EDITORIAL
The deficiencies of an old superpower
During the past year the target has
moved from regime change to disarmament. We are led to believe at press time
that a new target is emerging, Iraq’s association with and aid of al
Qaeda.
The president’s State of the Union message and the flurry of
activity following it -- Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit to the
United Nations to lay out evidence against Saddam Hussein and the growing
support in Europe for the use of force to upend the Baghdad regime -- all
seemed to point to the inevitability of war.
The run-up to war, if indeed that is what is occurring, still has
the overwhelming feel of a unilateralist venture. If one accepts the most
benign interpretation of the impending war -- that the United States is not
interested in oil but in the liberation of an oppressed people and the removal
of an unstable dictator -- disturbing questions quickly arise. Not the least of
those questions is: Where do you stop? There is, of course, no shortage of
unstable regimes with fully developed weapons of mass destruction and countless
more with the materials inside their borders to develop the same.
We have entered the new millennium with no major enemy against
which to push and to define ourselves; and we have brought along with us into
this new millennium no new ways of viewing ourselves and our role in the
world.
We seem to be bashing our way around the global landscape looking
for a posture that will work. The danger in using force in Iraq in a preemptive
strike is that we will give the new millennium a distressing precedent. It will
contribute to lawlessness and a disregard for international rules of behavior
and law, however tenuous they may be. The United States could end up in the
unfortunate position of diminishing its own authority and moral stature by
unleashing its awesome power unilaterally.
The case for war, as outlined in Bush’s speech, was thin. And
one trusts he called up the list of torture techniques used by the regime
knowing full well that one could turn to countless pages in the reports of the
United Nations and human rights groups where similar and worse details describe
the techniques used in recent decades by vicious regimes from Brazil to
Argentina to El Salvador to Guatemala. The groping about for moral authority is
not as easy as declaring our superiority in a State of the Union speech. It is
sobering to note that some U.S. officials knew intimately of the ugly torture
of those Latin American regimes that we supported and armed and whose soldiers
we trained. And some of those officials, thanks to current Bush administration
appointments, are back in important positions in government.
While many heard in Bush’s speech a certain march toward war,
some hold out hope for a different scenario. The possibility exists, they say,
that the current show of force in the Gulf region and our agreement to continue
extending the deadline are designed to allow the other Arab countries of the
region the opportunity and the motivation to devise a solution on their own.
Such a solution would involve removing Saddam and his coterie from power under
an arrangement for exile.
Such an optimistic view is not as incredible as it might first
appear. Certainly other countries in the region would do almost anything to
avoid war, particularly an all-out invasion of a neighbor. So the hunch in that
view is that diplomacy is going on around the clock and that the only way it
will work is to simultaneously maintain a certain march toward war.
In either scenario, whether Saddam is forced out peacefully or by
invasion, only a small portion of the problem in the Middle East will be dealt
with. The real work -- of persuasion, of coalition building, of seeing
ourselves in relation to the rest of the world in ways other than a collection
of consumers with an unlimited right to all the earth’s resources -- will
remain. We will still need to become a superpower of a different nature.
National Catholic Reporter, February 7,
2003
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