Divisive effect of war
The Iraq war is nearly over, and coalition victory is certain. There is reason to rejoice in the fall of a brutal dictatorship. Still, as an American living overseas my feelings of ambiguity remain.
What disgruntles me is not that a war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was undertaken, but that it was undertaken by my country and Britain alone. It is annoying to realize the extent to which many Americans still don't see this as a problem.
For the past two years since Sept. 11, there's been a strident new tone in American political discourse. I encounter it most compellingly in my e-mail in-box -- letters and forwards from pro-Republican compatriots who themselves almost never leave the US; letters that show a skewed perception of world realities.
Every day I get a handful of these supposedly patriotic forwards. I say "supposedly" patriotic because I normally credit Americans with being particularly thoughtful and reasonable people. The vast majority of these forwards, however, are nine-tenths rhetoric and one-tenth thought. Their logic is often hopelessly flawed; their tone shrill, hysterical. Sometimes it looks to me as if half the US is suffering delusions of grandeur. People seem to be underestimating how damaging their government's unilateralist polices are going to be.
I'm not only concerned here about the war, but about nearly everything the Bush administration has done in terms of foreign policy and its contempt for treaties -- the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM treaty, the establishment of an International Criminal Court, etc. The anti-war fury was not merely a matter of pacifism. In the world's eyes the Iraq war is mainly another addition to a growing list of broken treaties and scuttled agreements.
Respect for international treaties and international norms is not something to be sneezed at. But much that I'm hearing shows just this tendency in America -- to sneeze at everything that doesn't agree with George and his policy team.
The people sending me these forwards seem to think they are subtly convincing me of the virtue of the administration's actions. Probably they wouldn't guess they are convincing me of something quite different. What I see in these texts is an America beyond reason and debate. The style of their arguments (emotional, illogical), the inflated rhetoric, the appeals to the sacredness of whatever "our leader" deems right to do -- all this is more characteristic of fascism than a democracy with a healthy sense of realism.
I worry that this new American rhetoric will not stop with the end of the conflict in Iraq. I suspect it will continue as constitutive of a new unilateralism, a new American arrogance. Regardless of success in Iraq, America cannot continue to flout international norms. Many patriotic Americans want to see their country return to more balanced relations with the rest of the world community.
Eric Mader-Lin
Taipei
I find it amusing and naive that an editorial of a major Tai-wanese newspaper could still come up with "A massive deception revealed?" (Apr. 7, page 8), now that coalition forces are two weeks into Operation Iraqi Freedom and have surrounded Baghdad, finding chemical warheads and suffering from symptoms of Sarin gas along the way.
There is no doubt Saddam Hussein is hiding some biological and chemical weapons (US Secretary of State Colin Powell already made the case at a UN Security Council meeting). Whether or not all people agree on the definition of weapons of mass destruction is irrelevant in this war to liberate Iraqis.
This war is fought because Saddam blatantly and continuously ignored more than a dozen UN Security Council resolutions since the Gulf War. Several of these resolutions clearly calledfor Saddam's disarmament of these weapons, or face the consequence of forced disarmament. It wasn't until Resolution 1441 that two world leaders, US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, finally spoke up against years of appeasement and indifference in the Security Council.
The US and Britain merely held the UN to its words spelled out in many resolutions.
This war will not turn out to be a deception. In the end of the war, those who had doubts and opposed the war without factual basis will become the only ones feeling deceived -- by themselves.
Eugene Liu
Atlanta, Georgia
The war was wrong. We know that so clearly. But now it is almost over. Benefits are being trumpeted, costs hidden or minimized. We will forget that the war was wrong. And then we will be ready to start all over again.
Matt Nicodemus
Taipei
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