Hawks and Hornets

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Severo Ornstein <severo () poonhill com>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 12:58:12 -0800
To: Recipient List Suppressed: ;
Subject: Hawks and Hornets

Sorry to inundate everyone but there's a lot of important stuff out there.

S.

William Raspberry, a Post columnist since 1966, won the Pulitzer
Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1994. His column generally
appears in the Washington Post on Mondays and Fridays.
==================================
washingtonpost.com Hawks and Hornets
By William Raspberry
Monday, March 31, 2003; Page A13

There is this interesting notion that while it is quintessentially
American to debate matters of grave importance, once the decision is
made, the debate should be over.

Sometimes it makes a good deal of sense. One hears hardly a word of
debate over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election -- even
though less than half of the American electorate voted for the guy
who wound up in the White House. The Supreme Court decided and the
debate ended. Similarly, most Americans have little taste for
debating the war in Iraq. The president has decided and further
debate seems pointless -- even unpatriotic and dangerously divisive.

I suppose I am inclined to that view. But what are we supposed to do
-- what are we supposed to think -- when we suspect that our desire
for national solidarity is being exploited in quite cynical fashion?

To get to the point: What if we believe we are being manipulated into
supporting positions we don't believe in -- positions we believe will
be harmful to our long-term national interests?

Maybe I read too much. I've just been looking at articles by Seymour
Hersh in the March 17 issue of the New Yorker and by Joshua Micah
Marshall in the April issue of Washington Monthly and feeling more
than slightly used. Hersh's piece, on the personal financial
implications of Richard Perle's involvement as an adviser on defense
policy, is disturbing enough, though it stops short of accusing Perle
of anything worse than having a tin ear for the appearance of
conflict of interest.

Marshall's piece disturbs in a quite different way. His thesis, in a
nutshell, is that far from ignoring the things some of us fear will
result from our venture in Iraq -- radicalization of the Arab world,
new waves of terrorism, transformation of the conflict into a species
of religious warfare -- the administration's hawks are actually
counting on such an outcome.

"In their view," he writes, "invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even
primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really
about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination [would
be] an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the
invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the
power structure of the entire Middle East."

Not because they are hopelessly monomaniacal but because they see it
as essential to an effective war on terrorism.

There are, basically, two views regarding the source of anti-American
terrorism in the Arab world. The first was articulated by retired
Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar in testimony last September before the
Senate Armed Services Committee.

The problem, he argued, is that the Muslim world does not trust us.
"They believe the U.S. government has acted unilaterally, sometimes
as a bully, sometimes has used other nations for its own interests
and abandoned them when the objective has been achieved. And most
important, they believe the U.S. has unjustly supported Israel over
the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.

"At the end of the day, the war on terrorism will be won only when we
convince 1 billion Muslims that we are, in fact, a just society; that
we do support peace, justice, equality for all people; that in fact
we really are the 'City on the Hill.' "

On the other hand, the administration's plan, says Marshall, is "to
use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple
virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends
like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these
regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism."

The problem is not that this second view is wrong (though I have no
doubt that it is dangerously so) but that its adherents have
consciously avoided letting it become part of the public debate.
Instead, they have sold a sort of incrementalism-without-retreat by
which we have only to accept the necessity of getting rid of Hussein
to wind up supporting the radical realignment of the Middle East.

We accept the Iraqi invasion out of patriotism and conviction, then
accept the need to do something about the resultant anti-American
assaults elsewhere in the world because we have to. I mean, if
Hezbollah targets American citizens, or if Egypt and Syria prove
unable to control their radicals, are we just supposed to let it
happen? The time for debate will be over.

Marshall likens the strategy to whacking a hornet's nest in order to
get the hornets out in the open and force a showdown. You can have a
spirited debate over whether such a strategy ought to be supported.

"The problem," he says, "is that once it's just us and the hornets,
we really won't have any choice."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company
-- 
Severo M. Ornstein
Poon Hill
2200 Bear Gulch Road
Woodside, CA 94062
Tel: 650-851-4258
Fax: 650-851-9549

"What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to
be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called
reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane
is now called solid conservative thinking" (Tony Kushner)

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