20 Questions on going to war with Iraq

 10-6-02

Sometimes war seems inevitable and in the national interest, as when the United States rolled back Saddam Hussein from the oil fields of our Kuwaiti protectorate, or when we destroyed the Taliban's safe harbor for terrorism in Afghanistan.

But the current possibility of war in Iraq seems, well, evitable. At the very least there are unresolved questions that Americans deserve to have answered before we launch an attack that may find our soldiers fighting their way through the populous urban centers of a faraway land. After weeks of discussion, we still need more due diligence. Here are some questions I have:

How did the War on Terror become a War on Iraq?

How's that War on Terror going, anyway, and how will an attack on Iraq help defeat al-Qaida?

What evidence is there that Iraq is providing state support for terrorism?

If there is not evidence that Iraq is a sponsor of the terrorists we are fighting, why do we need to fight Iraq?

Why is Iraq worth invading now when it was not worth invading before last September?

Is there any possibility that the large number of other countries that do not want us to go to war with Iraq have at least some legitimate reasons for their dissent, or is everyone who ever disagrees with us always wrong?

What is our commitment to nation-building in Iraq after the war is over?

Why are questions about going to war seen as unpatriotic instead of patriotic?

Why is there virtually no debate over the much larger story unfolding here, which is the adoption of a doctrine that calls for the United States to wage pre-emptive wars?

Will the United States develop something like the Department of Pre-crime in the movie "Minority Report" to tell us who to attack next?

If we are interested in countries that support terrorism in the name of Islam and have nukes, is our good buddy Pakistan on the list of places to invade?

Dick Cheney has been pushing his vision of global dominance for the United States for a decade now in a series of policy papers and official statements. Where is the discussion of this historic shift in our attitude and behavior toward the rest of the world?

What would Freud say about W's need to avenge his father via a war of conquest?

Who reaps the political benefits from this war? What would be in the headlines if the headlines weren't about a possible war with that reliable bad guy, Saddam Hussein? What would the issues be in the upcoming elections?

Shouldn't people who trot out the specter of Neville Chamberlain to decry our supposed appeasement of Saddam note that we did not appease him when he did his version of seizing the Rhineland? If rearmament alone is the trigger for war, shouldn't we inspect first to make sure he has rearmed in unacceptable ways?

Is it possible to rattle one's saber so loudly and so long that you get what you wanted without actually going to war, or do you end up talking yourself into a war you don't really want to fight?

If you don't need to fight a war, but you fight it anyway and win it and thus remove a really bad guy from power, have you done the right thing?

There are answers to these questions that would justify a war with Iraq, and there are answers that would not justify it. We should be clear on the answers before we fight. Sometimes peace must be established or maintained by acts of force, but the threshold for using force should be high in a peace-loving nation.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone.com) contributes a column to the News & Record each Sunday.

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