Margaret More: Father, that man's bad.
Sir Thomas More: There's no law against that.
William Roper: There is. God's law.
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.
Lady Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
Thomas More: And go he should if he were the Devil himself until he broke the law.
William Roper: So, now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
Thomas More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes! I'd cut down every law in England to do that.
Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
[Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons]
Dick Cheney: Father, that man's bad.
Sir Thomas More: There's no law against that.
George Bush: There is. God's law.
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.
Colin Powell: While you talk, he's gone!
Thomas More: And go he should if he were the Devil himself until he broke the law.
George Bush: So, now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
Thomas More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?George Bush: Yes! I'd cut down every law in the world to do that.
Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, George, the laws all being flat? This world is planted thick with laws, from ocean to ocean, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
There are good reasons for making Iraq the fifty-first state:
1. It would relieve us of the pressure of a deadline by which to leave that country.
2. It would allow the United States to become at least partly a Muslim and Arab country, countering claims by Muslims and Arabs that the United States� war on terror is actually a war on Muslims and Arabs; for how could this be so once we become a country with one state largely populated by Arab Muslims?
3. Because Muslims worships on Fridays, we could recognize Friday as well as Saturday and Sunday as days of rest and have a four-day workweek. (This is my favorite reason for annexing Iraq, by the way.)
Of course, there are also drawbacks to Iraqi statehood:
1. It is one thing to have to learn Spanish while living in the United States, but at least Spanish is relatively easy to learn. Have you ever tried to learn even a little Arabic? I have, and it isn�t easy: Arabic is read (and written) from right to left--and in a different alphabet without a single letter in common with ours!
2. Eventually, we would have to get around to cutting the Iraqis the same legal slack we do American citizens because, if Iraq became the fifty-first state, the people there would be, well, Americans.
3. Some Iraqis might object to the idea.
4. Once you become a state of the Union, you can never be a sovereign nation again. This means that if Iraq tries to secede, the U.S. will have to invade and conquer them all over again.*
Naturally, some objections to this proposal will be raised. For example, just look at drawback number 3 above. Well, I say, tough turkey. (Not the country, which would have taken a capital �T�; I do not propose their annexation�at this time.) Let us face facts: the United States has already shown that it can treat another nation�s sovereignty like the inconvenient nonsense that it is**; besides, getting all fussy about annexation and statehood after having already been conquered is like straining at a gnat after one has already swallowed a camel. (You see? We Americans already think like Middle Easterners in some respects.) Those who would resist Iraqi statehood should just get used to it. (That is, if it happens, and it hasn�t yet; we are just talking here.)
Some might point to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military police and say that, under such conditions, the Iraqis will never �get used to it� as I put it. Others might counter that this prisoner abuse was an aberration and that the MPs were untrained and had no idea that torture is a highly unorthodox method of penology and was even repudiated by the founders of the United States. I would say that this is the wrong way to go about countering the arguments of squeamish nay-sayers who are congenitally incapable of seeing that my plan to annex Iraq to the United States is the best last hope of the Free World. Instead, I would point out to them that the ringleader of the naughty MPs turns out to be a reservist who, in civilian life, had worked as a prison guard. Thus it is clear that everyone involved was observing normal American standards for the treatment of prisoners. This proves, as well, that Iraqi and U.S. penology systems are not all that far apart.
*Other countries, like Russia or Yugoslavia, should allow their constituent states or regions to secede from the whole, but, the United States, by the accident of an historic victory by federal might at the conclusion of the American Civil War, is deemed as if by lawful precedent to have closed the door on any part of the U.S. seceding from the union�ever. This concept will not seem alien to Muslims who believe that once one accepts Islam, apostasy is simply not allowed and is punishable by death. Most religions have believed this; yet the American creed of Union Forever is not so draconian. True, a secessionist from the American Union can be killed, but this is not necessary, and it is preferable if diplomacy�backed by force of arms, of course�can avoid getting any blood on the carpet. (This last word was not a reference to Persian carpets, by the way; Persia is the ancient and historical name for Iran, which I do not propose we annex at this time.)
