled out or destroyed incriminating
evidence. The most incriminating thing Iraq will ever be accused of
is denying access to a sensitive site.

Indeed, the supposition that any level of Iraqi defiance would spur
the Security Council to authorize war is ahistorical. During the
1990s, our non- British allies compiled a record of consistent
appeasement. After Iraq whittled away at the prerogatives of
weapons inspectors, going so far as to deem areas as large as
Washington "presidential palaces" and thus off-limits, China,
France, and Russia refused to back even a toothless resolution
admonishing Iraq for its lack of cooperation. After Iraq expelled
the inspectors, France and Russia opposed pinprick bombing. If they
considered bombing too strong a response to massive violations
then, why would they support the vastly stronger alternative of
full invasion in response to weaker violations now? It may be that
our allies' reluctance to enforce Iraqi disarmament stems in part
from their distaste for Bush and his cowboy style, disregard for
environmental accords, and fondness for protectionism. But the lack
of commitment to Iraqi disarmament on the part of France, Germany,
and Russia long predates the Bush administration. And yet many
American liberals prefer to reside in an alternate universe where
the United Nations stands poised to defang Saddam if only the
United States would be just a bit more reasonable.

There is one sentence in Tuesday's Times editorial that comes
closest to expressing the true sentiments of antiwar liberals: "The
world must be reassured that every possibility of a peaceful
solution has been fully explored. " Consider the implications: The
character of the Iraqi crisis is such that there is always the
possibility of a peaceful solution. At every point in time, Saddam
permits the minimal level of inspections cooperation he can get
away with. Whenever he is threatened, he backs down until the
crisis subsides, only to ratchet up his defiance later. The only
logical end to this cycle is Saddam's successful acquisition of a
nuclear weapon, at which point disarmament, forcible or otherwise,
will no longer be an option. Indeed, this would be the actual
result of the policy favored by antiwar liberals--whether they
consciously desire it or not.

By the Editors

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