| Author | Message | | Guest | | Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 3:55 am Post subject: Dancing in the Dark if the USA Invades and Occupies Iraq |
| Subj: Dancing in the Dark
Date: 10/25/02 6:17:21 PM Pacific Daylight Time
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October 21, 2002
Dancing in the Dark
By BOB HERBERT
ever, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
— Winston Churchill
There may yet be a way to avoid the war with Iraq that President Bush appears to so desperately want. But if the U.S. does go barreling into Baghdad, with or without the sanction of the United Nations, the American people should at least have some clear sense of the potentially very heavy consequences that may ensue.
The Bush administration, with its muscular rhetoric and its trumpeting of a new generation of weapons even smarter than those used in the gulf war, would be happy to have the public think of the war as little more than a walk in the park.
I recently asked a storekeeper in Coral Gables, Fla., how he felt about the possibility of war with Iraq. He was reluctant to answer at first, but eventually said, "I support the president on this." He said that Saddam Hussein was a bad fellow and we'd have to go after him sooner or later, so we might as well go in now and get the job over with.
Ray Bradley, a retired electrician in Jackson, Miss., was even more gung-ho. "Let's have at it," he said in an interview. "We worry about them throwing chemicals and biologicals and nuclear bombs. Let's wipe it out before it starts."
It can sound so easy. But the truth is that the people of the United States (from the most ardent doves at Berkeley to the fiercest hawks in the Bush administration) are dancing in the dark on this issue. No one really knows where a U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq will lead. Saddam's regime can be destroyed, no doubt. But what then?
Do we really want to occupy Iraq? For how long, and at what cost, and to what end? Will we simply be eradicating a murderous threat, or also establishing a beachhead in an oil-rich frontier?
And what about the humanitarian crisis that is almost sure to develop once the smarter bombs and other forms of firepower have done the job they were created for? Are we ready and willing to deal with the life-threatening food and water shortages, the wounded and frightened civilians (including children), the shattered infrastructure and the desperate refugees? Are we ready?
And what's the plan for locating and securing Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? One can easily imagine, in the chaos of war, the dispersal of such weapons into terror networks both inside and outside Iraq.
For that matter, what's the plan for locating and securing Saddam? Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the troops in Operation Desert Storm, told NBC News: "I think target No. 1 if we have to go to war will be Saddam Hussein. Now that's an easy-say, hard-do thing. Because we never could find him in the gulf war."
The violence of that war seemed remote to most Americans. It had the qualities of a television special, or a video game. But the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, brought the cruel violence of terrorism right into the gut of ordinary Americans — and terrorism, not Iraq, remains the great fear of the moment.
That fear was in no way diminished last week when the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told a Congressional panel that the risk of a terror attack inside the United States was as grave now as it was "the summer before Sept. 11."
How is it possible that a war in Iraq and its aftermath will not divert attention and precious resources from the crucial fight against more immediate terrorist threats? A series of Qaeda-linked attacks, including the bombing in Indonesia that killed nearly 200 people, were carried out in the very week that Congress was giving the president the authorization he sought to attack Iraq unilaterally.
In a world as dangerous as ours has become, questions about the profound implications of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq deserve much more in the way of answers than we have now. Seldom has the U.S. had a greater need for wise and candid and prudent leadership. This is not a good time to be dancing in the dark. | |  | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
