WHAT’S UP with the Senate Democrats and a few Republicans who have heartburn over going to war with Iraq? They’ve spent much of the past two weeks erecting hurdles President Bush must jump over to get Senate approval of military action against Saddam Hussein, everything from ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to building an international coalition. Whatever the senators’ excuses for caution or dragging their feet, my guess is one of four things is the source of their hesitance: (1) They fear the use of American power more than the use of Iraqi power; (2) they want to put President Bush on the hot seat; (3) they’re hypocritical; (4) they don’t read the newspaper.
Excuses for inaction or a slow response in the face of a dangerous enemy are hardly new. We heard them over and over during the Cold War–whenever the United States was called upon to build up its military forces or deploy troops or weapons. And then excuses were trumpeted again in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, mostly but not entirely by Democrats. Their advice: Wait for economic sanctions to work. Also, where once foreign policy had automatic bipartisan support–from 1945 to roughly1965–now the party out of power in the White House feels free to criticize, oppose, and harass on foreign and national security matters. And some members of the president’s own party will join in as well.
Who has a deadly fear of American force? Oddly enough, the leading voice here belongs to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin. An American attack on Saddam Hussein, Levin says, is probably the most disastrous course of all. If Saddam doesn’t have nuclear weapons, there’s no reason to attack. If he does, according to Levin, “the result of our attack would be his using the very weapons we’re trying to deter.” Saddam, Levin says, “is deterrable by his own desire to survive.” Should he use a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), it would lead to his own destruction. Because of this, says Levin, “the intelligence community feels he would not initiate an attack.” Of course he wouldn’t, but an Iraqi attack on the United States or another country isn’t the problem. It’s Saddam’s potential for secretly slipping weapons of mass destruction to terrorists like al Qaeda. How would we know he’d done so? We wouldn’t.
The Democrats leaning on Bush to tie up loose ends and make a stronger case for regime change in Iraq will probably support a war resolution in the end. But they won’t make it easy for Bush to win approval. These senators include Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry, and zillionaire John Corzine. Kerry, in particular, demanded in a New York Times op-ed last week that Bush exhaust all alternatives, such as seeking a new round of arms inspections, before going to war–as if the non-war options hadn’t been tried and failed over the nearly 12 years since the Gulf War. Saddam first thwarted arms inspectors, then expelled them entirely. Nonetheless, Kerry says, the war effort won’t have legitimacy without another bid for inspections, an endorsement from the United Nations, and approval by Congress. Sounds time-consuming, doesn’t it? Doing all of that would be.
Next in line are the hypocrites, led by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. “I would hope that [Bush] could get the kind of support from the U.N. that his father did,” the senator said. “And that . . . will be a central factor in how quickly the Congress acts. If the international community supports [military action against Iraq], if we can get the information we’ve been seeking, then I think we can move to a resolution.” The wrinkle here is that even when President Bush Sr. did all of this in 1991, Daschle voted against a Gulf War resolution. He sang a different tune, however, when Democrat Bill Clinton was president, noisily clamoring for an attack on Iraq. When Clinton failed to attack, Daschle quieted down.
Finally, there are senators seemingly so busy they haven’t kept up with the enormous amount of reporting in the mainstream press about WMDs Saddam already has developed or acquired. Just last week, the Washington Post disclosed the existence of drones, or pilotless planes, in Iraq’s possession with faucets to spew out chemical or biological weapons. Yet Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) bemoaned what he called an “information gap” between what he and other senators know about Saddam’s WMDs and what the White House knows. In truth, there’s not much of a gap. Saddam’s arsenal is no secret, at least to newspaper readers.
All these senators believe they reflect concerns of the American public and perhaps they do. But recall the way public opinion changed in the months before the Gulf War. Neither a speech nor deliberations at the United Nations was the catalyst. It was presidential action, first deploying troops near Iraq, then expanding the force, and finally launching an air war followed by a ground war, that brought the public firmly behind the war. When the president spoke, the public merely listened. When he acted, public opinion changed.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
