Justifications

Originally written 8/25/05:

Jon Stewart’s guest last night, Christopher Hitchens(promoting his latest book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America - ISBN 0-06-059896-4) made some good arguments in favor of going to Iraq. In fact, he came closer than anyone ever has to convincing me that what we are doing is the right thing.

Hitchens laid out 4 reasons why we should invade a country. He said it’s justified when a leader (or country) 1) invades its neighbors 2) uses weapons of mass destruction 3) commits genocide or 4) harbors terrorists. He concluded that Saddam Hussein had done all of these at one time or another. The counter-argument that the time to respond and take him out was after the Kuwait invasion, he conceded.

Jon Stewart’s counter-argument was that he just doesn’t like the way Bush talks to us. He doesn’t like the way that Bush belittles and sneers at his opponents.

I found myself both agreeing with him and terribly disappointed in his answer. You don’t want to hear the champion of your cause (or maybe just your views) expose the utter weakness of one of your core beliefs.

It’s not easy to look in the mirror and see someone that is behaving exactly as the very people you spent 8 years in the Clinton years despising. The Clinton haters rarely could come up with a better argument than “I don’t like the way he looks and I don’t like the way he talks.”

OK, now the shoe is one the other foot. But let’s review some of the reasons for disliking the way the country has been run the last 5 years and some of the contrasts to the previous 8.

The economy is in stark contrast. The past 5 years have certainly been the most dismal economic time in my life. I wasn’t alive during the Great Depression, so I can’t compare, but I’m sure some of the benchmarks surpass those times. The only good thing you can say is that there wasn’t a total collapse, and we seem to be pulling out of it shakily.

We have no plan for cutting our dependence on foreign oil, and I discount more drilling in ANWAR, as it will have little impact (in supply) and will take too long to develop to help – it does not address the root cause or move us boldly into the future.

We are suppressing scientific development. Rather than using government to prod or encourage science and continue to keep our lead in technology, we have the glaring example of opposition to stem cell research. I’ll even concede that the development of new technologies needs ethical guidelines and moral oversight, but just slamming the door shut is not good enough. First, it totally removes government from the game, actually inviting abuses. Second, it ignores reality. The promise of the technology is too strong to expect that it will wait or go away. If we don’t do it, someone else will, and if the government doesn’t take a hand in it, we will lose control of the direction the technology goes and where it will take us. I could go into the question of genetically engineered humans or the whole way that patenting and tightly held intellectual property drives the cost of those innovations up and beyond the means of the average person or how pharmaceutical solutions tend to create “addictions” to medical technology rather than curing root causes, but those are other issues.

What’s more important, getting back to Iraq, is what we were told about why we were going into Iraq. I’ve often thought that if Bush had just said, “He’s a bad man, it’s time to take him out,” he’d be better off right now. As it stands, he justified the war saying there were weapons of mass destruction, which there were not. Then he said they had the ability to make them, which they did not. Then he said that they were planning to make them, which is ridiculous. Then he tried to make it seem that Saddam was involved in 9/11, which is easy for many people to accept, regardless of the fact that there is no proof or evidence of any connection. Then he started to say that the world and Iraq is better off without Hussein. Unfortunately, that’s not really clear. You could argue that the heavy hand of an oppressive dictator kept the lid on the current pre-civil war explosive situation. Saddam could keep the oil flowing to the world and kept the electricity flowing to his people. This argument doesn’t excuse Saddam to the outside world, but it gives the insurgents something to rally around and it prevents the average citizen over there from having confidence in our presence. Don’t even get me started on “We will be greeted as liberators”.

The other major problem is the planning and execution of the war. We certainly had Halliburton ready and primed in order to keep the oil flowing, which it turned out wasn’t necessary. What we didn’t have was enough troops, enough armor, enough local authorities, any appreciation of the growing insurgency or any semblance of a coherent plan.

The major thing that fills me with dismay when I look at the current administration is the feeling that things are getting much worse. We are supposed to relinquish personal freedoms because of a threat of terrorism. We are not supposed to question how people connected with the administration or those of already comfortable means are in a position to profit wildly at a time when the rest of the country watches their standard of living slipping away. We are not trying to solve any long term problems, medical care, the environment, or the future of our energy supply.

And the thing I fear the most is the death of truth and the total annihilation of civility. It started during the campaigns, when winning an election was so important that it justified trying to trash the reputation of a respected war veteran (twice! once with McCain before Kerry). It’s nothing new for people seeking power to play with the truth in order to get support. But those are the people that ended up on the trash heap of history (Joe McCarthy was quite popular for a while, but you don’t ever hear people singing his praises now).

I think the thing that angers me is that any student of history would measure Bush as one of the worst presidents this country has ever had. The problem is that people that live in the current day often can’t see how things are likely to end up. I see the Bush era as a time that future people will look back on as a dark time with an incompetent leader. But the guy in the parking lot with the W sticker on his SUV thinks people that think like me are anti-American. In their eyes, those of us that can really see how it is, we are the problem.