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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Diplomacy hasn’t failed — it’s never been tried!<\/b><\/i> 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? <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 <\/i>of his Al Samoud missiles.<\/p>\n
Well, you know, this is all just, falsely, about 9\/11.<\/b><\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n