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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

Dave, I don't think there's anyone here /not/ thinking about this,
though it's difficult to say whether any of us are thinking about it
well or throughly ;) It's a complex problem, and not one that can
be solved or even understood quickly.

Here's my two cents, FWIW.

on Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 11:24:42AM -0400, Childers.Paula AT epamail.epa.gov 
wrote:
> > I already have said in my post that Iraq was seen as the US ally  in
> the
> > area against the religious revolution in Iran. Read it again.
> 
> Credit given. However, the point remains that we, in effect, have "set
> him up." we gave him the first WMD's, and many more after that, and in
> effect created the Hussein regime. We have no moral grounds to act
> superior, or to believe we would do any better a second time around,
> especially after we kill thousands more Iraqi civilians.

See, this is, IMHO, the only real grounds we /do/ have. We helped to
create and foster a murderous cretin who has enslaved tens of millions
of people, funded suicide bombers, killed members of his own family (to
say nothing of the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds), and our actions not
only kept him in power during the 1980s, but our refusal to finish him
off (or support those who would have) after Kuwait helped keep him in
power, as did the sanctions that basically placed his government in
control of distributing hunger relief.

We're at least partly responsible for the deaths by starvation of some
quarter to half a million Iraqi children. Sure, there is blame on both
sides - Hussein hasn't exactly gone to great lengths to get the
sanctions removed, and his tribe isn't starving.

If anything, the US Govt has an obligation to right the wrongs we've
perpetrated, or helped perpetrate, on the Iraqi people and elsewhere.
And if that means we go in and help them bring him down (since they're
obviously incapable of doing so themselves) then so be it. And don't
forget - we're /already/ at war, in practical terms, with Iraq, and have
run hundreds of bombing missions since 1991. We're already in a role of
containment, with UN authorization, and it's not working. We are in the
air keeping the Kurds and southern Shi'ites from harm, with virtually no
transparency on the ground between the no-fly zones. And I'm not sure
that inspections are anything other than a stalling tactic on the part
of Hussein and Aziz.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no hawk, and I certainly don't trust Bush or any
of his clan. I'm more inclined to trust Zinni and Powell and the others
who are advising caution, as they've seen war where the chicken hawks
got away with AWOL and worse, because of their powerful connections. And
I think the whole process has been very badly managed, and done much to
encourage the cynical responses we've seen on the list so far, as well
as engender a dangerous lack of trust in the government (as opposed to a
productive one). And I hope like hell that there's a reckoning when the
voters realize what hypocrites these guys are, and when the corruption
and ignorance and poor communications skills are revealed to have caused
more harm than good. "Axis of Evil"? Who thought /that/ was a good idea?

But I get very uncomfortable when I see arguments based on some goofy
idea that because our government has done bad things we have no right,
or no responsibility, to do good things. That's asinine. I suppose we
shouldn't have rebuilt Germany after Dresden? Or Japan after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki? Of course, good and bad are simplistic moral concepts, and
often have hidden biases, but very few areas do not.

I'm extremely uncomfortable with the possibility that all of this is a
thinly disguised grab for oil, or political play to distract us from the
economy, or a first step towards some vaguely defined empire. And I am
less than trusting of the current administration's ability to bring about
the best course of action for us and for the Iraqi people.

But I am coming round to the belief that the war will be short, with few
losses on either side other than those who are willing to fight for
Hussein (which makes them suspect, in my book, given all that I've read
about these thugs - do some research on Uday Hussein if you want a
picture of a psychopath) and that the end result will be a better Iraq
or a better Middle East. The comments I've heard about the installation
of a member of the Hashemite dynasty as ruler of a (somewhat differently
constructed) postwar Iraq are interesting, if discomforting for any
American, raised to believe that a righteous populace can rise, and
should, against tyranny, and that a comfortable isolationism is best,
that the avoidance of "foreign entanglements" a wise policy.

But we haven't done very well in avoiding such entanglements, and from
the Spanish-American war to the two World Wars, and beyond, it is our
willingness (or our government's willingness, to be fair) to engage in
such conflicts that has brought us to the prosperity we now enjoy (hard
as it may be to remember in a bad economy). We've beaten or bankrupted
the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, we've assumed responsibility for
much of the old British and French empires, and we have helped build
postwar Germany and Japan and Taiwan and South Korea into thriving,
open, modern industrial societies. There is more good here in these
actions and their consequences than evil.

