A rchive Date
[ 21-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/1862353
Whose sorry now? Not war protesters
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
April 13, 2003, 5:52PM
Now that the battle for Baghdad is all but won, it may be time to clear up a few things.
First: Those who thought it a bad idea for America to launch what was the moral equivalent of unilateral war on Iraq have nothing to apologize for.
It's necessary to say this because the polls - in America and elsewhere - have been showing more and more support for the American effort. Are all these people changing their minds about the rightness of the war? Some of them, no doubt. But what seems a more reasonable conclusion is not that minds have changed, but that circumstances have changed. There's not much point in opposing the launching of a war that already has been launched and essentially won.
Take something as ordinary as this: Your nephew insists he wants to go into the widget business and you, knowing a little something about widgets, offer your opinion that the timing is wrong, his business undercapitalized and his reading of the business climate about 180 degrees wrong. He shouldn't do it.
But if he does it anyway, do you have to hope his business fails so you can be proved right? Of course not. Once he launches, you have to hope he succeeds - unless you care more about your analytical reputation than about your family.
The point was made last week by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, whose government had opposed the American-led assault on Iraq in favor of giving the weapons inspectors more time - a position that dismayed and disappointed the Bush administration.
Chretien was responding to a motion in the Canadian Parliament to apologize to the United States for not joining the war in the first place.
"We would have preferred to be able to agree with our friends," he said in a statement his more hawkish colleagues assailed as an attempt at damage control, "but we have an independent country, make our own decisions based on our own principles. While we are not participating in the coalition, let us be very clear that this government and all Canadians hope for a quick victory for the U.S.-led coalition, with the minimum of casualties."
Shouldn't the PM and all of us who thought the war was hasty and dangerous and wrongheaded admit that we were wrong? I mean, with the pictures of those Iraqis dancing in the streets, hauling down statues of Saddam Hussein and gushing their thanks to the Americans, isn't it clear that President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair were right all along? If we believe it's a good thing that Saddam's regime has been dismantled, aren't we hypocritical not to acknowledge Bush's superior judgment?
Not at all. If the Iraqi people end up better off as a direct result of America's insistence on launching the war without the support of the United Nations, it won't be the first time that good outcomes have resulted from bad means. I don't doubt that there are some children who are healthier and happier than they would have been if they hadn't been stolen from their parents. Can't we wish the best for the children without condoning kidnapping?
Why can't those of us who thought the war a bad (or at any rate, a premature) idea let it go now and just join in the celebrating the victory wrought by our magnificent military forces?
A number of answers come to mind, perhaps the most important being: The war isn't over.
I accept that Iraq is probably over, save for a military mopping up and maybe a decade of rebuilding. But I can't dismiss two worrisome thoughts: First, that the loudly proclaimed justification for launching the war in the first place was Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to materialize. Could it be that our leaders took us into war not believing what they swore to us was true?
And second: The neo-conservative ideologues who brought us this war have spoken publicly and repeatedly about the need to go the rest of the way toward replacing all the Middle East dictatorships with democratic governments - whether we are invited to do so or not.
Is Syria next? Iran? Egypt?
I'd love to see democracies in all those places. I just don't think my country should be using its unmatched military power to install them.
Raspberry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. (willrasp@washpost.com)
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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