**Of course, the United States� own sovereignty is sacred and non-nonsensical, unlike the sovereignty of other nations. The United States is always a special case. (See note above.)
A War on Terror seemed reasonable at first: It was necessary to go after al Qaeda and those who aided and abetted the organization involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. But that could have been covered by a �War on al Qaeda.� Now we see in 20/20 hindsight that the administration of President George W. Bush very early on decided that it would use the �War on Terror� to go after Saddam Hussein whether he had anything to do with al Qaeda or not. (Which, if anyone cares to know, he didn't.)
Part and parcel with the decision to create a �War on Terror,� there arose the notion that the Muslim world hates America because we are successful or free. In the aftermath of 9/11, hundreds of talking heads and nodding news anchors made this seem plausible. There must be, of course, a grain of truth in it. Muslims might, indeed, resent our success and disapprove of our licentious mores, but they do not really care as much about what we do on our own side of the world as they do about what Americans are doing in the Middle East. Does anyone really believe that the Muslim majority that does not live in the United States really cares what most Americans do? The reality is that the beef al Qaeda has with the United States�the one that gets terrorists like Osama bin Ladin the most mileage in the Arab street�is not what we westerners are so much as where we are: in Saudi Arabia, in the Middle East, exercising an extensive reach over the rest of world�their world. Apparently the pundits and spokesmen for the administration who have been spreading that notion since the afternoon of 9-11 have found their audience, but if you realize that bin Ladin�s rhetoric is never aimed at the supposedly corrupt values of the West and always at U.S. foreign policy (bin Ladin has gone so far as to say �occupation�) in the Middle East, you can�t deny that the commonplace belief about why 9-11 happened is skewed. It isn�t what we do over here so much as what we do over there. I am reminded of the movie �Lion of the Desert� starring Anthony Quinn as Omar Mukhtar, an Arab who fought against Mussolini�s invasion of North Africa in the 1930s. In one scene, Mukhtar spares an Italian soldier and hands him a captured Italian flag. Take this back to your superiors, he tells the westerner, and tell them it doesn't belong here. But in North Africa the Italians were not persuaded by such humaneness. They did not leave until they were forced out. Not that there is much similarity between Omar Mukhtar and Osama bin Laden. Hate bin Laden as he deserves to be hated for the reckless cruelty of his tactics (And the man and all of his associates must surely be mad to believe that their Allah, the Merciful, will forgive them for murdering innocent children), but his cause has nothing to do with his wishing that Americans were not infidels, or that they were less prosperous, or that our fashions would cover up more of our bodies; rather, bin Laden sees himself as representing what Anthony Quinn did in the scene from that movie, only without the mercy: he wants us out of his part of the world; he hates us not for who we are but where we are.
Back in 1993, after the first attempt by Muslim extremists to blow up the World Trade Center, it occurred to me that if I know very little about Islam, the American people, in general, know far less. The U.S. has been bumping up against the Muslim world for decades; yet how can the American people make informed decisions about our government�s policies toward Islamic countries when my countrymen know little about those policies and less about the people directly affected by them? The short answer is that we cannot.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I never dreamed the extent to which the Bush administration would abuse such an abysmally ill-informed citizenry. At first, I accepted the administration�s calling its program the �War on Terror� as understandable shorthand for a War on al Qaeda. Admittedly, going after terrorists in general, might seem too broad a goal, but surely it was meant as rhetoric, and the administration would make al Qaeda the main target of its efforts. Perhaps, I supposed, the president and his advisors thought that their response might somehow seem too measured if they simply called for a �War on al Qaeda.� I worried about the invasion of Afghanistan, but I recognized that this was where Osama bin Ladin was and that the Taliban, who ruled part of that country were harboring him. The invasion was iffy, but justifiable, I thought. At that point, I did not think that my government would do such a foolish thing as to make war on all Arabs or all Muslims. (I suppose that there must be a special corner in the afterlife for those na�ve enough to think that there might be something that their government is above doing only because it would be foolish, counterproductive or craven to do it.)
