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| Op/Ed - Maggie Gallagher |
By Maggie Gallagher
You may not have heard President Bush (news - web sites)'s speech on Iraq Monday night because only one network (Fox News) chose to carry the president's first major domestic address on what it will take to avoid war with Iraq: Destroy all weapons, permit key witnesses to be questioned (with their families) outside of Iraq, stop meeting with terrorists, account for all Gulf War (news - web sites) personnel, stop diverting oil money intended to feed Iraqis to weapons of mass destruction.
For me, and I suspect for other Americans who did watch, it was a glorious moment. President Bush appeared determined to do what is necessary to protect America, but only consistent with our values. American values have always included the belief that war must have a moral component. Might does not make right, as Sen. Ted Kennedy said. Grandiose new doctrines of pre-emption and invitations for single-bullet regime change could easily be confused with bullying: Swagger loudly and carry a really, really huge stick is an unattractive foreign policy, to say the least. Americans believe we fight just wars against aggressors who threaten us or other innocent allied nations.
Through the long months post-Afghanistan (news - web sites), various administration officials offered their sometimes weirdly warring, partial, incomplete and occasionally appalling justifications for war with Iraq. Like many Americans, I withheld judgment, waiting for the president to speak for himself and our nation: Why Iraq? Why now?
Bush framed the casus belli with devastating clarity: "Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations." Even today, Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) has chemical and biological weapons that violate the terms of that treaty; he is rebuilding weapons facilities, assembling new squads of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, and continuing to seek nuclear weapons, all clear treaty violations.
Saddam Hussein cannot assert an international or moral right to invade his neighbors, go down to ignominious defeat, sign a truce, repeatedly break the terms, and then try to hide behind the sanctity of his borders. Military action in Iraq would not be a new war, but a resumption of the Gulf War after a failed truce.
But even if it's a just war, is it the war that needs to be fought just now? Al Gore (news - web sites), among other critics, charges that war with Iraq will distract us from the larger war against terrorism. "To the contrary," said President Bush, "confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror."
Last September President Bush warned the nations of the world: No more playing footsie with international terrorists. "Those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves." But Iraq continues to harbor terrorists. We do not know how great or deep the cooperation is, but the failure of Iraq to arrest and turn over al-Qaida members within its borders speaks for itself.
Skeptics dismiss the idea of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida, saying bin Laden's troops despise the secular Iraqi regime. Skeptics miss the point. At some point in the last decade, international Islamicists began to cut deals with various Arab and Muslim nation-states: tacit support from governments in exchange for directing violence outward, toward Israel, Europe and now America.
Interrupting this kind of tacit state support for terrorism, which often leaves little or no fingerprints, requires a change in the balance of power in the minds of dictators across the Middle East. They have to decide that it is in their own corrupt, dictatorial self-interest to stay far away from Islamicist terror, that it is better to anger al-Qaida than the United States of America.
But with victory comes hope, not only for America but for the tortured, abandoned people of Iraq, according to Bush: "People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery, prosperity to squalor, self-government to the rule of terror and torture."
As another great American once said, "Gentlemen may cry peace! Peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun." That was Patrick Henry, speaking of war with Great Britain. But right now only Iraq is fighting.
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