/If/ we can keep sight of the positive, the good, that came of our
involvement in postwar Axis countries, and the long and brutal Cold War,
and try to ensure that we support similar goals in Iraq and the Middle
East generally; if we can block all efforts by the more cynical and
politicized in the current administration, and urge our leaders on to
stand up for the good regardless of shortsighted political fears, then
we will have done all we can do. This also means supporting the Afghans
in rebuilding their country, which we're not alone in having forsaken.
(I suspect this is because our "goal" there isn't yet accomplished,
namely, the capture of OBL, and that we're reluctant to flush money
into a country that may still harbor OBL and Omar, but what do I know
of these matters? Not much.)

And if that also means we can stop molly-coddling the Wahhabists in
Saudi just because we're dependent on their oil, then all the better. Of
course, if it means we're in bed with corrupt oligarchs in Nigeria or
Venezuala or Russia, then that's bad - so hey, suddenly a post Saddam
Iraq led by a friendly Hashemite looks more interesting. It's too bad
there aren't any nice oil-producing nations.

And if that means the repressive regimes in Egypt and Syria and Iran
have less success holding on to power in the face of a democratic Iraq
(or whatever comes of the political process that ends the war) then more
the better.

And if that means that we can finally pay attention to the situation in
Israel with an eye to figuring out what the hell is really going on over
there, more the better. Thinking we can solve it is silly, though. My
grandmother was from Northern Ireland. My mother spoke to some of our
cousins over there, particularly one who is a fire chief in Belfast, and
she's convinced that it's more a matter of keeping protection rackets
going than anything to do with transubstantiation or a hatred of John
Bull.

The thing to remember here is that politics, especially power politics,
are messy. Things aren't always as simple as finding out who's right, or
finding out what's wrong. And the powerful often lie and manipulate the
weak by exploiting popular prejudices. (Worth remembering, especially in
this day and age!)

In an attempt to understand the world in general and the Middle East
specifically, I've been doing a lot of reading over the past year.

Right now, I'm reading "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" by
Richard Rhodes, to get a sense of what effect an isolationist country in
a deadly arms race during a rapid attempt to modernize its culture and
economy can have - namely, a fifty year Cold War, tens of millions dead
in purges, proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, Central America, and
Afghanistan, among other places, and the destruction of much of eastern
Europe.

I'm also reading "Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein"
by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, which follows on the heels of "Saddam
Hussein: Politics of Revenge" by Said Aburish, which are interesting
companions to Dark Sun in that the parallels between Stalin's USSR and
Saddam Hussein's Iraq are chilling, though I'd say Hussein is a cruder,
probably less intelligent man than even Stalin was, and certainly less
concerned about the nation of Iraq and more concerned with himself and
his tribe and family. For all his excesses, I do believe that Stalin was
acting rationally in response to his situation - namely, a Russia
surrounded by enemies and struggling with the modernization of a peasant
class in an attempt to stay relevant in a post-WWII world. I think
Hussein just wants power and to be remembered as another Salah al'din.
And if that means turning Israel into glass, I don't think he'd stop
short of that at all.

I just finished "A Peace to End All Peace", which was a discussion of
the path that led to the creation of the modern Middle East out of the
pieces of the British and Ottoman empires. Fascinating and frightening.

I've read dozens of others, more than I can name, some more depressing
that others, and some less directly related to Iraq and the Mideast
than with Afghanistan and Islam in general.

The situation we're dealing with derives directly out of a fifteen
hundred plus year old religious and cultural conflict; a thousand year
old power politics conflict (read: the crusades); the collapse in WWI of
a six hundred year old empire; the reconstruction, around basically
irrational lines, of that empire, and then failure to hold on to that
result, by the British; the rise of (and fight against) Communist
totalitarianism worldwide; and the importance of cheap oil for the world
economy, in particular our allies, who for the most part lack sufficient
natural oil reserves . All combined with the decline of Islam as a
thousand year process, suddenly confronted by modernity and the rise of
Europe and America and the post-Cold War military and economic supremacy
of the United States.

Simplistic moral tales are useless, but so are simplistic power tales,
simplistic religious tales, simplistic cultural tales, etc. Paula and
David are right to "follow the money", but let's not assume that wealth
is always a bad thing. George Marshall argued, successfully, that a
wealthy, modern, democratic Germany and Japan would be far less harmful
(and expensive) than the weak, impoverished Germany of the Weimar
Republic.

But, and this is a provisional 'but', despite the urgency that faces us,
I'm coming to believe that something must be done, that containment as a
strategy has only succeeded in the death by starvation of a half million
Iraqi children and inflamed the passions of Muslims everywhere, while
strengthening Hussein's power and destroying the thriving secular middle
class of Iraq two decades ago, leading to a potential for even more
Islamist and fundamentalist anti-American fervor, and we know where that
delivered us.

My opinions, and open to critique,
Steve

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