David details nature of conflict in Iraq

Almost 60 students, faculty, and community members gathered in Hodson Hall Wednesday to hear Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and political science professor Stephen David present a lecture and discussion session on the pertinent issues in the recent coalition war against Iraq.

"Speaking as a professor, not as a dean," David discussed conflicting viewpoints in an examination of the rationales behind the conflict, the progress of the war and the prognosis for a democratically elected regime in Iraq.

Pointing out the difference between a preventative and a preemptive war, David said the current situation in Iraq differs significantly from preemptive strikes in the past. Whereas a preemptive war entails an immediate threat of attack, and a corresponding first strike in the face of such, the Iraqi war was presented as a preventative war against an enemy seen as a threat in the distant future, said David.

He said a preventative war is thus seen as a choice that "history has been unkind to." Pointing out the examples of the Japanese invasions of Pearl Harbor and of the behavior of Germany and Russia in World War I, David said in the light of the past there is now "a high threshold for the Bush administration to reach."

Discussing three options that existed for dealing with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, David first noted the threat of an "especially odious" regime in Iraq, quite possibly developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), in a critical part of the world that contains two-thirds of the world's supply of crude oil.

Presenting evidence of Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Iranian civilians in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, of the nuclear program in place in Iraq for many years and of biological weapons capabilities, David said that if no WMD were found this core argument of the rationale for attack would be severely undermined.

David pointed out that thus far, the evidence has been inconclusive, though with further investigation by Allied and possibly United Nations forces, that situation could well change.

A second option considered was the containment of Saddam's regime, even if Iraq did indeed have WMD.

Arguing to "keep Saddam in a box," those in favor of such a proposition made the argument that Hussein had been contained through sanctions and weapons inspections for 12 years.

This rationale was also dispelled by David, who pointed out that sanctions and inspections cannot be relied upon in the long term. David said major evidence had come from defecting scientists about the presence of WMD in Iraq, before UNSCOM inspectors were prevented from doing their work by Hussein.

David presented the Bush administration's argument: that reliance upon sanctions would ultimately fail once Iraq had sufficient money, through the sale of oil, to spend in the country. Ultimately, David determined that sanctions were an ineffective tool. Drawing an analogy to the Cold War methods of deterrence, David also considered how the argument of mutually assured destruction could function in Iraq, to possibly inhibit the regime without needing to go to war. David said the Bush administration rejected this proposition for three reasons. First, the administration saw Hussein as an irrational leader, unable to calculate the costs and benefits of his actions in the international arena.

Unpersuaded by such an argument, David claimed that a leader who grasped and held onto power in the fashion of Hussein could not be considered incapable of calculating the costs and benefits of his actions.

David said the administration's second case was made in the consideration of Hussein as an extremely risk-prone leader, through invasions of Iran in 1980 and of Kuwait in 1990. If Saddam were to consider an attack on the United States, it was argued, it would be better to confront the threat now as opposed to later.

The most persuasive argument, in David's opinion, was the threat of Hussein deterring the United States.

The administration thought that with the acquisition of nuclear weapons, Hussein could dissuade the United States from intervening against his actions in the region, a proposition made more frightening by the military weakness in countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, said David. He pointed out that "this threat perhaps scared the Bush administration the most."

Discounting the arguments of a war for humanitarian intervention and of a war for oil, David said it is "unthinkable that the war would have been undertaken before the attacks of Sept. 11." Stating that scant evidence yet exists of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, David ultimately left the question of whether or not the rationales for the coalition action in the region were justified.

"Reasonable people can make different conclusions," said David.

In discussing the progress of the war, David pointed out that the war had been concluded mostly in accord with U.S. expectations, and that many of the threats some perceived, such as terror attacks in the United States or the firing of scud missiles into Saudi Arabia or Israel, had not occurred. The key question that remains, for David, is what will happen in Iraq in the war's aftermath.

With a largely educated, secular population and female emancipation, Iraq's progress towards a liberal democracy can be seen as possible, if somewhat difficult, for David. Ethnically divided, with no democratic tradition and an Islamic core population, as well as heavily dependent upon oil production economically, Iraq faces a difficult transition, said David.

However, the prospect of liberal democracies emerging in Iraq, under the auspices of the American model of post-World War II reconstruction in Germany and Japan, and eventually spreading throughout the Middle East, proved to be an exciting one for David. He said such a proposition would be one possible justification of the coalition war.

David spent the remaining hour of the presentation fielding questions from audience members. Questions addressed included issues of Syria's involvement in the war, the consequences of French action diplomatically in the United Nations in opposition to the coalition war, the prospect of an independent Kurdish state in the region and U.S. hegemony as the premier superpower in the world.