Falsepolitik
You wouldn’t know to look at them today, but a generation ago, the Republicans were the party of fiscal discipline and hard, clear-eyed foreign policy. Now, of course, it appears to be their deliberate policy to bankrupt the federal government through irresponsible tax cuts, but what’s most surprising is how the party of Kissinger, Nixon and realpolitik has become enough of a pack of bleeding-heart sentimentalists and idealists to make Woodrow Wilson blush with embarrassment. At least, that’s what you’d think to listen to the party flacks on the screaming head cable shows, defending the Iraq war.
See, it seems that the whole rationale for the war now boils down to ridding the world of the monstrous dictator Saddam Hussein. WMDs or no, terrorist ties or no, who among us can say everyone, especially the Iraqi people, aren’t better off without him? After all (repeat after me boys and girls), he murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people, even using chemical weapons! In the calculus of the administration, it was worth sundering fifty years of international relationships and plunging the entire region into utter chaos for the humanitarian purpose of liberating the people of Iraq from the tyranny of a brutal thug. Henry Kissinger would be turning over in his grave, if only he’d have the decency to be dead already.
Because, really, it’s like this. Screw the Iraqi people. Saddam rose to power through whatever means constitutes legitimacy in their society. He is indigenous to Iraq and was not installed as a puppet by some foreign power. If they wanted to be rid of him, they could have found a way, just as the good citizens of Congo (once Zaire), Romania, Uganda, the Soviet Union, the Philippines, Indonesia and Chile once got rid of their villainous rulers, and as the folks of Zimbabwe and Iran hopefully will do in the near future. He was their monster, he was their problem.
Yes, he had greater ambitions once, but they were broken by force. Since the first Gulf War, Saddam had been kept in a box – marginalized in the Arab world and utterly harmless to his immediate neighbors, much less to the United States. As we have seen in recent weeks, any claims to the contrary were an utter pack of lies. His army was a joke, even the so-called elite divisions. He had no WMDs to speak of, and even if he did, what use were they if he could not even deploy them in a last-ditch effort to save his own regime? Now, rather than being under unified control and perhaps subject to inspection, whatever ingredients for mayhem that may have been lying around are in the hands of unaffiliated and increasingly desperate partisans whose behavior is completely unpredictable. As for terrorist connections, I think terrorists will find the new Occupied Anarchy of Iraq much more hospitable than a land ruled by one top-dog who didn’t want the competition.
And what about those precious, innocent Iraqi citizens that we wanted to save? They are running amuck, trashing their country and arming for a civil war that is likely to draw the entire region into conflict. More Iraqis are likely to be killed in the coming six months than during the past 10 years of Saddam’s reign, and they will perish miserably by disease and starvation in addition to by violence. But this time, it isn’t the shame of brutal Arab politics that brought about the tragedy. This time, the crime has a perpetrator – and over 200,000 accomplices are still on the scene.
“Declare victory and go home” is the advice Senator Fulbright once gave to another Texan president caught in a worsening overseas war. That advice might not be so easy to follow today. A war waged for humanitarian principles makes for a much more difficult disengagement than one fought even on as slim a basis as the “Domino Theory” that was used to justify Vietnam. The Domino Theory might not have held water, but it was at least founded upon the Cold War foreign policy consensus, and articulated the genuine, legitimate interests of the United States at the time. The Administration’s Iraq policy is based on no consensus, the interests it articulates (now solely the humanitarian claim) are not genuine, and the genuine interests (oil, intimidation, domestic politics) are not legitimate. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the honest cynicism of Richard Nixon.
9:22:42 AM 
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