Gulf War Lite

In the run-up to the Gulf War, government officials put forth a bewildering array of reasons for the war, culminating with Secretary of State Baker's fatuous claim that "it's about jobs."

In this impending war, perhaps the earliest and most consistently telegraphed since Cato the Elder's repeated calls for the destruction of Carthage, a similar confusion reigns. The same reflexively secretive administration that didn't want to disclose which companies it met with and for how long when formulating its energy policy has released at least four different plans for achieving "regime change" -- widely-announced "covert" operations; the "Afghan strategy"; "Gulf War lite" and the "Baghdad/inside out option." It has also released numerous reports of generals, military strategists and other insiders who oppose the war, to the point that the American public seriously wonders what's going on.

This confusion has reached such heights that many are beginning to call this a "Wag the Dog" war, an attempt to avoid a Republican disaster in the November elections. While the exact timing may be affected by domestic considerations, the claim that they are the reason for the war itself is implausible when you consider that there has been talk about war on Iraq ever since 9/11, at a time when the world was Bush's oyster. In fact, the war is simply a continuation of the "regime change" policy of over 10 years' standing -- except that in the post-9/11 world the government believes that it can get away with anything by invoking terrorism as a threat.

So what is really going on?

Let's start with what are not the reasons for the war. None of those put forth by the Bush administration holds water.

Shortly after 9/11, there was an attempt to relate Iraq to the attacks. The original claim that Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague earlier in the year, quickly fell apart, as Czech officials engaged in an array of recantations and re-recantations. There are also allegations, recently resurrected, that Iraq had a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak, where Islamic fundamentalists were trained in how to hijack planes. It's hard to argue against any of this simply because there's so little there there; in fact, for months the administration stopped claiming any connection, unthinkable had there been any concrete evidence. The best current argument for this connection is Donald Rumsfeld's dictum that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

The main reason given for the war, of course, is the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Scott Ritter, formerly one of the most hawkish of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, has stated repeatedly that Iraq is "qualitatively disarmed." Although there's no way to account for every nut and bolt and gallon of biological growth medium in the country, Iraq had (as of December 1998) no functional capacity to develop biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. The common counter-argument is that Iraq could acquire them and the longer we wait the greater the chances of that happening.

Given the widespread credulous acceptance of this argument, it's worth nothing that even the extremely one-sided pro-war panel on the first day of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on Iraq was unable to produce any reason why Saddam would jeopardize his position by plotting an attack that would surely invite massive retribution. In fact, although he has used weapons of mass destruction before, most notably against the Kurds (at which time he was aided and abetted by the United States), the most plausible scenario in which he would use them again is under threat of American attack.

Beyond that, successive U.S. administrations have done all they could to sabotage arms control in Iraq and worldwide.