Title: Message
If I
Were President
August 15, 2002
by Joe
Sobran
If, my fellow Americans, you should see
fit to elect
me your president in 2004, I will take office with one
thought uppermost: No man on earth should have this much
power. No man
should be able to determine the fate of
millions. In particular, no man
should have the life-and-
death power to plunge the United States into
war.
President Bush has proved this. Not because
he is an
evil man, but because, like all other men, he has his
oddities.
His judgment is highly questionable. He knows
little of history, geography,
or foreign cultures. Worse
yet, he seems not to realize his shortcomings.
Let me
recall an old saying: "He who is unaware of his ignorance
will be
only misled by his knowledge." Why should the
lives of thousands, or even
millions, be at the mercy of
one man's
idiosyncrasies?
In other words, if I had his
power, I wouldn't use
it. I would remind Congress that the authority to
declare
war belongs to it, not to the president. And I'd make it
clear
that I think going to war is generally a terrible
course to take; in the
case of Iraq, surely imprudent and
very likely disastrous -- as well as
criminal.
I would refuse to prosecute such a
war, even if
Congress declared it. If I were impeached for this, so be
it. Declaring war should not mean making an arbitrary
decision to attack
a foreign country, but recognizing
that a state of war already exists,
requiring, in the
plain English of the Constitution, "the common defense of
the United States."
The whole principle of
American government is, or
used to be, quite simple: DIVIDE POWER. The
founders of
this republic often said that the very definition of
tyranny
was "the concentration of all power into a few,
or the same hands." Bush
seems to think that's the
definition of
democracy.
There is nothing defensive about
Bush's proposed war
on Iraq. Iraq poses no threat to us. Even its neighbors,
who ought to feel threatened by Saddam Hussein if anyone
does, are
begging Bush not to attack Iraq! Iraq's chief
regional enemy is Israel,
which is always quick to
respond to a perceived (or even suspected) threat;
yet
the Israelis aren't preparing to attack Iraq. The
governments of
Europe are virtually unanimous, and
passionate, in their opposition to
Bush's war. And they
are much closer to the Middle East than we
are.
Because it's so obvious that Iraq has no
intention
of attacking us, Bush has cobbled the excuse that if not
stopped now, it may attack us in the remote future, when
it has acquired
"weapons of mass destruction." He also
charges, without credible evidence,
that Iraq was somehow
complicit with the terrorists who attacked this
country
last year. For good measure, he calls Saddam Hussein a
mass
murderer of his own people, as if this fact somehow
fortifies his other
reasons for war. It doesn't. And
besides, one good reason would be enough.
Three feeble
excuses don't add up to a single good reason for this
oddball war.
So Bush insists that the war is
defensive in the
sense that it is "pre-emptive." That is nothing more than
a very strained euphemism for "aggressive." It could be
used to justify
attacking almost any foreign country.
In fact,
by Bush's logic, the Japanese were
justified in launching a "pre-emptive"
strike against
Pearl Harbor in 1941. After all, the United States had
its own designs in the Far East, posed a danger to
Japanese ambitions in
the region, and was clearly hostile
to Japan. Better to cripple the U.S.
Navy sooner than
allow it to dominate the Far East
later.
But Japan's pre-emptive strike not only
failed, it
backfired. Not only was the U.S. Navy quickly rebuilt and
immensely increased; the United States also built an air
force that
ruthlessly annihilated the civilian
populations of Japan's great
cities.
And in the greatest and most instructive
irony of
all, from today's perspective, the United States soon
developed
"weapons of mass destruction" and used them to
destroy two cities, even
after the war was essentially
won. So the seemingly prudent "pre-emptive"
strike turned
out not to be such a bright
idea.
War is not only evil, it's supremely
unpredictable.
A wise critic summed up the great tragic lesson of
Shakespeare's tragedies: "that men may set off a course
of events which
they can neither calculate nor control."
This is also the eternal lesson of
war.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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