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Blair before Congress Wonderful, but...By Rick Horowitz
That was a beautiful speech Tony Blair delivered last week. Addressing a joint meeting of Congress last Thursday afternoon, the British prime minister was determined and humble, poetic and passionate and wise. He said things that needed to be said, including some things his audience, there in the Capitol, and in front of TV screens in America and back at home, might not have wanted to hear. He sent American viewers, in particular, running to Churchill for comparisons -- and to Webster's for definitions. ("Risible"? "Perforce"? "Resile"?) It was a beautiful speech, an important speech. I suspect it made as eloquent a case for the war with Iraq as has been made on this side of the Atlantic. And at the very core of it, there was a false choice. "Can we be sure," Mr. Blair asked, in perhaps his most quoted passage, "that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together? Let us say one thing: If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. "But if our critics are wrong, if we are right, as I believe with every fiber of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive." The choice, as Mr. Blair described it, was between acting against the danger Iraq represented, or not acting. But the real choice -- the one Mr. Blair glossed over, the one President Bush and his people have likewise glossed over for months and months -- was this: acting against the danger Iraq represented, or acting against even graver dangers elsewhere. When -- if -- the apocalypse comes, it's far more likely to bear Osama bin Laden's fingerprints than Saddam Hussein's. And every minute and every ounce of mental energy we spend strategizing against Saddam Hussein are minutes and ounces diverted from the far more imminent, and far more horrific, threat that Osama bin Laden represents. Some of us who were willing to accept the concept of pre-emptive war spent the time leading up to war waiting to hear sufficient justification for it, waiting for the argument that would make it most logical to send our troops and treasure after this enemy, rather than that one. That argument never arrived. Not before the war, certainly -- and, if anything, the case has grown even less convincing since. The parts that weren't outright fabrications turn out largely to have been no more than educated (and disputed) guesses, dressed up in words of certainty. But freeing the people of Iraq -- surely that's worth something, isn't it? Of course it is. It's all well and good that we've liberated millions and millions of people from the rule of a brutal dictatorship. But think back: Did we go to war where and when we did to make the world safe for Iraqis? We went to war to make the world safe for us. Or safer, at any rate. Has sending Saddam Hussein into hiding really made us feel more secure? But wait, you say. Isn't taking down regimes that might provide al-Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction one efficient way of keeping those weapons out of al-Qaeda's hands? A fair question. With two responses. First, there are other regimes out there, too, regimes that dislike us every bit as much as Hussein's did; what's to keep these other regimes from fulfilling al-Qaeda's quest for carnage? And second, even if keeping Iraqi weapons out of al-Qaeda's hands were sufficient reason to go to war against Iraq, we seem to have made a hash of it, haven't we? Before the war, our top officials knew -- or said they knew -- just where Iraq's weapons were. And now? Well, they stammer, we can't actually find the weapons, but perhaps they've all been spirited out of the country. Isn't that precisely what we were trying to prevent? Isn't that also precisely what our own intelligence experts predicted? That Saddam Hussein facing war, facing defeat, was more likely under those circumstances to share whatever awful weapons he possessed, to make common purpose with the religious fanatics he'd kept at arm's length? Yet we went in anyway. What were we thinking? And more important: What is Osama bin Laden thinking? Posted 7/22/03. Keep
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Rick Horowitz
