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In the crosshairs Let's Get PreemptiveBy Rick Horowitz
The administration would like you to understand that there's no connection. No connection, that is, between United States warplanes attacking military targets in Iraq, which we've been doing with increasing frequency in recent months, and the United States actually going to war with Iraq, which we haven't done. Not quite. Not yet. No connection, the administration says, and I'm willing to believe them. Of course, I'd have even more energy to believe them if I weren't so busy trying to unload all these bridges I bought a few weeks ago. Put me down as skeptical. Skeptical -- but not necessarily critical. Our planes may be making a point, and not just "We're tougher than you are." The latest confrontations (though there may have been still others by the time you read this) came on Tuesday, when U.S. jets attacked a radar site near Mosul in northern Iraq, and an air defense command-and-control facility near An Nukhayb in southern Iraq. The Defense Department said the raids were a response to recent hostile acts by Iraq against U.S. and British jets policing Iraq's "no-fly" zones. The Iraqis had apparently targeted the jets with their radar. The Iraqis paid for it. Now, there are several ways of looking at these dust-ups, at the ratcheting up of the firepower to match the near-to-boiling rhetoric on both sides. Personally, I'm inclined to focus on the motives. Our motives, that is. Iraq's motives seem pretty evident. They've never accepted the "no-fly" zones. We enforce the "no-fly" zones -- we've been doing it for a decade -- and they resist. But what do we get out of it? Or to put it another way, what do we get out of it by doing more of it? Plenty -- and not just a better security shield for the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south, who are, I'm sure, perfectly lovely people and fully deserving of our kind attentions. We get more than that. By increasing our flyovers, we get to test Iraqi air defenses in a more comprehensive way, probing their strengths and their weaknesses. You never know when a war might break out; this is information worth having. And should a war break out, it won't hurt to have already disabled or destroyed some of the very facilities the Iraqis would rely on to shoot down our planes or track our troop movements. So a few precision-guided missiles now can pay big dividends later. Then there's the emotional factor. Not that anyone in this (or any) administration would think of putting our pilots at unnecessary risk, but they certainly understand that the more flyovers we conduct, the more likely it is that some U.S. plane will be fired on, or even hit, that some crew member may be injured, or killed, or captured. For those people who insist that we can't launch an "unprovoked" war against Iraq, a shootdown may be all the provocation they need. Interesting reasons, every one. But I'm leaning toward a different one: reinforcing the preemption principle. See, most of the heaviest hitters surrounding President Bush, from Dick Cheney on down, have been arguing that we don't have to -- that we can't afford to -- wait until Iraq has actually put its wicked plans, whatever they are, into action. Instead, they argue, we have to move preemptively to stop them. "Preemptive self-defense" can be a hard sell -- but preemptive self-defense is exactly what we've been doing in the "no-fly" zones for years! If our pilots feel threatened, they're authorized to act. They don't have to wait until they're actually fired on; it's enough that Iraqi radar locks onto them, paints them as a possible target. There's danger, they take it out. End of argument -- and much of the world seems to understand. The more flyovers we conduct in the current situation, the more often our pilots have to defend themselves, the more the point is pounded home. And if war comes sooner rather than later -- a preemptive war -- expect the administration to make its case: This is just like that, only bigger. Posted 8/29/02. Click
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Rick Horowitz
