It's not about Anti-Americanism

Before I go on to comment some passages from Winer's article, I want to quote from an article by US historian Paul W. Schroeder, »Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War«. It's a long and exhaustive anaylsis of the implications of a preemptive war for international law from a historical point of view. By a man who calls himself a conservative (the text appeared in the »The American Conservative«).

There are two things remarkable about that text. One is that none of his core arguments have been refuted yet as far as I can see, neither in the European nor in the US press. And I've been reading quite a lot in the past couple of months.

And second, Schroeder argues without having resort to motivations, psychology, greed, globalization, war of cultures, imperialism, and the like - it's a very sober analysis, making it a brillant example of intellectual minimalism, aka »Ockham's Razor«. Here's what I take to be his central argument:

»Consider what norm the administration’s planned attack will set for the world. The United States will be declaring not simply verbally but by using its overwhelming armed force that a state may justly launch a war against another much smaller and weaker state even though it cannot prove that the enemy represents an imminent, direct, and critical threat, or show that the threat could not be deterred or managed by means other than war. It need only claim that the regime and its leader are evil, harbor hostile intentions, were attempting to arm themselves with dangerous weapons, and might therefore attempt at some future time to carry out their hostile aims, and that this claim as to an opponent’s potential capabilities and intentions, a claim made solely by the attacking state and not subject to any international examination, justifies that state in eliminating the allegedly dangerous regime and leader preemptively.
A more dangerous, illegitimate norm and example can hardly be imagined.« [emphasis by CP]

That being said, here are some of my comments on Dave Winer's piece.

Winer: »He [Saddam Hussein] doesn't have an exclusive on oil, and as long as that's true he has no control (that's probably why he took over Kuwait and was starting to move on Saudi Arabia, and went to war with Iran -- to get control of all the Middle East oil reserves).«

We should remember that Saddam Hussein used to be a friend to the US in the 80s and that the Reagan administration used him as a »weapon« against Iran. It was oil he was after, for sure, as far as I remember the war was about some oil field in the region near the border; but what the US were after back then was to overthrow the regime in Teheran that had replaced the US friendly Shah regime in 1979 (BTW, I have no sympathies for ayatollahs of any kind; I just think it's ironic - to say the least - if we condemn Saddam Hussein for something today that had our wholehearted support twenty years ago: Remember 1983? I even heard that the US augmented their food aid for Irak after he gassed his Kurds in northern Irak in 1988.)

Winer continues: »And we all know what he does with the oil money -- he uses it to build nukes, missiles to deliver them, etc etc. He is one major asshole, a dangerous one. Why anyone would stand up for him is beyond me. Yet that's what the French, Germans, Russians and Chinese (and others) are doing. This makes no sense. (Unless you consider the possibility that they have conflicts of interest.)«

There's always a possibility of »conflicts of interest«, and I don't trust *any* government that they don't have any. To the least my own.
But we don't »stand up for him« - we stand up against an unnecessary, ill-legitimized war (more about that below) that would bring an immense amount of suffering over the Iraqi people (more in the UN paper at the end of this piece).
Regarding the threat SH poses, I don't think that he's really such a threat. The country is much, much weaker than it used to be 13 years ago, and all they could do back then was invade the small neighbor Kuweit; not even with US help was Saddam able to invade Iran during eight years! And what about today? Even if he really hides some tons of nerve gas, he has no means to bring the substance somewhere. There are no nukes. There's not even an evidence of contact, let alone collaboration with Bin Laden or any other terrorist network, which would be the only way he could threaten some other country.

Again Winer: »Then in the last few pargraphs the author explained that the Germans and French and other European countries with long histories of starting brutal hypocritical wars over things like oil, sometimes even proclaiming themselves the master race, might not understand a country like the US where we're more likely to go to war to save the free world. Stupid ole US, no good deed goes unpunished. Of course. We knew that.«

I have three points to make here. First of all, the opposition to the war is not a matter of anti-Americanism. I suspect that this is something the US government (along with the conservatives in Germany) would like us all to believe as a part of the divide and conquer strategy. But who believes that 1 million US citizens (that's about 1 in 300 of all the population) would gather in New York to deliver a message of Anti-Americanism? The police behaviour descibed in the story linked above seems to support my claim: The less protest becomes visible in the US the easier it is to call it »Anti-American« if it occurs abroad. BTW, it's interesting to see how Boot's article falls into the general pattern of American Anti-Europeanism when he calls European governments »cynical«; more about Anti-Europeanism has British historian Timothy Garton Ash. On a more personal note, this whole Anti-Americanism/Anti-Europeanism debate is a pain in the ass. My relatives (google for »Pingel«) who left Germany (Mecklenburg) in the late 19th century live all over the place from New York to California, and so do I when it comes to software, music, the internet, or other kinds of influences.

My second point is that if you want to »save the free world«, you have to do it wisely, with just, justified, and appropriate means. Wisely means that you have a chance to achieve what you want to achieve, and there is strong evidence that an invasion in Iraq would heaten up the whole situation and help breed new terror. Camilla Paglia has some strong words supporting this view. (Sorry, to read her whole article, you have to be a member or look at some commercial.) My impression is that this point together with the next is what really drove people to the streets this last weekend. An invasion is perceived as unnecessary, self-contradictory (the right to live is the most fundamental human right) and dangerous in the long run.

The third point is the damage that an invasion means for the international order, especially if it is done without UN approval. The US would set a very bad example allowing almost everyone to invade everywhere for »preventive« reasons (think about India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Korea, etc. - See my above comments about Paul W. Schroeder).

There's one more thing: Still some Europeans know what war is like, but so do some Americans and a lot of Asians, and I don't think this should be an issue. I was born in 1963, and even my parents were only small children during WWII. In general, I think that only a small percentage of people all over the world do not have enough fantasy to imagine what a horrible thing a war is. If anybody needs some help there in the case of Iraq, UN can help. There's a strictly confidential paper from last December talking about the most likely humanitarian effects of an invasion. Note that this is not the price we pay, it's the price they pay.