IRAQ: Here’s where my thinking is at now. Unqualified Offerings recently said that he felt like pretty much all the arguments had been hashed and re-hashed, and that probably applies to this post too; I’m posting it as much for myself as for you all, so I can get this all worked out in a relatively coherent sequence. Apologies in advance for the length and lack of certainty.

We’ve been urged to go to war against Iraq (…more so than we are already) for a number of shifting reasons. There was the claim that Saddam Hussein played a Taliban-like role in maintaining and supporting Al Qaeda, and that he might have aided in the 9/11 attacks. As far as I know, this connection has not been shown in any remotely conclusive way. The closest tie is the alleged meeting in Czechoslovakia between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. The most recent reports I’ve found, though, are the ones from May in which both Czech and US intelligence said that the meeting probably didn’t happen. Certainly not enough of a clue to go to war against Iraq. (More promising Al Qaeda leads seem to exist in Liberia and Burkina Faso.)

The next explanation is that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who has violated UN decrees. This is absolutely, 100% true, and doesn’t tell us anything about whether we should go to war.

A related claim is that we have an obligation to bring liberal democracy to Iraq (perhaps in the hopes of spurring liberalization throughout the Middle East). I sympathize with this stance, but I just don’t think we’re likely to attain this goal via war. Stanley Kurtz makes a good case that liberalization would be extraordinarily difficult in a postwar Iraq. He points out some of the flaws in the often-made comparison between postwar Iraq and post-WWII Japan; I would add that in order to get Japan to knuckle under, we used two atomic bombs–are we prepared to do the same to Baghdad?

The final and most persuasive claim is that Saddam Hussein is seeking to build weapons of mass destruction (this generally means nuclear weapons; people throw in chemical and sometimes germ weaponry, but nukes are the big catch) and we have to stop him. So let’s look at that case.

First: I take it as a given that Saddam Hussein is actively seeking to build nuclear bombs. I mean, for Pete’s sake, why wouldn’t he? So what does he want them for?

a) attack on US soil, pure revenge.

b) threaten us or

c) Israel–he’ll nuke one or the other unless he gets various concessions (like the ones Eugene Volokh sketched here, or less Islamist ones)–control of Kuwaiti oil, ending no-fly enforcement, ending sanctions, etc.

d) give nukes to other enemies, e.g. Al Qaeda

Let’s deal with d) first. Unqualified Offerings points out how thoroughly the nuclear genie has already escaped from the bottle; he’s also hammered on the fact that pressing danger from a common enemy (that’s us) is more likely to drive the otherwise quite distinct Saddam and Al Qaeda breeds of hideousness into alliance.

I think it’s a given that Saddam would have to be crazy to actually nuke us or Israel. Forget about turning the desert to glass–we’d turn him to glass. He’d be a shadow burnt onto a palace wall. This is why a lot of the pro-war arguments rest on the belief that Saddam Hussein is deranged and/or he is seeking a glorious death. As far as I can tell, there are four kinds of dictator, although the distinctions between these categories are anything but sharp: a) the strongman who uses terror for certain limited political ends, a la Duvalier or Aristide.

b) crazy as a moonbat, behaves self-destructively due to personal derangement–it’s not easy to get examples of these guys because they don’t tend to last long, but I’ll throw out Hitler as one possibility.

c) suppurating font of evil, but not self-destructive and deranged only in a moral sense–Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il. In a lot of ways Kim eats crazy for breakfast, he’s a freak and a half, but I don’t think anyone’s suggested that he would do something as fluorescently self-destructive as attacking the US or Israel.

d) evil enough to have intimidated everyone around him into becoming complete yes-men, thus even though he attempts to act in a self-interested manner he can’t get good advice.

As far as I can tell from my cordoned-off civilian press box, Saddam Hussein is either c) or d), not b). I mean, you have to be really, really out there to hit b).

Evidence that he’ll act in self-destructive ways: 1) invading Kuwait. There are conflicting claims about why Saddam took this risk: Some cite the near-decade of warming relations and uneasy alliances between Washington and Baghdad, which lasted almost until the eve of the Gulf War, thus possibly making Saddam think that Washington would look the other way; Hussein’s Deputy Prime Minister now argues that Saddam was convinced that he’d be attacked no matter what, so he hit Kuwait first.

