The Right Debate About the War?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

When an advance copy of the book “The Right War?” (Cambridge University Press, 264 pages, $19.99) landed on my desk a couple of months ago, I put it aside. At that moment, a collection of warmed-over magazine and newspaper columns from the previous year and a half about Iraq did not seem like the most pressing volume to attend to.

Little did I know that the coming months would bring an indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, in a case that served, among other things, to resurface repressed resentment over the supposedly false intelligence that led to the Iraq war. Little did I know that the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, was about to throw the Senate into a rare secret session to press for yet another investigation into pre-war intelligence. Little did I know that a visit to America by the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, and the departure from the New York Times of one of its star reporters, Judith Miller, would renew the debate over the war itself.

The editor of this volume, Gary Rosen, who is managing editor of Commentary, has, in other words, a fine sense of timing. For amid all the recriminations being heaped on the Bush administration in the past few weeks for supposedly having overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, what could be more useful than a volume that reminds us, as this one does, that during the Clinton administration the then-defense secretary, William Cohen, appeared at a Pentagon press briefing on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to assert that if Saddam had “as much VX in storage as the U.N. suspects,” Saddam “would be able to kill every human being on the face of the planet”?

This volume is a useful reminder of other facets of the Iraq debate, as well. One of the most useful insights that emerges is that, with the nearly lone exception of George Will, who is a Zionist, philosemitic skeptic of the war, the opponents of the Iraq war are critics of Israel and of the America-Israel relationship. A professor at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich, writes, “Israel’s war is not our war,” adding, “Further deference to Israeli hardliners like Sharon, who know nothing but force, is contrary to American interest.” Francis Fukuyama accuses Charles Krauthammer of transposing Israel’s situation onto America.

The pro-Israel Jews who back the Iraq war reply as good, or better, than they get. Here’s Norman Podhoretz on Brent Scowcroft:

By strongly insinuating that the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was a greater threat to us than Saddam Hussein, Scowcroft provided a respectable rationale for the hostility toward Israel that had come shamelessly out of the closet within hours of the attacks of 9/11 and that had been growing more and more overt, more and more virulent, and more and more widespread ever since.

Mr. Krauthammer answers back to Mr. Fukuyama:

What is interesting about Fukuyama’s psychological speculation is that it allows him a novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism. His is not the crude kind, advanced by Pat Buchanan and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, among others, that American neoconservatives (read: Jews) are simply doing Israel’s bidding, hijacking American foreign policy in the service of Israel and the greater Jewish conspiracy. Fukuyama’s take is more subtle and implicit. One is to understand that those spreading the mistaken idea that the war on terror is existential are neoconservatives so deeply and unconsciously identified with the Jewish state that they cannot help seeing the world through its eyes.

As fine as the ripostes of the pro-war writers are, however, there’s something discomfiting about the willingness of Cambridge University Press and the managing editor of Commentary, who is a friendly acquaintance of mine, to provide a forum for showcasing this debate. The charge that American Jews finagled America into a war for Israel is so unfounded as to be unworthy of a serious response, and so irrational as to raise doubts about whether those who propound it can be dissuaded by any arguments, no matter how rational, marshaled, no matter how valiant, in response. The situation is similar – not exactly analogous by any means, but close enough to call for caution – to the refusal of reputable Holocaust scholars to debate Holocaust deniers.

It may be claimed that such accusations against the Jews can’t be allowed to go unanswered, for they might take hold. Yet the arguments of the Iraq war detractors are so weak that they collapse of their own ridiculousness, almost without need of a response. This is one of the valuable contributions of Mr. Rosen in “The Right War?” – in laying out the anti-war arguments for all to see, he makes it clear how weak they are. The book includes an essay by Robert Ellsworth and Dimitri Simes, published after America’s 2004 presidential election, in which they write, “it was unfortunate that there was no real foreign policy debate during the campaign.” One wonders whether they read a newspaper, watched television, or glanced at the Internet during the campaign.

The Ellsworth-Simes essay goes on to claim that “reactions from other major powers strongly suggest that the Iraqi experience, for example, has made it considerably harder for the United States to get European, Russian and Chinese cooperation on tough measures against Iran.” That line made me chuckle, as I remembered the time I spent during the Clinton administration writing about European uncooperativeness with respect to tough measures against Iran, an uncooperativeness that predates the “Iraqi experience” by enough years to suggest strongly that it is unrelated to it.

The collection could have been improved by the inclusion of pieces by Bernard Lewis or the editors of The New York Sun or the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Pollock, all of whom are close to Mr. Chalabi. And it’s debatable whether limiting the topic to the “conservative” debate on Iraq is much of a service; two of Mr. Rosen’s “conservatives,” Andrew Sullivan and Fareed Zakaria, are described elsewhere in the book as “liberal hawks.”

With luck, this debate will be fought out in 2008 as it was – Messrs. Ellsworth and Simes notwithstanding – in 2004, and with the same outcome. The Republicans in 2008, unlike 2004, will have a primary. It may include an anti-war candidate, Senator Hagel. It may include pro-war candidates, such as Senator McCain or Mayor Giuliani, who have yet to show consistently that they are as articulate and persuasive advocates of the march of freedom as President Bush has been. If the anti-war forces gather around Mr. Hagel or some other candidate in 2008 with hopes of moving America toward a more isolationist or appeasement-oriented posture, it will be a tragedy. For if they succeed, the effect will be to increase the likelihood that tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims are deprived for years to come of the chance to make their own political decisions in elections marked by free debate of the sort that, as this volume ably documents, obtains in America.


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