***Dave Does the Blog

It’s getting to be a bit moot now, but here’s a well-reasoned article about how the option of “containment” of Iraq is not only “war by another name,” but carries with it dire costs in terms of:

• the impact on Iraqis of sanctions.
• the impact on Iraqis of maintaining the current Baghdad regime.
• the monetary cost to the US (and others) of maintaining containment forces there (significant even before the recent build-up).
• the terrorist cost to the US (it was the presence of US forces in Saudi, a direct response to previous Iraqi aggression, that was touted as a a major excuse by al Qa’eda for the 9/11 attacks)
• leaving the initiative in the Middle East with Iraq, to let their compliance, or their saber-rattling, make everyone else react.

In summary:

Morally, politically, financially, containing Iraq is one of the costliest failures in the history of American foreign policy. Containment can be tweaked — made a little less murderous, a little less dangerous, a little less futile — but the basic equations don’t change. Containing Hussein delivers civilians into the hands of a murderous psychopath, destabilizes the whole Middle East and foments anti-American terror — with no end in sight.

Now let’s see if we can do something better.

(via Both2And)

… you should check out this article, which discusses the horrific situation in the Sudan.

For the past 20 years, the regime in Khartoum has bombed, starved, and enslaved black Southern Sudanese with impunity in an effort to subject them to Islamic rule. As a result, over two million black non-Muslims have perished. A further five million have been driven off their land.
Sudanese slaves — mainly women and children — are routinely beaten, raped, genitally mutilated, forced to convert to Islam and racially abused. The scale of this ”crime against humanity” — as slavery is identified in international law — is enormous. Credible estimates of the number of Sudan’s slaves range from tens of thousands to over 200,000.

The US sort of finally woke up to this in the 90s, and … well, did just what self-respecting multilateral nations are supposed to do. The US declared Sudan a terrorist state, it sponsored strong resolutions in the UN Commission for Human rights, and imposed economic sanctions.

Unfortunately, certain EU guardians of international morality see North Africa as their playground, and as a potential economic partner. Thus …

What did the Franco-German duo do? It led the EU in the opposite direction. France provided Khartoum with military intelligence for the prosecution of the jihad, while French and German helicopters have been used for ethnic cleansing in southern Sudan’s oil fields. Driving black, non-Muslims out of their homes creates greater security for the investments of oil firms like Total Fina (France/Belgium) and the German engineering giant Mannesmann.
The Sudanese government’s role in the revival of the country’s once-dormant slave trade formed the greatest single political obstacle to legitimizing the EU’s appeasement policy. France and Germany therefore spearheaded a UN whitewash of this crime against humanity. With the rest of the EU and their new East European satellite states in tow, they overcame American objections and easily persuaded the UN Commission on Human Rights to censor any use of the word ”slavery” from official documents on Sudan and replace it with the euphemism ”abduction” — a lesser offense.

Perhaps they’d like to send some inspectors in, too.

Much has been made of past US support for Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Granted, we were a lot more concerned about Iran at the time (and may yet be in the future) than we were about Iraq. That doesn’t alleviate us of responsibility for what we did, to be sure, but …

… but Iraq wasn’t exactly a US client state, even in the heady days of the Iran-Iraq War. While we provided him with military aid, who else, you might ask, was right alongside there helping us — in fact, elbowing us out of the way in a mad rush to provide geopolitical support (or earn a few piece of silver)?

Between 1973 and 1991, the following countries exported the following value of military armament to Iraq:

The USSR is not surprising — Iraq was their socialist client state in the region. But seeing who rounds up the list there is more than a bit interesting, don’t you think?

(via Ghost of a Flea)

I missed the Bush address last night. I heard radio snippets of it on the way home from Alpha, and have seen a few video bits this morning. He sounded good, though looked his usual deer-in-the-headlights self when you saw him. I don’t think that’s the reality, but it’s a damned unfortunate personal characteristic.

As I was watching the pre-reaction to the final ultimatum yesterday, I kept reading some common rhetorical trends, many of them a bit evolved from previous weeks. Each, though, was misleading, and, since I’ve been nattering relatively non-stop all through this crisis, I might as well natter about this, too.

Diplomacy hasn’t failed — it’s never been tried! Well, not exactly. After all, most of the last twelve years have been a diplomatic dance with Iraq, trying to hold Saddam to the conditions of the cease-fire he signed, under UN auspices. There have been — how many UN resolutions, the results of how much further negotiation and debate?

