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Unfortunately, the president has not established such an argument. He insists on war, and yet he has not offered sufficient evidence of Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda or evidence of active Iraqi programs for developing weapons of mass destructions. In fact, some of the evidence he has tried to present to this end has been clearly established as fabricated. Furthermore, the president’s assertions that inspections have failed are preposterous, especially in light of Iraq’s destruction of its Al Samoud II missiles and Hans Blix’s comments to the U.N. on Tuesday that he needed more time to work in Iraq. President Bush’s abandonment of the United Nations, and indeed diplomacy itself, is the saddest and most troubling aspect of this war. His out-of-hand rejections of Canadian and French compromises that would have continued weapons inspections while upping the standards for Iraqi compliance demonstrated his lack of concern for proving his hypotheses about Saddam Hussein. The president’s “coalition of the willing” is pathetic and paper-thin, despite his best efforts to bully impoverished nations into consenting to U.S. war plans. If the war against Iraq goes poorly and leads to large numbers of American and Iraqi casualties, public opinion will rise against the president. It will rise even more so if we suffer terrorist attacks as a result of our aggression. But in the event that the war goes “well,” is minimally bloody and ends a regime that the president accurately describes as evil, we must still be wary of celebration. For victory will have come at the cost of the establishment of a dangerous precedent: preemptive war without conclusive proof of an imminent threat and without the support of the world community. The United States
has fought wars of self-defense in the past, and it will undoubtedly continue
to fight them. But those wars have not and will not be fought with ambiguous
cause. They have and will be characterized by imminent threat and significant
international consensus. The president’s war against Iraq does not
meet these criteria. —The College Democrats International
Socialist Organization The Bush Doctrine (shorthand for National Security Strategy of the United States, released in 2002) is a dangerous new precedent, and it must inform any debate surrounding war on Iraq. This imperialist how-to guide can be summed up quite briefly: The United States leads the rest of the world both militarily and economically, and will do absolutely anything to maintain that lead. Genocide in Iraq, pre-emptive wars elsewhere, first-strike nuclear missile attacks—these are all apparently justified simply because they might conceivably benefit U.S. industry. In the case of Iraq, the U.S. is willing to sacrifice Iraqis (and potentially U.S. troops) in order to control the flow of oil to the world. European and Asian trade competitors, unlike the United States, rely on Middle Eastern oil, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq will mean that the U.S. calls the shots in the world economy. Hence, the slogan “No blood for oil!” is quite appropriate. This is a disgusting war for profit and an inhuman disregard for innocent Iraqis, and as such there is no way that I could do anything but fight against it. —Alden Eagle The Green
Party Short- and long-term
global risks of invasion include not only uncountable deaths, injuries,
and toxic sickness in the innocent people of Iraq, which come on top of
the already debilitating sanctions, but also harm to the United States
and its international standing in world affairs. President Bush’s
main rationale for his war on Iraq is that it will save American lives,
but it will in fact endanger American lives by: —The Green Party College Republicans Even among Democrats, support for the war is at 55 percent, a recent CBS News poll found. However, despite the high levels of political backing, a U.N. presence is noticeably absent from this long overdue liberation effort. The U.N.’s increasing resemblance to the League of Nations is cause for great alarm. The conscious refusal to enforce its own resolutions should indicate just how seriously it flirts with irrelevance. While this impromptu coalition of allies will have little trouble freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam’s grip, more daunting tasks in the future will require the firm resolve of a proactive U.N. —Joseph Lisska Students for
Liberty —Eric Neuman
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