Sometimes I surf on television, happen to land on a cable talk shows, hear somebody say something outrageous and find myself entering the debate, as I did the other night.
A guest was going on about how Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. We should have confined our military response to rounding up al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan, she said.
“Really?” I asked the TV set. “And would it have been your advice after Pearl Harbor to have restricted our fighting in World War II to the Japanese? Would you have said that we should leave the Nazis alone on the ground that they did not kill our sailors or sink our battleships in Hawaii?”
No analogy works in all respects, and this one obviously doesn’t. Adolf Hitler declared war on us after Pearl Harbor. Saddam Hussein did not declare war on us after September 11, at least not exactly. His reckless, aggressive, genocidal behavior, his refusal to abide by U.N. resolutions or agreements after the first Gulf war, his ties with some al Qaeda and many other terrorists, his avowed hostility — all these came close to a declaration of war.
But despite his resemblance to Hitler in so many ways, he did not go as far. He was not explicit about his intentions. He certainly was not so stupid as to say he now planned to send terrorists to blow up our cities.
Here is how the analogy does work, though.
First: Japan in 1941 was not the only threat to American security or a peaceful world order. Prior to the declaration of war, an atrocity-prone, wild-eyed and vicious regime in Germany was chewing up Europe and would clearly be a monstrous challenge to the American way of life if unstopped.
Comparison: Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan did not constitute the only terrorist danger to the United States as our citizens began to take in the lesson of what happened in 2001.
Saddam had trained and paid terrorists. He had tried to assassinate a former U.S. president. He had used weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in mass murders. It seemed nearly certain he still had such weapons, and it seemed about as certain that sooner or later he would send some our way.
Not a few critics of the war in Iraq like to say President Bush intentionally misled us into thinking the weapons existed. Are they themselves intentionally lying? They brush aside the fact that our intelligence agencies, along with respected European intelligence agencies, said he possessed these weapons of catastrophic consequence. Are the critics also going to brush aside what we learn from Bob Woodward’s new book — that CIA Director George Tenet told a querying Mr. Bush it was a “slam dunk” that Iraq had these weapons? Probably.
Critics also shrug off the fact inspectors have learned Saddam’s henchmen had the means of cooking up WMDs at a moment’s notice, which is much the same as storing them.
The September 11 attacks were just 2 years ago, but it already seems many have forgotten what so many of us felt in our bones that terrible day. We then knew what could happen to us and that the next time it could be worse; it could be tens of thousands of lives lost to biological agents, or a major city transformed by a nuclear device into a wide, deep, dark hole.
If that should be our fate — and if it should happen more than once — the tragedy would be spelled out in lives lost, yes, but also in the possible transformation of America into a land so frightened we would abandon much of our energy and optimism and liberty for the sake of safety. The last, best hope of mankind would be less a hope.
There are reasons besides the WMDs to go after Iraq — namely, that without dramatically altering Iraq, the Middle East remains a birthing place for terrorists for at least as long as the informed imagination can see. Transforming it gives this generation a real chance to meet the terrorist challenge.
The present state of affairs in Iraq is frightening. The cost of this war goes higher. Some arguments that the cost is too high are formidable. But it is not a formidable argument that the only terrorist threat to the United States resided in Afghanistan. That’s thinking with blinders on — and with no sense of history.
Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers.
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