2) the alleged assassination attempt against Bush Sr. If this was him, this is a huge deal. It’s a really dumb thing to try, and it constitutes a direct attack against the US. I have to admit that I don’t know enough about this to say whether this was Saddam–and yes, that would seriously affect my view of war with Iraq.

Evidence that Saddam Hussein isn’t self-destructively crazy: the body doubles; the shift in Iraqi propaganda. Plus I do think there should be a benefit-of-the-doubt thing here–Saddam really would have to be insane in the membrane to somehow miss the fact that bombing the US is a sucker’s game. It’s a lot more obviously stupid than invading Kuwait was.

So: If Saddam Hussein gets nuclear weapons, we’re back to MAD, same as with North Korea. (Although like North Korea, Iraq already had various lesser deterrent capabilities; North Korea, for example, could destroy Seoul with purely conventional weapons, and since no one is ready to see that happen Kim had a pre-nuclear means of deterrence.) He waves a nuke menacingly, we reply with, “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout Willis? Do you think you’ll like being dead?”, he backs off, he lurks, he waves a nuke menacingly, etc. This sucks (and it’s a most-likely-case scenario, not a worst-case scenario, in which either Saddam doesn’t care or he fails to blink in time and gets somehow caught in events, precipitating nuclear war; I imagine this whole process will provoke tons of fun childhood memories for my parents’ generation. “In the event of a nuclear attack, children, hide under your desks and fold your hands over your head. It’s important to vaporize the hands first…”).

Mutually Assured Destruction sucks for a lot of reasons. Both sides have to convince each other that they are willing to use nuclear weapons. It’s in Saddam Hussein’s rational self-interest, once he has nukes, to convince us that he is orbiting-Pluto crazy and bent on dying gloriously. Otherwise we won’t make any concessions. Thus it’s pretty hard to assess his state of mind accurately, and it becomes harder to figure his game as he moves closer and closer to nuclear capability and his incentives for looking like a madman/wannabe-martyr rise.

MAD is also really weird from a just-war perspective. It relies on constant talk of how willing we are to use nuclear weapons (a.k.a. targeting civilians), precisely in order to avoid nuclear war. It relies on doubletalk, uncertainty, lies, and keeping your opponent unsure of just how crazy you are.

So, the total World Level of Hellaciousness goes up when Saddam Hussein gets nuclear weapons, just as it went up when North Korea got ditto. But as Gene Healy admirably lays out, the WLH is highly likely to go way, way up in the event of a US invasion of Iraq, as well. Which of these hellacious alternatives is less hellacious?–that seems to me to be one of the central questions here.

(Brief section on pre-emption. I note that even Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for War Against Iraq, disavowed pre-emption, although I didn’t really understand Pollack’s explanation of how his position was non-pre-emptive. I can see why he’d shy away from the term, though, since pre-emption is a hugely risky doctrine to throw on the table. It provides a major incentive to speed nuclear production, to be Kim and not Saddam. This incentive is almost certainly not offset by pressure not to seek WMDs at all, since very few dictators who would want nukes will settle for no WMDs at all. [I.e. I’m sure Aristide will settle for machetes, but then, he wasn’t seeking nuclear technology anyway. By the time you’re even considering WMDs, I doubt pre-emption will spur you to ditch your ambitions rather than simply try to get WMDs fast and secretly.] The CalPundit acknowledges the dangers and hopes to avert them by relying on the UN; this seems like a really bad idea to me, as the UN is just a bunch of governments, liable to pressure from all sides, equally liable to suck up to the US or to reflexively attack it. I’m not sure why relying on the UN diminishes the problems with pre-emption at all.

(There are non-pre-emptive ways of presenting war against Iraq: as punishment for the Bush assassination attempt, as merely a heightening of a war that started 12 years ago. These reasons aren’t the reasons most often or most persuasively cited as the actual reasons for war, though.)

So. I’m still tentatively anti-war, because I think MAD works, and the World Hideousness Level calculation favors Saddam with nukes over US invasion. (You can assume that my reasons there are largely Healy’s.) But I’m not certain of my position enough to, for example, go to last weekend’s anti-war rally. I don’t like this half-stance at all but it seems to be where I’m stuck right now.

As a postscript, tomorrow I’ll post some questions and thoughts about liberalization in Iraq. I think those will be more original and thus perhaps more helpful than this admittedly scattershot and repetitive post. Sigh.