The latest slogan of the camp agitating for the appeasement of Saddam Hussein is that an American attack on Baghdad would be unprovoked. We gather this from yesterday’s New York Times. “Without Mr. Cheney, America would not be planning to invade Iraq. Who else understands why the U.S. is starting a war without provocation for the first time in its history?” the Times’s Maureen Dowd wrote yesterday. And lest this be mistaken for just the opinion of one op-ed columnist, the newspaper made it official by printing in its news columns without redaction a Reuters dispatch from Washington that reported, “Under increasing pressure from some members of Congress and many foreign allies not to stage an unprovoked attack on the longtime Persian Gulf foe, Mr. Bush said he was consulting with Congress and foreign governments.”

Claiming that the Iraqi regime has not done anything to provoke an attack strikes us as ostrich-like. As reported by the Washington Post, Saddam’s regime has been awarding $10,000 “martyr payments” as an incentive to the parents of Palestinian Arabs who die in suicide attacks on Israel. No fewer than 36 American citizens have been murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists in Israel since 1993. The State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2001 noted that “Iraq was the only Arab-Muslim country that did not condemn the September 11 attacks against the United States. A commentary of the official Iraqi station on September 11 stated that America was ‘…reaping the fruits of [its] crimes against humanity.’ Subsequent commentary in a newspaper run by one of Saddam’s sons expressed sympathy for Osama Bin Laden following initial American retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan.”

Following President Bush’s words of September 20, 2001 — “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” — these actions surely qualify as a provocation. And there are other provocations still unavenged — the raining of Scud missiles on Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, the meeting at Prague between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Al Qaeda September 11 leader Mohammad Atta, the repeated Iraqi attacks on American planes patrolling the no-fly zones, the attempt to assassinate President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara during their 1993 trip to Kuwait City, the fact that Iraq is still harboring Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is on the U.S. government’s list of most wanted terrorists for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. And then there is the report by Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker, who traveled to Kurdistan and found startling evidence of Iraqi assistance to Al Qaeda.

If all this is not provocation enough, it makes us tremble to contemplate what might be. The American people, as poll after poll shows, understand this, with wide pluralities supporting military action against Saddam Hussein even if it means a war of up to five years in which thousands of American lives are lost. The opinion elite, on the other hand, are now waiting around for sufficient “provocation” for an American attack on Iraq. This is the same opinion elite that has not hesitated to condemn Mr. Bush and President Clinton for having failed to act against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda before September 11. The cover story of the August 12 Time magazine refers to that hesitation as a “lost chance” and a “failure.” Al Qaeda, too, had its pre-September 11 provocations — the attacks on the USS Cole and on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The question for those complaining that a war on Iraq would be “without provocation” is: how many more Americans must die at Saddam’s hands, and in which American or Israeli cities, to qualify as a sufficient provocation?