At the same time, we began to hear what turned out to be a trial balloon from Secretary of State Colin Powell about Iraq being next on the list of enemies in the War on Terror. This instantly struck me as ridiculous. So ridiculous, I thought, that surely Powell must be alone in his id�e fixe, which, of course, turned out to be far from the truth. Powell�s notion seemed absurd because associating Saddam Hussein with pious Islamists is like associating Hitler with fundamentalist Christians. They are fundamentally opposed to each other in many ways, and the only way to bring them together is to give them the same enemy, in which case, the doctrine of �the enemy of my enemy is my friend� would apply. Otherwise, Saddam and Osama were anything but natural allies and would indeed have been very happy to be rid of each other. We have since heard much from the conquistadors about Zarqawi, a supposed associate of bin Ladin who was in Iraq during Hussein�s rule. But was Zarqawi even there with Hussein�s imprimatur? And were there any other members of al Qaeda in the country? Meanwhile, many al Qaeda operatives were in Iran and Pakistan, but no one has proposed (yet) that these countries be invaded.
The anti-Saddam rhetoric that Powell ran up the flagpole earned enough salutes to encourage the administration that it could sell the broader approach of a War on Terror (which, you see, conveniently had a broad name already). At least the idea was not widely enough rejected to discourage the administration. And so, after the expedition in Afghanistan failed to actually capture or kill Osama bin Ladin, the president and his advisors turned their attention to Iraq. There is a misapprehension that everyone who mentions petroleum as a motive for Gulf War II thinks that Bush was out to help his friends in the oil business. I rather believe that the president saw his motives in a far nobler light: oil is the life blood of contemporary Western civilization, and the president probably believes that removing Saddam Hussein as head one of the largest oil producing nations was necessary to preserve that way of life. No wonder that Bush must see the French and Germans as ingrates: his fight to maintain the flow of oil must be for their sakes as well as ours in Bush�s mind. (Of course, the rhetorical excess has been visited primarily upon the French rather than the Germans who could hardly be expected to be grateful for our whipping their behinds in two world wars.)
When the drumbeat for invasion began to build, my initial reaction was bafflement. It looked to me as if the Bush administration was admitting defeat against al Qaeda, or at least losing focus on the initial justification for the War on Terror. When I later discovered that many Americans think that Iraqis were involved in 9-11, I saw that the deception involved in creating a mandate for the war on Iraq had been deliberately choreographed. The entire project had made increasing generalizations from seeking revenge and/or justice against al Qaeda to making war on any obnoxious people, whether they be Arabs, Frenchmen or any amorphous goblins in the collective American psyche following 9-11. Not only were we treated to an instant generalization from a war on al Qaeda to a war on mmany different �enemies,� but the administration�s entire �anti-terror� campaign has been extended by new generalizations (which have engendered rather than reduced terror, by the way). We were told that Saddam was indeed in cahoots with Osama bin Ladin even though this was patently untrue. As I realized a decade ago, the American public knows nothing about the very real divisions within the Arab world. To most Americans, Arabs, Muslims, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and the American Sikhs (who don�t even belong to the same religion) might all belong to the same terrorist network.
Further, we were told that we had to attack Iraq because the country had �weapons of mass destruction,� a virtually meaningless rubric for several different classes of weapons, which confuses those weapons that Iraq definitely had with those that it might have had with those that it almost certainly did not have. Neither did the term nor its acronym, �WMD,� allow any recognition of Iraq�s primitive capacity to deliver such weapons beyond the Middle East. Only by vague generalizations was the administration able to float the notion that Iraq could�let alone would�attack the U.S. with any of the several types of weapons that it had or might have had in its arsenal.
Half-hearted and mindless resistance to the war has been ineffective largely because it has given away too many rhetorical advantages to the administration. The war protestors assumed 1) that the United Nations would be entitled to invade Iraq if it wanted to, and 2) that Iraq should not have WMDs even if she did not actually threaten any other country with them. Once the anti-war camp conceded these things, all that the administration had to do was build its case upon these very assumptions. Just read the president�s address on the eve of war and see how he argued�disingenuously to be sure�that what he was doing was an extension of the UN�s self-proclaimed authority over Iraq�s internal governance and what weapons she might be allowed to possess.
