The Daily Grasshopper

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, identified in today's New York Times as "the administration's toughest hawk on Iraq," was in Michigan yesterday holding an anti-Saddam Hussein pep rally. The story in the Times is called "U.S. Suggests Iraqi-Americans Will Help in Recovery Process." You can read it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/national/24SECU.html

According to the Times article, the Wolfowitz event (which was held at "a Ford Motor Company training center turned civic forum," incidentally - you think FoMoCo supports the war?) was open to "an invitation-only audience of about 250 Iraqi immigrants and naturalized American citizens." Yet even with this effort to stifle dissent (limiting the audience to only those people the White House approved in advance), there were still concerns raised by Iraqis about what is going to happen after Saddam is ousted.

That he will be ousted is not questioned. Wolfowitz himself said there is "small chance" to avoid war, according to the article. And although the crowd ended the session with chants of "Saddam must go!" there were also some tough questions for "the administration's toughest hawk on Iraq." Here's the relevant section:

"But some Iraqis voiced suspicions about whether they could trust the United States to finish the job in Iraq. Some voiced bitterness over President George Bush's failure to back a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq immediately after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Others expressed alarm at press reports that the administration might support a Baathist party general as Mr. Hussein's successor, or leave an American officer in charge of Iraq indefinitely.

"They won't be willing to see another dictator after Saddam," said Imam Hassan Qazwini, a prominent religious leader at the Islamic Center of America in Detroit.

Mr. Wolfowitz vowed that the administration would never back a "junior Saddam Hussein." And he repeatedly stated that American forces would be "liberators," not an occupying force.

But he cautioned that only the American military could handle some tasks, like destroying hidden weapons of mass destruction, putting out oil field fires and dealing with humanitarian crises."

I think there are a lot of surprises in store for people who think the Iraqi people are going to be "liberated" by this war. I'm not defending Saddam Hussein's regime - he's deplorable. I only wish we had been so worked up about him when he was committing his worst offenses. The truth of the matter is, we aided and abetted them. Acknowledging U.S. support for Hussein during the 1970s and 80s, back when we needed his regime to maintain the balance of power with Iran, is verboten for those who defend the Bush administration's march to war today.

Take William Safire's column in the same edition of the Times. He writes: "With some logic, the dictator of Iraq has taken heart from the marching rallies and the TV railing. He believes that the tried-and-true technique that has maintained him in power will work again: deceive and resist, shift the burden of proof, concede enough to prevent attack, divide and delay."

I'm not sure where Safire gets off questioning anyone else's logic, given that his argument depends entirely on ignoring some very important facts. The "tried-and-true technique that has maintained [Saddam Hussein] in power" has first and foremost been believing that the U.S. to put up with him, and being vindicated in that belief (with a couple important exceptions - but note that he is still in power). Saddam has little to do with it. In the 70s and 80s, he was useful to us, atrocities (like the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja) and all. He overstepped the boundaries of acceptable behavior in 1990, and he paid for it. But was it Saddam's ability to "deceive and resist" that kept him in power in 1991? No, it was the decision by the first Bush administration ("President George Bush's failure to back a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq" - to say nothing of the betrayal of the Kurds, who apparently will never learn, in the North), decried by the Iraqis in Michigan yesterday, that allowed Hussein to stay in power. This is not a secret, by the way. You have to be really influential, a writer like William Safire, to be able to blatantly ignore such facts and still get published in the New York Times.

Getting back to the question of what's going to happen to whom in the aftermath, there's an interesting story in the Times about Turkey's bargain with the U.S. to allow troops on its soil. Here's the relevant part:

"Mr. [Yasar] Yakis [Turkey's Foreign Minister] has suggested that his government intends to send tens of thousands of Turkish troops into northern Iraq to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state. The Turkish government has fought a long-running insurgency against its own Kurdish minority, and is afraid that a Kurdish state in northern Iraq would revive similar desires here.

The Americans are concerned that a large-scale Turkish intervention in northern Iraq could ignite age-old ethnic hatreds between the Turks and Kurds, and prompt a similar intervention in the region by the Iranian military. In interviews, American officials have said they want to limit any Turkish intervention to dealing with refugees.

In the interview today, on CNN, Mr. Yakis indicated that he wanted to ensure that the oil fields around the northern Iraqi cities of Mosul and Kirkuk did not fall into the hands of Kurdish fighters. Turkish officials fear that Kurdish possession of the oil fields would give the Kurds the economic power to form their own state.

Anyone familiar with Turkey's actions to "prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state" closer to home (the Kurds, and a few others) have to see this as an ominous development for the people of Northern Iraq. Is the U.S. looking for a pre-text to get the Iranians involved right off the bat? After all, they're in the "Axis of Evil," we'll have all the tanks and planes and troops all ready to go... Who knows? Maybe this is just the beginning of the end, after all.

You can read the whole story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/international/middleeast/24TURK.html

As for Wolfowitz's claim that the military is the best option for "dealing with humanitarian crises," I, as the President might say, respectfully disagree. Maybe "creating humanitarian crises" is the better way to put it. That, at least, is the premise of an op-ed in today's Boston Globe, entitled "Humanitarian consequences of war in Iraq." You can read the article here:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/055/oped/Humanitarian_consequences_of_war_in_Iraq+.shtml

Here's the part that struck me:

"Save the Children UK warns that military intervention in Iraq could significantly increase the suffering of the majority of Iraqis, almost half of whom are children below 14. Aside from a public health crisis, the possible sabotage of oil wells could produce environmental damages -- with serious health effects -- not only in Iraq but in the whole region. The possible use by Iraq of chemical and biological weapons within and beyond Iraq could provoke a nuclear retaliation by the United States and/or the United Kingdom. A nuclear explosion like the one in Hiroshima over Baghdad could kill between 60,000 to 360,000 people. One with a modern-day thermonuclear bomb could kill 10 times as many people, excluding long-term deaths.

Even without the use of nuclear weapons, Medact, the UK affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, estimates that possible deaths during the conflict could range from 48,000 to 260,000, most of them civilians. Civil war within Iraq could result in 20,000 additional deaths."

I live in Boston. Last week, on Thursday night, there was a terrible fire in a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, that killed 97 people, according to today's paper. It has dominated the news for the past four days, and rightly so. It was a tragic and horrible event. But I want people to think about the suffering of the victims and their families, and then multiply it by a factor of anywhere from 25 to 500. Because that's what we're about to do to the civilian population of Iraq. And we ought to be calling it by its name: a crime against humanity.