The "Maybe War" Faction

During my last visit to Baghdad, on the eve of last decade's Gulf War, I sat for three long hours in the middle of the night arguing with one of Saddam Hussein's top strategists. I thought both he and his mustachioed boss, whose smirking visage shone from his wristwatch, were truly miserable putzes. Najib Al-Hadithi, bunkered in his top-floor office in the Information Ministry building, plied me with tea and endlessly clicked his worry beads. He bellowed about millions of Iraqis, who he said were at that very moment preparing to heroically sacrifice themselves and fight to the last man against the imminent U.S. attack.

Right.

History played out rather differently. While emaciated and cowering Iraqi soldiers scrambled to surrender to CNN crews, friendly fire accounted for most of the very few American casualties. On the last day of the ground war, Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf cooked and plowed tens of thousands of Saddam's soldiers into the sand along the so-called Highway of Death -- one of the greatest one-sided military massacres in recent history.

It tested the imagination to think that anyone would rise to defend Saddam or his wretched regime. I had been to plenty of places in the world languishing under dictators, but nothing could compare with Iraq's sheer and sinister megalomaniacal evil. The place oozed fear and intimidation, with public or even private disparagement of the state considered a capital crime.

Nor could there ever be any doubt as to who was in charge. Every public institution was named for Saddam. Entire stores sold nothing but Saddam paraphernalia. Fifteen- and 20-foot hand-painted Saddam portraits on nearly every street corner. Saddam in military uniform, in a white linen suit, in desert robes. Saddam steelily commanding troops, reading a book, studying a map, digging a trench, smiling in Ray-Ban ski glasses, loading a hunting rifle, playing with smiling little girls, puffing contentedly on a big stogy, lounging bare-chested on a Kurdish rug like a Playgirl centerfold, riding a horse with his red-checkered kaffiyeh trailing in the wind. Indeed, Saddam in seemingly every conceivable costume and pose except maybe a pink belly-dancing outfit from A Thousand-and-One Nights.

And yet, as I strolled the crowded streets around the dazzling Golden Mosque in the ancient Kadhimiya quarter of the city and looked upon the black-robed Shiah women with tattooed lips and the old wizened men puffing on hookahs under green fluorescent lights in the corner tea shops, I couldn't think of one single justification for waging war against this nation or its people.

And now, as Bush the Second noisily threatens to finish the job that Poppy pooped out on, I find even less justification, if that's possible. At least during the first Gulf War you could delude yourself into thinking we were rescuing occupied Kuwait and restoring rule to its syphilitic sheiks.

But this time around, what? We can be chums with the nuclear-armed Chinese Stalinists who hold public executions of petty criminals and beat up senior citizens in Tian An Men Square. We contained the Soviets and their arsenal for 50 years, but we can't figure out a way to deal with Saddam short of invasion?

When it becomes so patently obvious that the administration's warmongering stems not at all from any authentic security concerns but rather from cold and cynical domestic political calculation, why is there no clear and steadfast anti-war opposition?

Instead, as New Yorker writer Henrik Hertzberg recently said, "In Washington one side wants war; the other wants debate about war." The result is a pro-war faction and a "maybe war" faction, he rightly says.

Move over, Mike Dukakis; all those other Democratic hopefuls want to clamber onto that tank with you. To one degree or another, every major Dem-ocratic presidential contender, from Gore to Daschle to Gephardt to Kerry to Edwards, has recently endorsed the coming war against Iraq. At most they whimper and whine about "timing" or "consensus building" or congressional "consultation." But at the end of the day, they are all in the tank for Bush -- quite literally.