Debate conducted in the media regarding the war is discouraging. During the flap over whether or not Bush told the truth when he accused Iraq of having �WMDs� or buying weapon-grade materials from Africa, no one asked the important question, �So what if Hussein did?� As long as he knew that he could not use such weapons against more powerful enemies with impunity, his merely having them gave no one cause to invade Iraq, and the fact remains�based on his record�that Hussein was sane enough never to start a war with a superior military power or to sell or give any weapons to those who would use them against the U.S. It was pure self-preservation that he never did these things. (Obviously, he remained obnoxious enough to the U.S. government that his restraint finally did him no good.) The media has no incentive to cast an effectively discouraging light on any war that makes good copy and television pictures, and the left is too ineffectual to stop it because they concede that someone�the UN�should have the authority to wage such wars.
Where all of this leaves us is in the utmost state of uncertainty. So far, the Bush administration has gotten away with selling the American people a sow�s ear for a silk purse. Americans have patiently accepted that an unnecessary war was necessary and are evidently ill informed enough to accept a widening war against any troublesome foreigners if only the administration is once more prepared to vague-up its rhetoric. There is no sign that this approach will cease to work. Now we seem to be doing more or less deliberately what I had feared we might do willy-nilly: Declaring war on virtually all or most Arabs or Muslims. This would have been and now is both unjust and foolhardy because 1) they are not our enemies, which is a good thing because 2) there are too many of them for us to make war on all or most of them. For all we know, a year from now, we could be at war with everyone and everything.
I receive many solicitations to subscribe to magazines. I usually give them the once-over and then throw them out. But now and again I see something that makes me go �hmmm,� before I throw it out. One day, I got a solicitation from a magazine called �The American Conservative,� a relatively new magazine (it has been around at least since 2002), which had a genuinely controversial pitch:
�I�ve been labeled a traitor,� writes founding editor Pat Buchanan. ��National Review� says so! You�ll find it in David Frum�s cover story in the April 7 issue [of NR, that is]. I encourage you to read it��Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War on America'." Much of what Buchanan has to say about his own magazine and what it stands for is out of the conservative-populist handbook. It�s what you have come to expect from Pat�anti-immigration, for example. But here are some choice quotes from his direct-mail pitch for �The American Conservative.�
��we�ve been speaking out�while the media pack marched in silent lockstep [OK, there�s an oxymoron since the media doesn�t do anything silently.]�about the dubious reasons for the conflict in Iraq. We�ve raised serious�and widely ignored�questions. About what exactly our new imperial foreign policy has to do with conservatism. And we�ve wondered in print about the politics of neoconservatives in the White House inner circle. We�ve simply asked what needs to be asked. Does every international crisis have to be an American crisis? Do we really have an obligation to see that every country is a democracy? What�s the connection between the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq? Does America have an �historic mission� to the world? And for raising these valid questions, we�ve been branded traitors! But I�ll bet you�ve wondered about some of the same things.�
Well, I have, though I�m not a conservative. I�m not a Democrat or socialist. I happen to be a libertarian.* Indeed, whatever Buchanan has to say that is acceptable to me is old hat (and what is disagreeable is, well, also old hat). I already knew that the war on (and subsequent conquest of) Iraq is a betrayal of the mandate for the war on terrorism. (Well, of course, the idea of a war on terrorism in general was always meant to open to interpretation who is and not a terrorist; otherwise, the administration would have started with a war specifically on al Qaeda.) The administration has hi-jacked its authorization to combat the terrorists responsible for the 9/11/01 attack by going after any bothersome Arabs. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, but the Bush administration has recklessly turned the war on al Qaeda into an excuse to make war on him because of his threat to 1) the free-flow of oil to Western civilization and 2) Israel. (The second threat is debatable; I think Israel can handle whatever threat--if any--a particular country poses without U.S. intervention.) Some would say the two are the same thing, but if the United States wanted to keep oil flowing from Arab countries, tying itself to Israel would not be the most logical way of doing so; rather, U.S. policy favoring Israel seems to be based on some Realpolitic doctrine having to do with Middle East stability, perhaps maintaining opposing forces in a "peaceful" stalemate--but this doesn't seem logical, either, does it? Note that I impute to Bush a relatively more noble motive than do most of those who argue that U.S. foreign policy toward Hussein�s Iraq is motivated by oil or score-settling.** I don't think that Bush or his administration is trying to help their friends in the oil industry. The old theory of the link between the governing class and business interests is simplistically one-sided. Government does not merely act in the interests of big business, it acts in its own interests and consequently manipulates business far more than business manipulates it. Instead, members of the administration�including Bush himself�regard oil as the life-blood of Western civilization as we know it, and rightly so. They have wanted to preserve that life by taking out a man who controls enough of it to hurt the economies of the world�s leading industrial nations�including but not solely the U.S. Where they err is in thinking that this gives them the right to trample the sovereignty of other nations. (Not to mention that they probably overestimated the economic and terrorist threat that Hussein actually posed--even to Israel.) They then underestimated what it would take to pacify Iraq. I have been reading an ongoing argument over Iraq, and the hawk estimated that U.S. casualties would be under 1,000. All his opponent had to do was point out that casualties were--at the time of the argument--already approaching 900, making 1,000 easy to reach. Secy. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been rightly blamed for this: generals told him he could not pacify Iraq with as few troops as he sent, and Rumsfeld fired the generals instead of heeding them.
