'The people'? Watch your back

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

The propaganda implication behind the people phrase is that thisentity is somehow innocent of all the government's bad deeds and doesnot share the rulers' hostile mens rea in the present situation;therefore, the people must not be harmed or attacked in any way lest weincur moral obloquy. The efficient political tool of guilt isreinforced -- as it was during the Gulf War and since -- especially inmedia reports on the effect of sanctions with touching images of (forinstance) Iraq's grieving women, street merchants or passers-by goingabout their business in Baghdad, with tear-jerking media reports ofbabies and children who are being hurt by sanctions while Saddam goesunhurt.

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As propaganda goes, this is all quite plausible. The facts asselected are quite true but, like so much journalism of this type, theyadd up to a lie. Videlicet, because the Middle Easterndictatorships are not democracies, nothing their rulers do or mean to dois connected to their people -- who share none of their rulers' moralresponsibility for ugly deeds -- and therefore deserve to remain happilyuntouched.

As to this matter of innocence: like the Iranians, most of the ArabIraqi people support their ruler enthusiastically. If there aredissidents here and there among them, that in no way affects theprevailing strength of this support. It was just as strong, just asenthusiastic when Saddam was using nerve gas against Iran, and it wasjust as solid when he was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. Itwas solid when the ayatollahs were committing grisly atrocities againsttheir own opposition. Saddam Hussein or the Iranian ayatollahs cancommit any horror -- including mass murder, torture, assassination,terrorism or what you will -- against those they stigmatize as enemiesinside and, above all, outside their countries and none of it is goingto make the people rise up and overthrow their rulers; that is becausepopular support in the Muslim Middle East is not conditional upon themoral character of their leaders in such matters.

The case against the people out there is the same as that which hasstood against national citizens since the days when Napoleon swelled warinto an enterprise actively involving the whole nation. Some of thosewho do not actually fight are engaged in supporting the military effortthrough maintaining the national infrastructure; among others whosesupport is only passive, there are those who lend themselves and theirchildren to propaganda on the dictator's behalf, making their supportsomething more than passive. And, before anyone mentions harm tochildren, I would remark that the responsibility for their sufferinglies with the parents who allow them to be placed -- cynically -- inharm's way.

If the people have little choice in these matters, that is not thefault of those outside their countries who mean to disrupt theirdictators' plans to make (and certainly to use) weapons of massdestruction. In such a conflict, the people's choice is not life ordeath; it may well be between two kinds of death: one deserved becauseof support for their murderous leaders, the other honorable because ofrefusing that support. If that sounds awful, it is not those who aretrying to prevent biological and nuclear warfare that have created thisdilemma.

The other strand of complaint about maintaining our will to uselethal force lies in a brand of tu quoque focused mainly onIsrael -- which has its own weapons of mass destruction. If we donothing about the Israelis then, it is implied, we should do nothingabout anyone else. That would be fine if the Muslim dictators and theirterrorist friends did not have a record of indifferently slaughteringcivilians and of attempting, vis-a-vis Saddam's famous super-gunproject, to mount a weapon whose direct and deliberate function was toplace biological ordnance in the middle of Tel Aviv.

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

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

The crying and shouting from all sides, and especially from Europeand the Arab League, about diplomatic solutions is transparentlydesigned to give time to our enemies. Much of it, like the temporizingrhetoric from France, is based on short-term commercial interest. Someof 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 Americanpower and a judo-like attempt to use America's own scruples of decencyand restraint -- and these are considerable -- to reduce the influenceof American power and / or cripple it.

Of course none of this means to glorify the prospect of actuallyfighting our Muslim (and other) enemies. On the contrary, the prospectof such a conflict is grim and our sane conscience tells us, correctly,that it should, if possible, be avoided. But there are situations inwhich, to coin a phrase, too much of that conscience not only makescowards of us all; it risks our necks and gives the initiative -- notto mention a mortal advantage -- to our enemies. It is one thing todraw back from gratuitously inflicting the horrors of modern warfare onthose who mean harm to no one and, in any case, do not have the means toinflict large-scale slaughter. In Saddam and -- make no mistake -- hispopular support in particular, we are faced with a country who not onlyhas those means but has shown, repeatedly, no restraint about using them-- even on its own civilians; it continues with its energetic effortsto expand those means. And, in the face of that record, we are supposedto 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 massdestruction, will draw very important lessons -- not from our altruisticrhetoric -- but from the precedent of what we do or fail to do.

We backed down from such a challenge in the middle of the lastcentury, when the technology of mass destruction was far less generallydeveloped and accessible than it is now. The cost was measured inmillions of lives. The prelude to the present challenge was onlyhalf-met in the Gulf War. Our neo-peaceniks' insistence on leavingourselves with nothing but impotent high-stilted talk to counter it nowcrosses a thick black line into criminal neglect of our own security.