Being a hawkish dove
All of my life I’ve been a hawk. Turning the other cheek never made much sense to me-unless you wanted to get smacked on the other side. It always seemed to me that in order to achieve peace first you had to get the other guy’s attention. Typically, the best way to do that was first to go upside his head with a club. Then you apologized profusely and then go back upside his head again, to be followed by another abject apology. By this time the other guy is beginning to believe that you’re a little bit nuts and unpredictable, and more than a little bit dangerous, which, in my mind, is always a good place to begin a negotiation.
Apparently, George W. Bush is a devotee of the same school of diplomacy as are Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.
I suddenly find myself in a terrible dilemma. I agree with their tactics. I think Saddam Hussein is probably a terrible threat, and we’re better off confronting him now rather than a few years from now, when he’s probably going to have atomic weapons.
Yet, I still have trouble believing our Republican leaders. The sudden urgency of it all, that Hussein is suddenly this immediate and massive threat and calling for immediate and massive action before the November election, is a little too much of a coincidence to be believable.
There is no question in my mind this entire Iraqi crisis is being exploited politically by Karl Rove, White House chief political strategist, who is pure genius at smelling political opportunity and sees a chance to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. Everything on the domestic front looks sour-the economy, the stock market, the depth of the corporate corruption, and probably the complicity of many in this administration in that corruption, and yet it’s all trumped by the war drums.
There was a time I could have brushed off the war drums as just political opportunism, but that’s hard to do today.
This past weekend I was in New York to see my family, and each time we drove down the West Side of Manhattan to get to Brooklyn, we passed that great empty space in lower Manhattan that was once the World Trade Center. You can’t pass by there without having a deep visceral reaction that there are people out there who hate us, and that the threats are real. The intensity and depth of their hatred has shocked us all, and it’s pretty clear to me, as it is may be to many of you, we’re not going to change or lessen that intensity by being nice, changing our policy or with a United Nations resolution.
The only thing that will work is force, or the threat of force, so overwhelming and so ruthlessly applied that the likes of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein will have no doubts we will destroy them and their entire nations if need be. It’s also clear to me our enemies consider us all to be combatants. That means in their minds there are no innocents, and they apparently have no hesitation to attack unarmed, uninvolved citizens if it furthers their political purpose.
Must we be the same to defend ourselves?
That’s the dilemma. To defend ourselves from them, must we become more like them?
How long before we do a cost-benefit analysis and begin to think that maybe, just maybe, it’s quicker, cheaper and more humane to drop a nuke than to send an army slogging through a country.
Normally, I finish with an “and therefore,” but this time I have no “and therefore.” I am profoundly uneasy with what we’re doing, and yet I don’t see any other way.
But before we do anything, I think there should be an open and complete debate in Congress, which I’m fearful will not happen.
I applaud Al Gore for putting it all out on the table. I must confess I always thought of him as a bit of a wuss, but I think this time he’s right. What we’re doing is too big and too dangerous for our nation and the world to do it without first giving it some careful thought. And even though having this national debate just before a congressional election, with everyone posturing for position, is the worst of all possible times, it simply is unavoidable. If not, we could set something into motion that becomes impossible to stop, even if it makes no sense.
We must talk before we act. History has shown us that you can’t conduct a war without the support of the nation. If we are going after Saddam Hussein, the Bush White House must convince us that it’s the only realistic course of action available to us.