In recent days, as the White House speechwriters were weighing the language and the imagery of Tuesday's State of the Union address, President Bush was extemporizing his way toward war. He declared himself (vaguely) "sick and tired of games," exasperated by the arms-inspection process in Iraq and Saddam Hussein's attempts to evade it. And (even more vaguely) he warned any Iraqi commander who launched a weapon of mass destruction, "When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried, and persecuted as a war criminal."
Ever since the last Presidential campaign, Bush's wary relationship to his native tongue has been the stuff of easy comedy; his love of being "misunderestimated" a gift not merely to the writers of "Saturday Night Live" but also to Karl Rove's political operation, which had been eager to contrast Candidate Bush's studied homeliness with Candidate Gore, who liked to tell reporters of his fondness for the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What pork rinds were to the father, malapropisms are to the son— a gesture of cross-cultural solidarity.
On the level of state, however, the President's language, his ability to set out complex matters of policy for the American people, and also for our allies, and even our enemies, matters enormously. At the United Nations General Assembly more than four months ago, Bush, after long delay, opened his case against Saddam Hussein with a pointed litany of Iraq's egregious violations of human rights and international law. With a gravity appropriate to the occasion, Bush surveyed everything from Saddam's genocide in the Kurdish north to his relentless ambition to build nuclear weapons and dominate the region, by employing the same level of terror that keeps his own citizens in a state of constant subjugation.
But since this impressive opening foray the President has been less consistent in furthering, and deepening, his case for the use of force in Iraq. Even as he has dispatched aircraft carriers, fighter planes, and tens of thousands of troops to the region, he routinely dismisses important objections to, and questions about, the buildup to war; mainly, he has indulged in a rhetoric of irritation.
What is most unfortunate about the President's lack of public engagement in the argument for force is that the objections to it are answerable. There are, of course, some who oppose an invasion of Iraq on the ground that, say, peace is better than war, or that the "real issue" is a conspiracy of oil interests, or that the President is an avenging cowboy and all his advisers a posse. Far more seriously, there are questions of why now and why Iraq (and not North Korea or Iran); there are profound concerns about the loss of life (can't we just foment an Army coup?), and about what happens the day after Saddam is arrested, or killed, or lands on Elba. Do we really expect a Jeffersonian legislature to rise from the rubble of Saddam's palaces? Are we prepared for years of rebuilding in Iraq when we already seem to have lost interest in the continuing chaos in Afghanistan?
Saddam's record is unambiguously horrific, but the issue of a military offensive is almost uniquely complex as a matter of timing and strategy. There have been no recent Iraqi invasions of neighboring countries, no recent Biblical mass of refugees, no indisputable evidence of a connection with the Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. It is also unlikely that the White House or the United Nations inspection team will present this week what Adlai Stevenson presented to the Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis: irrefutable evidence that an enemy is amassing weapons of mass destruction. Even if the Administration agrees to support a short extension for the U.N. inspectors who are now at work in Iraq—and such a concession might go a long way toward building a larger, more cohesive coalition—this evidence will not come easily, if at all. The Cubans and their Soviet allies might not have been able to hide an enormous military installation from American spy planes forty years ago on a relatively small island, but the Iraqis are highly experienced in the craft of "cheat and retreat," and it is not as difficult to hide centrifuges or gallons of anthrax in a country that is larger than Germany.
As it happens, the most comprehensive and convincing case for the use of force in Iraq has been made by a government intellectual, Kenneth M. Pollack. From 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2001, Pollack served in the Clinton Administration as director for Gulf affairs at the National Security Council; before that, he was a military analyst of the Persian Gulf region for the C.I.A. More effectively than Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz or any other of the hawkish big thinkers in the Administration, Pollack, in his book "The Threatening Storm," presents in almost rueful terms the myriad reasons that an aggressive policy toward Iraq now is the least bad of our alternatives. As Bush did at the U.N., Pollack carefully describes the Stalinist character of Saddam's state: the pervasive use of torture to terrorize and subdue the citizenry and insure the loyalty of the Army and the security apparatus; the acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing; the use of chemical weapons on neighbors and his own citizens; the sponsorship of terrorist groups; the refusal to relinquish weapons of mass destruction despite the humanitarian and economic cost the Iraqis pay through international embargo. We are reminded, too, of Saddam's vision of himself as the modern Saladin, the modern Nebuchadnezzar II, who (after massacring the Kurds, invading Kuwait, and attacking the marsh Arabs of the south) vows to "liberate" Jerusalem, vanquish the United States, and rule over a united Arab world. Saddam is not a man of empty promises. His territorial aggression is a matter of record, his nuclear ambitions are clear.
Unlike the President, Pollack dignifies all possible objections and what-ifs with answers. For example, he concedes that North Korea and Iran are, in some ways, even greater and more obvious threats than Iraq, but he carefully shows why the regional politics of northern Asia require a different tack and why Iran, with its more dynamic, grass-roots politics, is far likelier to undergo a homegrown revolution or reform than Iraq, where politics of any kind are not permitted.
The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.
Saddam's abdication, or a military coup, would be a godsend; his sudden conversion to the wisdom of disarmament almost as good. It is a fine thing to dream. But, assuming such dreams are not realized, a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.
