IRAQ DEBATE NOTES. Scattered, and scattershot, comments from yesterday’s American Prospect/New Republic debate on war with Iraq.

First, Julian’s right–Barber and Chait were cartoony versions of the anti- and pro-war camps, whereas William Galston and Kenneth Pollack were nuanced and hard-hitting. Like Julian, my position didn’t change much based on the debate–I left the room about 75% anti-war, which is about where I started.

Questions for Kenneth Pollack: So… this is a war for oil. (Pollack pretty much said so.) Is that justifiable?

Pollack operates on the assumption that it is possible to stop nuclear proliferation. I think the strong anti-war arguments assume that it is not possible to stop proliferation. Saddam Hussein will get nukes if he a) wants to, which he manifestly does, and b) lives long enough, which is only slightly dicier. But the strong anti-war argument is that a world in which states accept the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emption is much more dangerous than a world with nuclear proliferation but without pre-emption. Basically, the claim is that “pre-emption” changes the “rules of the game” and creates major incentives for aggressors to strike first. (Here, have a cartoon.) Also, unlike Mutually Assured Destruction (which has major just-war problems, by the way, but leave that aside since frankly I have no clue what to do with that fact), both “sides” in any conflict can’t adopt a policy of pre-emption. Two hostile powers can agree to MAD, but once either one of them shifts to a policy of pre-emption, all bets are off, and the “game” becomes much less predictable.

Pollack stated his opposition to pre-emption, but, as Julian points out, he really didn’t make clear what he meant by his opposition, since he clearly favored some kind of prophylactic war–hit Saddam before he hits us. My best guess at the moment is that Pollack supports war only if it is (publicly) based on a preexisting casus belli like Saddam’s violation of the UN resolutions that ended Gulf War Classic. But that’s weird, since Pollack’s own reasoning is based on a very pre-emption-sounding understanding and not primarily based on the “we’re STILL at war with Saddam” non-pre-emption understanding. So if I’m right about how Pollack squares support for war “sooner rather than later” with Saddam and opposition to pre-emption, he seems to require a “noble lie” in which we pretend that we’re not pre-empting but really we are. Hmmmmm.

Galston thought the following would make war acceptable: 1) “significant Iraqi violations of UN resolutions acknowledged by nations other than the US”; 2) a war “to enforce disarmament, not regime change” ; he noted that the former might well require the latter but the latter should not be the stated goal of the war; 3) reasonable probability of no major collateral damage to other regimes (more on this in a moment); and 4) the war should not impede the war on Al Qaeda and allied agents of terrorism.

Galston also pressed hard on the possibility that war with Iraq would destabilize the Middle East and provoke a coup or revolution in Pakistan. So in order to keep one dictatorial freak-show from getting the Bomb, we would have sparked a war that would lead to a radical Islamist dictatorial freak-show taking power in a country that already has the Bomb. Pollack lamely answered that there were “things we could do to minimize unrest in the region.” Pleasant dreams, America!

Chait noted that Bush pere and Clinton both tried to stop Saddam’s weapons programs via threats and bombing but no full-scale war, and, in his view, that strategy has failed. He pointed out that the UN is not necessarily going to acknowledge violations of its own resolutions unless pushed, since France and Russia both have economic and political (domestic in France’s case–lots of Muslim immigrants, sucks to be an ex-empire doesn’t it?–and geopolitical in Russia’s) interests in making nice with the Iraqi regime.

Barber’s best line was a quote from Dick Cheney in 1991: “If you’re going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shiite regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?” Barber asked what had changed since Cheney said that. Chait, after noting that he had never claimed to be a Cheney fan, lamely replied that just about anything would be better than Saddam.

Interestingly, both sides (by which I mean Galston and Pollack) agreed that: 1) The Bush administration’s case for war had significantly improved since this summer, moving in a more multilateral and less pre-emptive direction, but Bush had only been able to wring major concessions from both Saddam and the UN because of his summertime war-cries. More noble lie?

2) We’re screwing up Afghanistan, and if we don’t get our act together we’ll screw up Iraq even worse, to the point that the war might be a terrible idea even from Pollack’s perspective. (Chait flatly denied that postwar Iraq could be worse than status quo. Another big hmmmm to that.)

3) Everyone–all four participants–claimed to be generally against the “Bush Doctrine,” pre-emption, and the more aggressive of the Bush administration’s various justifications and plans for the war. The anti-war team argued that you can’t separate opposition to the Bush administration’s current understanding of war aims from opposition to the war generally–you can’t be pro-war-on-Iraq but anti-Bush’s-war-on-Iraq. This sounds persuasive, but I thought Pollack actually made the better case here. He pointed out that major shifts in rhetoric and action have already occurred, moving the administration closer to his own perspective; he argued that vigorously pressing (what he considered to be) the correct case against Saddam would change the terms of public debate and essentially corner Bush into building a better war. Given my propensity to believe that shaping public debate really does change history, I’m naturally sympathetic to Pollack’s position here, especially since he could point to actual changes in Bush policy. On the other hand, Bush’s new emphasis on UN resolutions and inspections was a more natural shift than the shift to long-term postwar “nation-building” that Pollack wanted. (I note that in the presidential debates, Bush counseled against nation-building, but in context he was discussing nation-building not as the endgame of a war for American interests but as an end in itself, a la Haiti, Kosovo and assorted Clintonian whatnot.)

4) Everyone–all four participants–agreed that whether or not Saddam had some tenuous, faint, tangential connection to Al Qaeda, that’s not the point. Neither Pollack nor Chait argued the “linkage” thesis; both said Saddam should be defeated alongside the war on terrorism, not as part of that war.

Random note: To the extent that I could read the audience based on mutterings, laughter and so forth, the most obvious adjective was not “hawkish” or “dovish” but… “anti-Israel.” The moderator noted that the audience had submitted “about five questions” asking variants of, Isn’t Israel just as bad as Iraq? Bah.