The most frightening thing about the administration�s policy, to me, is that if the U.S. can invade Iraq under the pretext that that small country is in violation of United Nations sanctions and restrictions on what weapons it ought to be allowed by the rest of the world to possess, then what is to prevent the U.N. from one day resolving that the U.S. has too many weapons of mass destruction? (The very vagueness and arbitrariness of that term should make us ask who defines what is included under this rubric and who says that merely having the weapons, as opposed to using them, is in itself a threat to one�s neighbors. Why are biological weapons--which are relatively ineffective--in the WMD category, while extremely devastating incendiary bombs, for example, are not?) Aside from the formidable but surmountable problem of a present lack of material might to back up such a threat, what would stop the U.N. from arbitrarily declaring that America, too, ought to be invaded in order to insure world peace?
I have little use for the usual anti-war protestors. From the beginning of the debate over the invasion of Iraq they have missed the point and have given away crucial issues to the Bush administration, such as whether the U.N. ever had the right to make resolutions against Hussein�s Iraq. (It can be argued that most of these resolutions violated the U.N.�s own charter, which contains strong language supporting national sovereignty�language that has long been honored in the breech more than in the observance.) Whether the Bush administration is at all consistent in its defense of the U.N. sanctions against Iraq. (The administration supports the U.N.'s right to make the sanctions and goes so far as to imply that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is the fulfillment of U.N. policy--even though the U.N. never authorized the U.S. to invade Iraq--talk about having it both ways!) Whether U.N. inspectors had a right�or a reason�to search for weapons of mass destruction. Whether the vague term �weapons of mass destruction� serves to obscure rather than to clarify what weapons everyone has been talking about--whether these are defensive or offensive and whether they were already known to be in Hussein's arsenal or not. Whether the first Bush, Clinton and second Bush administrations (and their British allies) had any right to create and maintain no-fly zones over a sovereign nation with which we were not technically at war. Whether congressional inquiries into the administration�s specific justifications for attacking Iraq are�aside from being irrelevant�hypocritical when the congressional investigators are the same people who abdicated their constitutional authority by voting in 2002 to let the president decide whether the country goes to war with Iraq or not. (Well, CBS news commentator David Ross did raise this last question virtually in its entirety in a July 2003 broadcast�an exception to prove the rule.)
*I notice that erstwhile libertarian Justin Raimundo has written for �The American Conservative,� but I stand with Friedrich Hayek who wrote an article forty years ago entitled �Why I am Not a Conservative.� (Hayek also refused to be called a �libertarian,� though.) There's a joke that goes: Republicans can't sleep at night worrying that someone might be having fun; Democrats can't sleep for worrying someone might be making more money than somebody else; and Libertarians fall fast asleep because they are tired from being harrassed all day by both Republicans and Democrats.
**I do not say that President Bush is not finishing the work his father started, but whether or not this plays a part in the president�s psychology does not seem relevant to me.