No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Europe Won't Be Fooled Again

Oliver Roy of the New York Times has written an editorial today that clearly explains what the Bush administration intended and intends with the War in Iraq. For anyone, like myself, who did not think the rationale for regime change in Iraq we were being given made sense, he agrees. Then he explains why.

"To understand the problem, one has to consider what the Europeans were presented with in the build-up to war. Beyond polemics and misgivings, the basic problem was that Washington's stated war goals were not logically coherent, and its more intellectually compelling arguments were usually played down or denied.

"The official war objectives given to the allies were these: destruction of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; fighting terrorism; getting rid of a tyrant. The Europeans responded that there were no operational weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the inspections could have maintained the status quo at a lesser cost than a military campaign; Saddam Hussein was in no way integral to Al Qaeda, which had shifted to Pakistan (as shown by all the recent arrests); and, yes, Saddam Hussein was a bloody tyrant, but who decided not to finish him off in 1991?

"For Old Europe, the poverty of the official American arguments gave rise to suspicion that there was a hidden agenda. European public opinion endorsed the idea that the war was about oil, a claim that fed into the good old anti-imperialist reflex from Cairo to Paris.

"That oil argument was of course wrong. But that is not to say these Europeans were mistaken about the United States having a broader agenda. And, in fact, there had always been a not-so-hidden agenda, one explicitly expressed by many professional thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute, for example. The idea is that the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate is America's most worrisome foreign entanglement, and can be broken only if the overall existing order in the Middle East is shaken up first. "

He continues later in the editorial: "Washington has claimed that it can create a friendly, democratic and stable Iraq within two years. Forget it: achieve two of those adjectives [sic] and consider yourselves lucky. There is no democracy without nationalism, and the Iraqis will sooner or later challenge the American presence. The United States cannot stand alone when dealing with the driving force in the Middle East. This is neither Islamism nor the appetite for democracy, but simply nationalism — whether it comes in the guise of democracy, secular totalitarianism or Islamic fervor. "

So which two of the three objectives do we want? The choices are a 1. friendly, 2. democratic, and 3. stable Iraq. Personally, I consider "democratic" to be the least likely. It will, however, be the one most talked about by the various interest groups involved.
posted by Richard at 3:37 PM