Stardate 20021004.2036

(On Screen): Jon writes to me and sends this link to an article, along with a serious question. Before I quote Jon's letter and respond to it, I would like to examine extensively the article to which he referred, for in a sense it is a distillation of all the antiwar arguments I've heard which are at least somewhat plausible. However, all of them are weak, and I find none of them convincing.

After an ominous silence lasting much of the summer, a debate about U.S. policy toward Iraq has finally begun. Remarkably, Democratic elected officials are not party to it. Some agree with Bush administration hawks; others have been intimidated into acquiescence or silence. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings yielded questions rather than answers and failed to prod Democratic leaders into declaring their position. Meanwhile, Democratic political consultants are advising their clients to avoid foreign policy and to wage their campaigns on the more hospitable turf of corporate fraud and prescription drugs. The memory of the Gulf War a decade ago, when the vast majority of Democrats ended up on the wrong side of the debate, deters many from re-entering the fray today.

The Democratic Party's abdication has left the field to Republican combatants -- unilateralists versus multilateralists, ideologues versus "realists." The resulting debate has been intense but narrow, focused primarily on issues of prudence rather than principle.

Though William Galston would really like to blame this on the Republicans ("intimidated into acquiescence or silence") he ultimately correctly evaluates this as a failure by the Democrats. It's true that they are equivocating. It's true that they feel under a great deal of pressure. But most of that pressure is coming from opinion polls which consistently show a substantial majority of Americans in favor of an attack on Iraq, which puts the Democrats between a rock and a hard place. If they come out and strongly oppose the war as a policy of the Democratic Party, they'll get butchered in the election. If they favor it, they fear that they'll be handing a victory to the President. So mostly what they've been doing is dithering and hoping that they could postpone any kind of public debate until after November, a hope which has now been dashed.

That said, it isn't the Republicans' fault that the Democrats are too gutless to stand up and take a consistent position.

Galston's argument neatly presents most of the antiwar positions I've heard and most of the mistakes that they make. Among other problems are these:

1. He emphasizes the risks and potential cost of action without reasonably dealing with the risks and potential cost of inaction.
2. He attempts to talk about the operation against Iraq without in any way acknowledging that it is part of a larger war, and as a result demands sufficient reasons why Iraq as such must be taken. As such, he completely ignores all arguments that the primary reason for conquest of Iraq is to advance the overall war (just as was the American attack on Vichy France in Morocco in 1942).
3. Several times he acknowledges some of the strongest pro-war arguments and indeed does a decent job of summarizing them, then makes a comment along the lines of "This is not easily dismissed", after which he proceeds to dismiss it.
4. When talking about how many of our allies feel about our war, he treats an alliance as an end in itself rather than a means to an end, and as such doesn't acknowledge the possibility that when an alliance costs us far more than it gains us, that it's prudent to dispense with it.
5. He raises the flag that if we become preemptive and unilateral then everyone else will, too, and the world will become a worse place, conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the nations in the world already do this. We're not the first to consider acting unilaterally, we're nearly the last.
6. He discusses international law, the UN charter, and "just war" theory in ways which try to make them seem like laws of nature which we cannot ignore, rather than as the rhetorical weapons against us that they actually are, ignoring the fact that hardly anyone out there pays any attention to any of the three.

This is not to suggest that the prudential issues are unimportant, or that the intra-Republican discord has been less than illuminating. Glib analogies between Iraq and Afghanistan and cocky talk about a military cakewalk have given way to more sober assessments. President Bush's oft-repeated goal of "regime change" would likely require 150,000 to 200,000 U.S. troops, allies in the region willing to allow us to pre-position and supply those forces and bloody street battles in downtown Baghdad. With little left to lose, Saddam Hussein might carry out a "Samson scenario" by equipping his Scud missiles with chemical or biological agents and firing them at Tel Aviv. Senior Israeli military and intelligence officials doubt that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would defer to U.S. calls for restraint, as Yitzhak Shamir's government did during the Gulf War. Israeli retaliation could spark a wider regional conflagration.

Shortly after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, I saw an interview with a world-class expert in nuclear engineering who said that he'd been asked numerous times by people, more or less, "what is the worst that could have happened?" His answer was more or less along the l