by Chip Eastham

Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 4:53 PM

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If the Bush administration were really Machiavellian, they would make a great show of saying, well okay (creative misunderstanding here), "You folks on the Security Council who have doubts about the necessity of war, you go ahead and do what you can for the next month to disarm Iraq with words. We'll stay out of it so you have a free hand. If at that time you haven't done the job, we'll take care of it ourselves."

Now the genius of this is that it puts the US in a can't lose situation. Iraq will just be glad to have a reprieve and no doubt will settle into doing the same things they've been doing for the past four months, shuffling material and inspectors around with little result.

Then the US can just do a unilateral strike (er, lead a coalition of the willing) and slam the UN for being ineffective.

The only thing the Bush administration really needs to fear is a dawning awareness by the American public that all the wishful thinking about democracy building and duct tape is belied by history both recent and not so recent.

I admire the anti-war protesters around the world; many countries lack the due process safeguards we Americans take for granted in expressing political opinions.

I also admire those Republicans who pushed through several reform provisions to the "Patriot Act" in the recent budget package, most notably the repeal of indemnification of vaccine manufacturers (a section of law added at the last minute for which no one was willing to publically accept responsibility).

I respect those with service to our country in the military.

As someone whose year of draft eligibility merely came and went uneventfully in the Nixon era, I believe I know something of how deceitful and hypocritical the American government can be. Nixon bombed Cambodia and Laos. It was not only unlawful to do that because Congress had not declared war, it was against specific provision of DOD funding by Congress. And Nixon lied about it. Even before Watergate, public opinion made continued prosecution of the Vietnam War untenable.

The truth, sadly, is that the Bush adminstration is putting America's world leadership to suppressing democracy in the Western world, just as US policy has done in South America, the Middle East, and Asia for the balance of the past half century. The fact Bush is doing this by name calling ("The UN risks becoming irrelevant... they need to get some backbone... NATO risks becoming irrelevant... they need to get some backbone... it's like watching a rerun of a bad movie.") may make us laugh, but it's wrong.

Americans have, I think, been willing to overlook the fuzziness of the proposed "causus bellum" (reason for war) in order to show support for the President as a proxy for "being strong". Sometimes it just takes a bit of silliness, like the duct tape suggestions, to shift an entire nation's mood. I recently heard conservative commentator Robert Novak cracking wise about how the reason we don't go after N. Korea is because they actually have the WMDs that Bush accuses Iraq of possessing.

The tragedy of Sept. 11 lent the Bush administration a much needed air of gravitas. It seems to be evaporating.

May the winds of war go with it. The US could promote democracy around the world in many constructive ways. A go it alone war with Iraq is clearly not one of them.

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