Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=1-23-04

TYPE=BUSH-IRAQ

NUMBER=3-858

BYLINE=DAVID BORGIDA

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

CONTENT=

Suggested introduction: President Bush emphasized the war in Iraq when he addressed the Congress earlier this week. Has he made a convincing case that the war was justified? Is the world safer now or not? We asked two knowledgeable people with strong opinions to join us on the VOA NewsLine program to debate these issues. David Borgida is the moderator.

MR. BORGIDA:

And now joining us, Andrew Apostolou, Director of Research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Robert Dreyfuss, he is an award-winning journalist who has contributed to publications such as The Nation, The New Republic and The American Prospect. Our topic is the war in Iraq.

Mr. Dreyfuss, let's begin with you. The President of the United States this week delivering his State of the Union Address, in which he defends the war in Iraq. He and his supporters believe the world is far safer now without Saddam Hussein and that the war was completely defensible. Your thoughts?

MR. DREYFUSS:

I think the President's speech was more of a campaign speech than it was really a speech about Iraq policy. It seemed to me untethered from reality. The reality of Iraq is that it's a country that is teetering on the brink of either chaos or civil war, or both. We didn't find the threat that the President said was there either in terms of the terrorist connection or in terms of the weapons of mass destruction. And the war has done enormous damage to our standing not only globally but with our allies. And so it's hard to think of why we're safer when our allies are angry at us, perhaps less willing to cooperate with us.

And having alienated a lot of the countries that might otherwise, even in the developing world, want to cooperate with the war on terrorism, they're now feeling, I think, more scared and threatened perhaps from the United States -- I'm thinking of countries like Syria and many others -- than they might be in terms of being willing to cooperate. So I'm glad that Saddam Hussein will be on trial for crimes that he may have committed, but I don't think that the world is safer; quite the opposite.

MR. BORGIDA:

Mr. Apostolou, take a crack at it; safer or not safer?

MR. APOSTOLOU:

Well, I think it's self-evident that the world is a better place and a safer place when a mad, genocidal dictator, who has invaded two of his neighbors, who has committed genocide, which is a crime by any standard, against one of his largest ethnic minorities, is now in a prison and not in a palace.

And, what's more, as President Bush rightly said, we've found weapons programs that he failed to declare to the U.N. inspectors. What's more, we found missile programs that were way over the limit set by the U.N. So the violation of the U.N. resolutions that we cited as the right to go to war has been justified. And, what's more, just talk to the Iraqis; they're so glad that they're rid of this man. I think that justifies everything. We found mass graves; that's what counts.

MR. BORGIDA:

Let's talk a little bit about a point that Mr. Dreyfuss made. And that is this issue of unilateralism versus multilateralism and the extent to which other countries may or may not want to work with the United States and Great Britain, and those who supported the war, in the future. It has become, to some extent, a political issue, with Howard Dean, Democratic Party presidential candidate, and Senator John Kerry and others, raising this issue. Does it hurt the United States that we've done this to some extent without the support of the entire international community? Or does it make us appear to be a country that sticks up for what it believes is correct?

MR. APOSTOLOU:

Well, I would say the latter. It does make the United States appear to be a country that's serious. I personally would not define France, Germany and Russia as the entire international community. I'm not going to get into the American political aspect of this.

The point is, actually Donald Rumsfeld said it in September 2001 - a quite interesting article in the New York Times; he probably forgot he has written it now -- but he said that the coalition will change, it will shift. We were never going to get French support for this. I think we were fooling ourselves if we thought we were. We were never going to get Turkish support. Fair enough. What we do is we get the support we can. We build the coalition either at the time or perhaps later. We have 30 countries helping us in Iraq, and I think that's a good thing.

MR. BORGIDA:

Mr. Dreyfuss, do you want to respond to that?

MR. DREYFUSS:

Well, I think it has been catastrophically bad for the United States globally. Of course, we could have gotten French support. We had French support the last time we went to war against Iraq. We could have gotten a lot of other countries' support if there had been a threat. The fact is the threat was manufactured. And for all the talk about the genocidal dictator that we now have in prison, that was not the President's argument in going to war. He didn't say, this is a dictator and we've got to get rid of him. In fact, if he said that, there would probably be a list of 40 or 50 countries we could start planning war against.

The fact is that he said Iraq was an immediate threat to the United States. Not even Iraq's neighbors felt that Iraq was enough of a threat to support our effort, not even the Turks, not the Saudi Arabians. None of the countries around Iraq felt that Iraq was threatening to them; that it was contained. That was the view of the U.S. intelligence community, that Iraq was contained. But the White House and the Vice President's office and the civilians at the Pentagon did not think that that was a sufficient reason for leaving Iraq alone. And they planned this war and justified it on the basis of a nonexistent threat. And now the President is trying to change the subject. I mean, it's almost funny if it weren't so serious.

MR. BORGIDA:

The views of Robert Dreyfuss and Andrew Apostolou on the subject of the U.S. involvement in Iraq. I'm sure a discussion we will have again, and others will have, in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you, gentlemen, both, for being our guest on NewsLine.

MR. APOSTOLOU:

Thank you.

MR. DREYFUSS:

Thank you.

(End of interview.)

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