Does anyone remember the Menendez brothers? They were sent to prison for murdering their parents, and their lawyers’ defense strategy revolved around the so-called “imperfect self-defense theory.” The argument was that the boys’ parents had been abusing them physically and emotionally, and the brothers were afraid for their lives. The only choice they had, the lawyers claimed, was to kill their parents pre-emptively to save themselves. The jury didn’t buy it.
Now our president is about to make the United States the Menendez brothers among nations. Arguing that Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat to the United States, Bush intends to pre-emptively take him out. Many writers on The Reflector’s editorial page seem to think this is just fine (for example, Josh Foreman in the Feb. 11 edition) and are lining up to beat the drums of war. But why don’t we step back and consider this:
1. Hussein is contained and has been for 12 years. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States drove the Iraqi army out, restored Kuwait’s monarchy, set up no-fly zones over most of Iraq and pushed the United Nations to enact crippling economic sanctions. That is the current state of affairs, and Hussein is a captive in his own country. He is not about to lash out at any of his neighbors because he knows the consequences, nor is he going to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist organizations like al Qaeda. To do so would be putting his fate in someone else’s hands, and while Hussein is homicidal, he is not suicidal.
2. During the Gulf War, the first President Bush argued that we were fighting for “democracy” in Kuwait (something that doesn’t exist, by the way) and that Hussein was a very bad man who needed a sharp rebuke from the rest of the world. After all, he had invaded a sovereign nation, and that’s against international law. It’s interesting that President George W. Bush apparently thinks it’s OK to violate this on the grounds that Hussein has gassed his own people and is a brutal dictator; therefore, the United States has a moral obligation to do something. But if this really is a moral issue, then how do we explain our inaction in Rwanda, our failure to broker a peace deal in Israel, the countless millions suffering from AIDS and starvation in southern Africa or any number of human tragedies across the globe?
3. Our allies, chief among them France, Germany and Russia, know what this is really about: oil and power. I note that Foreman finds these countries’ motives “mysterious and beyond comprehension.” Apparently he hasn’t read Bush’s and Cheney’s rZsumZs very carefully. Russia desperately needs oil prices to stay at a reasonable level to sustain its economy, and France has definite interests in Iraqi oil. What these nations realize is that a U.S. invasion and subsequent establishment of an American-friendly government in Baghdad will put 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves under direct de facto control by the United States and increase American hegemony in the Middle East. Messrs. Chirac, Schroeder and Putin are certainly not fans of Hussein, but they don’t necessarily want a puppet regime established by Washington to take his place.
What we need to ask ourselves is this: Is war really necessary? I argue that it is not. We have Hussein contained, and Mother Nature will take care of him in due course (he is 68, after all). It is time for Bush to stop focusing on the enemy we can see and redouble his efforts to stop the enemy we can’t see or find-al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden-and it wouldn’t hurt to stop playing the role of bully and start using American power in a productive way to make the world a better, safer place.
Kevin Knudson is an assistant professor of mathematics.