We arrive now at Reason Number Five. What are the chances that Saddam Hussein was so bad and so immoral that George Bush and his staff simply could not live with their consciences and allow such an evil regime to go on? To believe this, we have to imagine that the Bush leadership got together right after 9/11 to rack their brains and search their souls over what the US’s moral obligations should be to the Iraqi people. How likely is it that a Republican government in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress somehow grew so obsessed with the poor and afflicted in Iraq that they simply had to take our country to war and end it? Not likely, I have to say. Not even remotely likely. After all, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, in supporting George H. W. Bush’s decision not to go on to Bagdad in 1991, had already passed up an excellent opportunity to get rid of Saddam immediately after the first Gulf War. Certainly Saddam had done nothing new to enhance his reputation as the world’s preeminent homicidal whacko. His résuméé in this respect was impeccable-- but he had many competitors, and as Saddam outrages go, he was definitely on the decline as a merchant of general mayhem. There was his rhetorical support for terrorism, and even his much-decried payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, but he lagged far behind some of our Arab allies in funding terrorists or actual complicity in terrorist attacks against the US, most notably the attack on 9/11. There was the question of his ambition to possess WMD, but UN weapons inspectors were beginning to have serious doubts about any viable threat in the foreseeable future. Even his neighbors flatly denied they felt threatened.
So the Good Samaritans would have to have had a deep-burning devotion to the proposition that American arms should be deployed around the world in the defense of humanistic values . I am sorry to say that, given everything I know about the careers and views of the architects of the war—of whom George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz form only the critical nucleus—I find little to suggest they have ever been high-profile advocates of struggles to free and uplift mankind. And furthermore, given everything I have ever observed about the right-wing Republican Party that has spawned and supported these men in power, I am equally sorry to say I cannot believe they ever clamored for a war anywhere simply to protect human rights. Save, perhaps, the right to confidentiality in the Cayman Islands. On the contrary, it is my belief that most such hawkish Republicans do not lie awake at night worrying about human suffering at all—unless they are trying to figure out how to make their political enemies suffer. Domestically they are prone to denying that anybody is ever suffering, like Ronald Reagan who once famously opined that anybody going to sleep hungry in America must be on a diet; or they claim that any suffering that does go on is caused by the moral unfitness or complicity of the sufferers, like welfare mothers who don’t keep up properly with grocery receipts and then try immorally to claim an Earned Income Tax Credit. In fact, unless the suffering is caused by taxes on wealthy people in the top income brackets or regulations that place the common weal above the right of certain connected individuals or industries to make the maximum profit, it does not cause undue moral distress to the collective neo-conservative Republican conscience.
If the War in Iraq is an outgrowth of massive Republican concern for the welfare and rights of the Iraqi people, then I believe we should and would find that reflected in the character of its leaders and the tone of its past leadership. A passion for human rights would be evident in their previous foreign as well as domestic policies. The attacks of September 11, devastating as they were, were not sufficiently apocalyptic to cause any philosophical rebirth of the Republican or Democratic parties. What Republicans and Democrats were before 9/11, they were after it, only in some cases more so.
In the case of Republicans the public record does not reveal much of a preoccupation with the problems of humanity—not at least with that portion of humanity that is unwealthy, unincorporated, or non-American. Columnist Ann Coulter, the darling of conservative Republicans, took a decidedly non-humanitarian view in the wake of 9/11 in a column for the National Review:
“We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.”
There are many conservatives who are as sensitive to humanitarian concerns as anybody else. Bob Dole is such a person. Senator John McCain is another. There is no reason to believe the African trips of Senator and Doctor Bill Frist are anything but authentic self-sacrifice for the good of humanity. I believe a list of such people, including vast numbers of Republicans who do not hold office, would be quite long. But I am not talking here of moderate Republicans, chiefly because they are not now in power. I am talking about the Bush Administration and its cabal of right-wing hawks like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, Armitage, Boulton, Perle, Negroponte and Elliot Abrams. I am talking about people like House Whip, Tom DeLay, Phil Graham and Dick Armey. I am talking about people like Jesse Helms and Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett and Roger Ailes and Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberts, as well as all the other figures who are drum-beaters or icons for the radical Republicans who now dominate the Party. Who has excoriated the United Nations for decades and opposed paying our back dues? Who defended apartheid in South Africa by opposing sanctions until the world outcry became so loud they had to act? Who supported military juntas in Chile and Argentina and turned a blind eye to death squads in Central America? Who lifted sanctions against Chile after Pinochet refused to give up terrorists who murdered Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in the middle of Washington D.C.? Who for decades has demagogued the issue of foreign aid to the point where angry Americans believe a large fraction of their paychecks goes to “foreign welfare” when in fact the fraction is less than 0.1% of GNP, less than any other developed country? Need I mention Kyoto or the World Court? And these are just a few examples of the callousness widely associated with the foreign affairs vision of the right wing GOP. Let’s face it, not since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln has the Republican Party been the party of altruistic activism. Teddy Roosevelt, the populist internationalist was an aberration the party has been careful to avoid since it kicked out the Bull Moose back in the Republican Convention of 1912.
And what about the Republican record on past military actions generally understood to have humanitarian goals? To say that conservatives have been unenthusiastic about any American leadership in trouble spots like Somalia, Rwanda, and most recently, Liberia, would be an understatement. When President Bill Clinton ordered air strikes against Yugoslavia the Republicans as a group exhibited little or no humanitarian zeal-- nor, in many cases, did they show any patriotic compunction about not criticizing the nation’s leader either. Though many saw opposing their president on a foreign military action that had NATO support as politically unrewarding, there was no chorus of heart-rending GOP appeals to humanitarian sentiment; many Republicans were flatly against taking military action. Tom "The Hammer" DeLay attacked the idea, "Not only is their [the Democrats'] president getting us in a mess, but he's undermining our military!" “This is President Clinton’s War,” said Senator Dick Lugar, “and when he falls flat on his face, that’s his problem”. Rep. Tom Campbell of California wanted to invoke the War Powers Act. Trent Lott said he had doubts from the beginning, “I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area”. The Clinton bombing campaign lasted 78 days, without a single American casualty. It resulted in a treaty that brought an end to the horrors of Milosevic’s thuggish regime and eventually to his ouster by the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia. He now sits in the dock at the Hague where he is on trial for crimes against humanity. Republicans, as a group, were never very much impressed with this outcome. Apparently the Hitlerian ethnic cleansing of Slobodan Milosevic, Radavan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic dictated a lesser humanitarian response than the atrocities of perennial Bush nemesis Saddam Hussein.
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