And, heck, it’s not like over the weekend, Dubya suddenly decided to attack Iraq. Bush made it clear that the current regime needed to be finally confronted a lot earlier than last fall, and he’s been putting the screws on heavily for months. Obviously, it’s been diplomacy with armed forces lurking in the wings — but, just as obviously, that’s been the only thing that’s gotten even token concessions from Iraq.

Diplomacy has been tried. But diplomacy is not an end in itself. If you’re not clearly willing to go the extra step to actually back up talk with action, then nobody will listen to you.

The other problem with diplomacy is that folks expect there will be give and take, a compromise reached between competing starting positions. But that only works when both actors are sincere in a desire to compromise (“sincerity” and “Saddam” only appear together in a dictionary). And it only works when there is a reasonable middle ground; if the alternative is full strategic disarmament of Iraq or non-disarmament, there’s not a lot of room to maneuver. Only Saddam would be happy to destroy just some of his Al Samoud missiles.

Well, you know, this is all just, falsely, about 9/11. This rhetoric usually has two parts: the Bushies know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but have used Fear Talk to convince the general public that Saddam personally gave the word to the terrorists.

The tie between Iraq and al-Qa’eda has been the weakest part of the Administration’s case. It’s possible that they may have overemphasized it, just to garner support. It’s also possible that they still have information that is sufficient to convince them, but not a smoking gun that would be worth revealing.

But concerns over Iraq — and the need to take a firm, even military, hand in dealing with Saddam’s flouting of the 1991 cease-fire (a result, not to forget, of Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait), did not suddenly spring, full-grown, from George W. Bush’s forehead, or even mysteroius Neocon Think Tanks. Bill Clinton publically stated the same need, but was paralyzed by his own scandals and accusations of “Wag the Dog” diversions; instead, he just lobbed some cruise missiles, which were both destructive and unpersuasive.

If nothing else, though, and even if no other firm connection is ever found or revealed, 9/11 was an obvious wake-up call for the Administration (as well as the rest of the US). Bush had shown every sign of being an isolationist president before that day, more focused on a domestic agenda than an international one. Forced to pay attention to the rest of the world, it was clear that one of the biggest threats in the Middle East, al-Qa’eda link or not, was Iraq — a conclusion shared by his two predecessors.

If the general public in the US thinks that all or most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi (they weren’t), then shame on them. But that doesn’t mean Iraq wasn’t involved, and it doesn’t mean that Iraq isn’t a danger.

This action by the US is unprecedented! It’s a betrayal of the international order that has kept peace across the planet for half a century! As was pointed out in the Jerusalem Post yesterday, Idi Amin wasn’t deposed by the UN, but by Tanzania. Pol Pot’s killing spree in Cambodia wasn’t cut off by the UN, but by Viet Nam. Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zairean kleptocracy was cut off by a coalition of African neighbors. None of these provoked massive world demonstrations. Why is Saddam different?

And, for that matter, the US has done this sort of thing, too, whether it was Noriega in Panama or Duvalier in Haiti. And, of course, the US was a major player in the non-UN intervention in Yugoslavia. Why is the US now seen as stepping into “unilateralism” now?

And, out of courtesy, we’ll not spend too much time discussing the ongoing French military intervention and forceful “peace” brokering in former colonies such as the Ivory Coast.

Is it that the US, as the “hyper-power,” is the easiest target? Or simply the biggest “threat”?

It’s times like these that I wish I could hop forward fifty years and see how things today are seen then. I think it would be illuminating to everyone — myself included.

Iraq claimed it never had any weapons of mass destruction.

Now, at (beyond?) the 11th hour, Saddam Hussein admits that, well, really, truth be known, they really did have them — but it was all someone else’s fault, you see? And, besides, they don’t have them any more.

Honest.

And they’ve never been involved with al-Qa’eda, either.

Honest.

I’ve long had respect for Paul Conrad as an editorial cartoonist and artist. I even have a book of his LA Times cartoons from years past. I haven’t always agreed with him, but he’s often had some important and insightful visual statements to make.

This is not one of them. Indeed, it’s downright despicable.

(via Ghost of a Flea)

Something else that 17-18 March is an anniversary of.

I don’t think it’s intentional that war is about to break out in Iraq, on the fifteenth anniversary of this event. But that makes the irony even higher.

(via A Small Victory)