Lisa S.
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From: steve zeltzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 06:51:29 -0700
To: bawdn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, TUDN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Iww-news] Revolving Door Monsters
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/opinion/11KRIS.html
October 11, 2002
Revolving-Door Monsters
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
President Bush and Vice President Cheney portray Saddam Hussein as
so menacing and terrifying that one might think they've lain awake at
night for
years worrying about him.
But when Mr. Cheney was running Halliburton, the oil services firm, it
sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company did. As first
reported by The
Financial Times on Nov. 3, 2000, Halliburton subsidiaries submitted
$23.8 million worth of contracts with Iraq to the United Nations in 1998
and 1999 for
approval by its sanctions committee.
Now let me say right up front that this wasn't illegal — or even, in my
view, sleazy. This was legitimate business conducted through joint
ventures that had been
acquired as part of a larger takeover in September 1998. Zelma Branch, a
Halliburton spokeswoman, says that the subsidiaries completed their
pre-existing Iraq
contracts but did not seek new ones.
So this is not evidence of scandalous conduct or egregious misjudgment.
This is not like a politician being found, as former Gov. Edwin Edwards
of Louisiana
put it, in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
But as we debate whether to go to war with Iraq, it's a useful reminder
of how fashions change in our perceptions of rogue states. Public Enemy
No. 1 today is a
government that Mr. Cheney was in effect helping shore up just a couple
of years ago.
More broadly, the U.S. has a long history in which Saddam, though just
as monstrous as he is today, was coddled as our monster. In the 1980's
we provided his
army with satellite intelligence so that it could use chemical weapons
against Iranian soldiers. When Saddam used nerve gas and mustard gas
against Kurds in
1988, the Reagan administration initially tried to blame Iran. We
shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq between 1978 and 1988.
These days, we see Iraq as an imminent threat to our way of life, while
just a couple of years ago it was perceived as a pathetic dictatorship
hardly worth the
bother of bombing. What changed? Not Iraq, but rather our own
sensibilities after 9/11.
"What is driving this?" asked Raad Alkadiri, an analyst at the Petroleum
Finance Company in Washington. "It's not driven by any Iraqi
provocation. You've got
a regime there that has kept its head down. It's been driven by a
domestic constituency in the U.S."
We need to be wary that we are not just pursuing the latest fashion in
monsters. Iran was the menace of the 1980's, so we snuggled up with
Iraq. The Soviet
threat led us to cuddle with Islamic fundamentalists like those now
trying to blow us up.
In 1994 the vogue threat changed, and hawks pressed hard for a military
confrontation with North Korea. We came within an inch of going to war
with North
Korea, in a conflict that a Pentagon study found would have killed a
million people, including up to 100,000 Americans.
In retrospect, it is clear that the hawks were wrong about confronting
North Korea. Containment and deterrence so far have worked instead, kind
of, just as they
have kind-of worked to restrain Iraq over the last 11 years, and we
saved thousands of lives by pressing diplomatic solutions.
If we spent money on hypocrisy detectors as well as anthrax detectors,
they would be buzzing. For example, Republicans are trying to defeat the
Democratic
senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota by running commercials featuring
Saddam Hussein.
(When I was writing from Iraq lately, some peeved readers suggested I
stay there for good; they might have had their wish if they'd been
shrewd enough to have
sent effusive e-mails thanking me for the fine spying, signed George
Tenet.)
The fact is that neither Tim Johnson nor any lily-livered columnist ever
bolstered Saddam's government the way Vice President Cheney did —
perfectly
legitimately — in 1998-99.
Before we prepare to go to war, we need to take a deep breath and make
sure we are doing so to overcome a threat that is real and enduring, not
one that we are
conjuring in part out of our trauma of 9/11.
Old monsters like Libya, North Korea and Iran have proved — well, not
ephemeral, but at least changeable, less terrifying today than they used
to be. And the
Iraqi threat, for which we're now prepared to sacrifice hundreds or
thousands of American casualties, just a few years ago was simply
another tinhorn
dictatorship where C.E.O. Cheney was earning his bonus.
