After the Iraq War
by Adam Reed
Enough time has elapsed from the recent US-British-Polish war on Saddam's Iraq to consider post-war evidence and current US policy.
As I wrote, Al Quaeda's successful massacre of September 11 made clear to the world that mass destruction could be delivered anywhere, at any time, by suicide terrorists. We knew, from Saddam's previous expulsion of UN weapons inspectors, that his regime was developing Sarin and Anthrax for delivery with medium-range missiles. If Saddam were to hire or create an organization of suicide terrorists, AND weaponize either Sarin or Anthrax for delivery by such terrorists, his regime would have been enabled to murder American civilians, on American soil, at his will. The only available choice, to any American president, even a hypothetical Objectivist president, was to try to eliminate the Saddam regime as soon as possible. If Saddam obtained both a terrorist suicide organization and Sarin or Anthrax suitable for delivery, it would have been too late.
Note that, again as I wrote previously, the risk did not need to involve Al Quaeda itself. All that Saddam needed was a few months to recruit and train his own suicide terrorists. In "Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand?s Radical Legacy", Chris Sciabarra writes that "the pro-war advocates did not present any conclusive evidence of a link between the lethally opposed Ba'ath and Al Qaeda gangs." The issue of this "link" is a straw-man and a red herring. We know that Saddam's pursuit of this half of his goal was successful: Saddam had suicide terrorists of his own. They were deployed against Allied forces during the war. Allied searches found a warehouse with 200 suicide bomber vests, including 80 already fitted with explosives and ball bearings.
Since Saddam would have deployed his biological (or chemical) weapons through suicide bombers IF he had a properly weaponized arsenal on hand, we know that he did NOT finish developing such weapons. The Bush administration's pre-war claim that Saddam already had such weapons was, I would conjecture, just another dishonest - nothing new about that - workaround for the absurdity of current "international law." Under this "international law," the government of a mostly-free country like the United States is no more sovereign, and no more entitled to deal preemptively with a deadly risk, than Saddam Hussein, the psychotic dictator of a tyrannical pesthole. It is here that the hypothetical Objectivist president of the United States would have handled the situation differently from George Bush. An Objectivist would have denounced the manifest obscenity of "international law" and told the truth. Bush and his flunkeys lied, perhaps in fear of an international prosecution for "war crimes," which could have interfered with their future vacations on the French Riviera.
Of the two munition systems that Saddam is known to have developed for missile delivery before his first expulsion of UN inspectors, Sarin - which was successfully used by domestic terrorists in Japan some years earlier - requires sophisticated technology for storage and transport. Rather than develop this technology, Saddam's missile force built mobile labs to synthesize Sarin and load it directly into waiting warheads immediately before a strike. Anthrax, the other alternative, is known to be deliverable in powdered form, but this also requires a sophisticated technology. To be weaponized for delivery by suicide terrorists, an Anthrax culture must first be induced to sporulate. Then the spores have to be dried and milled into a powder without killing them in the process.
Weaponizing anthrax could be done by one competent microbiologist and one competent solid-phase chemical engineer. It was not unreasonable to suppose that Saddam could have obtained the services of such a team. It turns out that Saddam failed, though not for lack of trying. The microbiologist whom Saddam put in charge of this project, Dr. Rahid Taha, a.k.a "Dr. Germ," was a Baath Party hack of questionable competence. There is no sign that a solid-phase chemical engineer ever worked on weaponizing Iraqi anthrax.
The rapid collapse of the Iraqi armed forces was less an allied success than an effect of Saddam surrounding himself with underlings who deferred all decisions to him. Saddam either left the country or suffered a mental breakdown early in the war, and the men he had put in command positions were incapable of doing anything without his approval, which was not available. Saddam's wartime "appearances" were staged by the Information Ministry using professional actors.
There was a similar absence of decision on the US side in the immediate aftermath of the war. Apparently, one faction in the US administration favored bringing in Poland for post-war planning, since the Poles have actual, recent experience in turning a totalitarian military dictatorship into a functioning, successful classical-liberal mostly-free-market constitutional republic. Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, is an ex-Marxist professional economist and a disciple of Robert Heilbroner, once the world's leading Marxist economist - until he examined facts of reality on socialist economies, and concluded that Marx was mostly wrong while Mises and Hayek were mostly right (see http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Socialism.html). A second faction, the Straussian neo-conservative corporatist block, favors direct American administration for the benefit of America's best-connected businesses (what Rand called "the aristocracy of pull"). During this factional conflict American forces were deployed without policies or goals. It now appears that the corporatist faction won, which is bad news for Iraq and bad news for Americans.
The remaining flashpoint in the Near East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is America's main foreign source of technological innovation; between one-third and one-half of all R&D done by US-based global corporations is done in Israel. In computer technology, Israelis are responsible for the pipelined microprocessor, the digital signal processor, the lithium battery, public-key cryptography, the internet's Akamai distributed caching algorithm, etc. etc. etc. The pattern is the same for military technologies, medical technologies etc. If Israel were ripped by war, American innovation would be crippled. In terms of risk to the well-being of Americans, Israel has greater strategic importance than any other foreign country except Japan.
Most Palestinians and most Israelis desperately want peace, but political leaders on both sides know that every successful peacemaker in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict - King Abdullah, Anwar Sadat, Itzhak Rabin - was eventually assassinated by nationalist fanatics. If they want to survive, they must act intransigent and appear to make peace only under American duress. This is a conflict in which American intervention - American intransigence for a just peace - is the silent prayer of everyone except the most extreme fanatics on both sides. In this case, short-term active intervention, to pressure both sides into a stable peace and then get permanently out, is the only practical way to remove a potentially permanent pretext for permanent interventionism. It is of course likely that corporatist interests, which do not favor the elimination of this pretext, will manage, perhaps in the name of "non-intervention", to perpetuate the conflict until it explodes in disaster.
Outside the Near East, the major apparent threat is nuclear blackmail against Japan and South Korea by North Korea. But the North Korean dictator, unlike Saddam and bin Laden, has no place to go (even Cuba is unlikely to remain communist for more than a year after Castro dies). In the case of North Korea, deterrence and containment have every chance to work, and it looks like deterrence and containment are likely to remain America's policy.
In sum, now that the potential risk from Iraq has disappeared, it is time for Objectivists in the United States to change our posture toward the policies of the Bush administration. There is no longer any reasonable justification for support of any of the policies of George Bush or of the Republican party. It is time to return to radicalism.
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