A well-rounded column from one of my faves, Molly Ivins, looks at “The dreary path to the Baghdad front.” She talks about betraying the Kurds, the possible beginnings of a global democracy (ironically, a trend begun because of Bush’s war, not by it), war reporting, creating democracy by U.S. military action, and Dubya’s continuing revisions of the reasons for the upcoming war:
The long, shifting rationale for war with Iraq advanced by the Bush administration changes almost weekly — regime change, weapons of mass destruction, disarmament, already-seen-this-movie, noncompliance (of how many U.N. resolutions is Israel now in “material breach”? And what a meaningless phrase that is), zero tolerance, the liberation of Iraq and the recently popular connected-to-al Qaeda.
But the capper in the whole bunch, the one just advanced by Bush last week, is: We’re going to war with Iraq in order to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I know we have some advanced thinkers in Washington, but put me down as a skeptic on that one.
The reason I bring up the unappetizing fact that the United States gave Saddam his weapons of mass destruction in the first place, including stock for anthrax and E. coli, is not to muddy the “moral clarity” of this lovely little war. It is in order to suggest that we stop doing it — stop arming vicious dictators. We’re still doing it around the world.
It seems unfair to me to sit around criticizing the folks in charge unless you have a better idea. Mine is blindingly self-evident: If you want peace in the Middle East, you lean mightily on both Israelis and Palestinians — settlers off the West Bank, two-state solution, go. Then why not a Marshall Plan for the Middle East?