'The people'? Watch your back

A great deal of worry about our Muslim enemies in the Middle East is
concentrated on "the people." The term implies that in Iraq, Iran and
elsewhere, this is an entity somehow apart from the menace which the
rulers represent. It is used to freight demands for the lifting of
sanctions against Saddam's Iraq (because they hurt the people) and --
where combat is involved -- the avoiding of targets for which civilians
are used as human shields.

The propaganda implication behind the people phrase is that this
entity is somehow innocent of all the government's bad deeds and does
not share the rulers' hostile mens rea in the present situation;
therefore, the people must not be harmed or attacked in any way lest we
incur moral obloquy. The efficient political tool of guilt is
reinforced -- as it was during the Gulf War and since -- especially in
media reports on the effect of sanctions with touching images of (for
instance) Iraq's grieving women, street merchants or passers-by going
about their business in Baghdad, with tear-jerking media reports of
babies and children who are being hurt by sanctions while Saddam goes
unhurt.

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As propaganda goes, this is all quite plausible. The facts as
selected are quite true but, like so much journalism of this type, they
add up to a lie. Videlicet, because the Middle Eastern
dictatorships are not democracies, nothing their rulers do or mean to do
is connected to their people -- who share none of their rulers' moral
responsibility for ugly deeds -- and therefore deserve to remain happily
untouched.

As to this matter of innocence: like the Iranians, most of the Arab
Iraqi people support their ruler enthusiastically. If there are
dissidents here and there among them, that in no way affects the
prevailing strength of this support. It was just as strong, just as
enthusiastic when Saddam was using nerve gas against Iran, and it was
just as solid when he was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. It
was solid when the ayatollahs were committing grisly atrocities against
their own opposition. Saddam Hussein or the Iranian ayatollahs can
commit any horror -- including mass murder, torture, assassination,
terrorism or what you will -- against those they stigmatize as enemies
inside and, above all, outside their countries and none of it is going
to make the people rise up and overthrow their rulers; that is because
popular support in the Muslim Middle East is not conditional upon the
moral character of their leaders in such matters.

The case against the people out there is the same as that which has
stood against national citizens since the days when Napoleon swelled war
into an enterprise actively involving the whole nation. Some of those
who do not actually fight are engaged in supporting the military effort
through maintaining the national infrastructure; among others whose
support is only passive, there are those who lend themselves and their
children to propaganda on the dictator's behalf, making their support
something more than passive. And, before anyone mentions harm to
children, I would remark that the responsibility for their suffering
lies with the parents who allow them to be placed -- cynically -- in
harm's way.

If the people have little choice in these matters, that is not the
fault of those outside their countries who mean to disrupt their
dictators' plans to make (and certainly to use) weapons of mass
destruction. In such a conflict, the people's choice is not life or
death; it may well be between two kinds of death: one deserved because
of support for their murderous leaders, the other honorable because of
refusing that support. If that sounds awful, it is not those who are
trying to prevent biological and nuclear warfare that have created this
dilemma.

The other strand of complaint about maintaining our will to use
lethal force lies in a brand of tu quoque focused mainly on
Israel -- which has its own weapons of mass destruction. If we do
nothing about the Israelis then, it is implied, we should do nothing
about anyone else. That would be fine if the Muslim dictators and their
terrorist friends did not have a record of indifferently slaughtering
civilians and of attempting, vis-a-vis Saddam's famous super-gun
project, to mount a weapon whose direct and deliberate function was to
place biological ordnance in the middle of Tel Aviv.

Nobody has attempted to destroy or announced the intention of
destroying an Arab country just because it exists. However, exactly
this threat is at present in force against the Israelis. Especially,
given their present capabilities, the Israeli record of relative
restraint after a half century of military attempts to destroy them has
been remarkable. And, yet, somehow by the most remarkable and wonderful
Möbius-strip twists of logic, the Israelis -- despite the withdrawal
from Lebanon -- are still damned by their Muslim enemies as aggressors
in the Middle East; and this view is uncritically accepted by many in
the written and visual media on both sides of the Atlantic.

One thing ought to be very clear although many politicians and
journalists are doing all they can to obscure it: the leaders of Iran
and Iraq are our declared enemies and, de facto, a majority of their
peoples are our enemies -- as much as the vast majority of the German
people were our enemies in World War II. Dictators and people alike
mean us harm -- great harm -- proved by the fact that they support --
proudly -- their rulers' development of weapons of mass destruction. In
such circumstances, it is not only foolish to temporize and waffle about
innocence, it is lethally dangerous.

The crying and shouting from all sides, and especially from Europe
and the Arab League, about diplomatic solutions is transparently
designed to give time to our enemies. Much of it, like the temporizing
rhetoric from France, is based on short-term commercial interest. Some
of it, such as that from the Arab League, Russia and certainly China
(whose rulers are actively helping our enemies) is more dubious still.
All of it, I would suggest, is colored by a jealous dislike of American
power and a judo-like attempt to use America's own scruples of decency
and restraint -- and these are considerable -- to reduce the influence
of American power and / or cripple it.

Of course none of this means to glorify the prospect of actually
fighting our Muslim (and other) enemies. On the contrary, the prospect
of such a conflict is grim and our sane conscience tells us, correctly,
that it should, if possible, be avoided. But there are situations in
which, to coin a phrase, too much of that conscience not only makes
cowards of us all; it risks our necks and gives the initiative -- not
to mention a mortal advantage -- to our enemies. It is one thing to
draw back from gratuitously inflicting the horrors of modern warfare on
those who mean harm to no one and, in any case, do not have the means to
inflict large-scale slaughter. In Saddam and -- make no mistake -- his
popular support in particular, we are faced with a country who not only
has those means but has shown, repeatedly, no restraint about using them
-- even on its own civilians; it continues with its energetic efforts
to expand those means. And, in the face of that record, we are supposed
to believe that we and our friends are in no future danger? Please!
Iran and Iraq, now working hard on the means to deliver weapons of mass
destruction, will draw very important lessons -- not from our altruistic
rhetoric -- but from the precedent of what we do or fail to do.

We backed down from such a challenge in the middle of the last
century, when the technology of mass destruction was far less generally
developed and accessible than it is now. The cost was measured in
millions of lives. The prelude to the present challenge was only
half-met in the Gulf War. Our neo-peaceniks' insistence on leaving
ourselves with nothing but impotent high-stilted talk to counter it now
crosses a thick black line into criminal neglect of our own security.