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Bombs over Baghdad
War as moral imperative
. . . by Alex Carnevale

As the bombs drop on Baghdad once again, I will not be the only one cheering. I will not be cheering for the loss of human life. One hundred thousand Iraqis died in the first Gulf War when, without provocation, the Hussein regime invaded Kuwait, where our soldiers wait as of this writing.

The casualties will undoubtedly be less this time around, as the Iraqi military is much smaller than in 1991 and our bombing has advanced by leaps and bounds. Consider the predictions of doom made by the left about civilian casualties in Afghanistan that just didn’t happen before you believe the ones they are making now. Perhaps the casualties will even be fewer than the 60,000 Iraqi civilians that die each year as a result of the terror of the Hussein regime.

I will be happy, then, to see a great dictator gone from the world, and an oppressed people finally freed. At one time Baghdad was a chief cultural center of the Middle East. It is a place from which Arab culture once sprung and might yet again. After a lengthy, U.S.-financed reconstruction, I will be overjoyed to see the free people of the world benefit from Iraq’s natural resources instead of seeing those resources used as blackmail for a war criminal.

I have found great difficulty in quarrelling with those who preach this old strain of isolationism, who would have kept us out of World War II, out of Kosovo. It would have prevented us from stopping Saddam’s take-over of Kuwait. It did prevent us from removing him right then and there—and who would not have advocated regime change then?
It is easy to list the foreign policy mistakes of the United States, as Howard Zinn did when he came to campus earlier this year. There are times when we supported corrupt regimes in the past, and in the present, as our current relationships with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan attests. But those were largely the errors of Cold War foreign policy, which is no longer. Does our initial support for Hussein, born of that era, not make it even more imperative that we remove the tyrant now, today?

Yet it is a manipulation of the facts to say that this particular piece of foreign policy—that is, the disarmament of Iraq as mandated by U.N. Resolution 1441—is motivated by anything but a desire to end a regime that has aided and abetted terror and oppressed its own citizens. The U.S., for all its flaws, has been the most responsible world power in the history of the world. What some preach as Clinton’s eight years of peace has turned out to be nothing more than postponement of conflict that only escalates when ignored.

As Tony Blair said on Tuesday, in perhaps the greatest speech ever given by a British Prime Minister, “Back away now from this confrontation and future conflicts will be infinitely worse and more devastating.”

We cannot pretend that regime change will bring reform to the Middle East, or that democracy will flourish in the absence of one tyrant. We cannot pretend a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the making, or that peace will come to the Korean Peninsula. We can hope for both of these things, and easily say that democracy in Iraq cannot possibly hurt their prospects, that backing up the threats of the world community with force is a bad precedent to set to those who would destroy us. We can also be glad that a democratic Iraq will end our dependence on Saudi oil. But no one can say the broad strokes of the Bush administration alone will solve the problems of the world.
These problems are older than Bush. They are far older, indeed, than we are, and they are as complex as the situation the U.S. currently finds itself in. What we do know is that they are our problems. And if we ignore them, we do so at the peril of our nation, and of freedom-loving people across the globe.

Near the end of the Cold War, when the dictators of Eastern Europe finally began to fall, the men and women who pleaded for freedom assumed the responsibility of government. Last week in the Washington Post, Ion Iliescu—now president of Romania—described the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu before it came to its end in 1989:
“Ceausescu, with all his repressive powers, did not threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction. Nor did he invade his neighbors. But his vicious cruelty alone was enough to drive Romanians into the streets. We will never forget the legacy of his tyranny and the sacrifices necessary to tear it down. For Romanians, any attack against freedom in Europe, the United States and throughout the world is unacceptable.”

Why students at this university do not share these sentiments is beyond me. Either they have lived too long under freedom to know exactly what a unique treasure it is, or they are too caught up in their hatred of Bush to see that there is no thinking person in the world who would object to the disarmament and, by extension, the termination of this atrocious regime.

I will finish by asking a question: Do you all not think the United States has a responsibility to the world to protect the international community, and a responsibility to its citizens to protect them as well? Or are the rich white men and women of this community so full of their own self-loathing that they cannot see past the Ivy League legacy of a commander-in-chief to the clear moral and political need for regime change?

I hope that when the fighting begins, some of these moral principles will come clear to this campus. The bombs will sound like war, but they will land as justice for the people of Iraq and for the people of the world.

—Alex Carnevale B‘05

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