(Guest Blogger: Sage McLaughlin)

Gore Vidal and Rush Limbaugh disagree, and everyone knows it. Teach-ins, sit-ins, and candlelight vigils are once again in full bloom. Such figures as the Tonight Show's Jay Leno and National Public Radio's foreign editor Loren Jenkins devote much of their on-air time to convincing the world that President Bush is an incompetent fool. Conservatives are hopping mad about it all, and everyone is threatening to yank everyone else's funding in some way or another. In the aftermath of our greatest national tragedy, American democracy is more or less as it should be.

Ironically, the desperate calls for a "genuine debate" over issues related to the Bush administration's nebulous War on Terror often take place on high-circulation editorial pages, and on cable news television programs, where that debate has already been raging in earnest for over a year. Often, cries of "censorship" are printed within the actual text of an openly hostile article or op-ed piece, which is then promptly distributed to millions of readers. The persecution complex suffered by those on the left who are critical of any war on Iraq is similarly puzzling, grabbing as they do an enormous share of our publicly-funded radio and television bandwidth.

In one important respect, there is a legitimate cause for concern. That is, the national conversation has not been terribly fruitful. While there have been some notable defections (Christopher Hitchens' recent falling out with the Nation comes to mind), battle lines have been drawn precisely where one would have expected them, and the argumentation has been decidedly unsophisticated.

What I'm getting at, in essence, is that I am yet to be convinced of the case for altering President Bush's immediate strategy. Specifically, I have not seen a single thoroughly well-considered reason to put the brakes on an obviously impending military conflict with Saddam Hussein. This concerns me. War of the preemptive type endorsed by most conservatives is not usually a self-evident course of action, and the fact that it seems so at this juncture has given me pause. Armed conflict ought not be favored in the manner of a prejudice, having never been sufficiently considered in lieu of a realistic alternative.

The objections currently being put forth by those on both the left and the right are of several types. Some are simply moral, while others are geo-strategic. Many are brazenly cynical, such as the suggestion that Bush's motives are "political," or that the war itself is part of a wider conspiracy of evil Zionists working in tandem with the petroleum illuminati (admittedly, this latter variety seems at this point confined to devout Arabists, professional academics, and the Black Helicopter wing of the libertarian set).

It bears saying here that all politicians at all times act with some deference to political considerations, so that criticism is a little hollow. Reasonable people can safely dismiss such rhetoric out of hand, since it does not follow that because the Republican party stands to gain political capital from the timing of the war that the war must be a mistake. I keep wondering when someone is going to call Senator Tom Daschle on "politicizing" the economy, or the National Organization for Women on "politicizing" the abortion issue...and right before a midterm election no less! For shame.

Perhaps the most incendiary statements that have been made have been those touching on America's shared responsibility for the terror attacks of September 11. It may surprise some who know me to hear it, but I think this line of reasoning has been a little unfairly maligned in some cases. The basic premise is perfectly valid. That is to say, American foreign policy entanglements, such as our oft-cited support for Israel and our ongoing diplomatic circle-jerk with the House of Saud, do have everything to do with winding up as the focus of rabid Islamist hatred. To believe otherwise is to assume that Al-Queda gave equal consideration to such choice targets as London or Berlin, rather than New York. I am willing to concede that point.

However, it is seldom demonstrated why America's response must be anything other than what it has so far been. Under the best of circumstances, and the most benevolent of foreign policy frameworks, wealthy radicals will always find cause to complain, and the governments with which we do business in the Gulf region can be easily reduced to a list of options ranging all the way from horrible to truly god-awful. Liberal opinion seems to hinge on some unspecified arrangement by which the average Arab enjoys more fully the benefits of Western investment in their most precious resource, oil. But that will require enormous internal political upheavals that at present appear truly remote (though the case of Iran is thought to be promising by some). In short, we cannot wish our interests in the Middle East away.

It is axiomatic that the bare wish for peace among statesmen is not by itself sufficient to avert war. The pre-World War I example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Hapsburg Monarchy is instructive. Emperor Franz Joseph had seen the empire decimated in one armed conflict after the next during the mid-19th century, and spent the last sixty years of his reign pursuing a policy of "peace at all costs." Even the assassination of the heir apparent to the Hapsburg Monarchy, Franz Ferdinand, on June 28th 1914 by a Serbian nationalist, was not enough to propel Europe into an inevitable war. Vienna offered the Serbian government an ultimatum, comprised of ten demands that, by design, would suppress the activities of ultra-nationalist terrorist activity within Serbia proper. When Serbia refused, Austria's continued status as a Great Power was incompatible with further negotiation, and war was declared. This set in motion a domino effect that engulfed the whole of Europe in general war.

It would have been nice if Vienna did not have railway interests in Bosnia at that time. It would have been better if the virility of Austria's various domestic ethnic conflicts had not metamorphed into a foreign policy concern. But on June 29th, as on June 28th, those problems still existed, and the balance of power was still a realpolitik priority for France, Russia, Germany, and Great Britain. And so it is with the United States today. A restructuring of America's financial and political interests in the region will take time and effort, and few people (Osama bin Laden and Ann Coulter excepted) are seriously proposing an all-out war on the Arab states. The bigger issue is whether such a "conflagration" can be avoided, while dealing with the immediate threat posed by the Iraqi regime.

Frequently, one hears that no such threat exists and that some other selfish American subtext is at work that has propelled the world into this predicament. Oil, it is said, is the overriding concern of the Bush administration, and control of this resource is thought by some to be an insufficient cause for war.

Accepting this simple analysis requires a leap of the imagination I am so far unwilling to make.

For one thing, I can think of no other regime in the world than Saddam Hussein's whose strategic aims are more convergent with that of Al-Qaeda's. At the time of this writing, Reuters has reported that Turkish troops have seized 100-200 grams of uranium a paltry 155 miles from Iraq's borders [JK: Originally thought to be rather more...], as it was being smuggled under the seat of a car by two unidentified men. Coupled with Condi Rice's recent pronouncements and a meticulous account of Al-Qaeda's activity in Iraq in the New Yorker, we are faced with a picture that is inconsistent with the notion that Iraqi terrorism is just a lame excuse or a smokescreen designed to fool the world into cooperating with an assault on an otherwise harmless, if nutty, madman. We would do well to remember that America shares no border with Afghanistan, but for the cost of airfare Osama bin Laden's fanatical troops were able to produce thousands of dead hailing from every part of the globe.

For the sake of argument, though, it's worth looking at this claim in isolation. "Mere" economic concerns, and particularly those of conspicuously wealthy oil executives, are offered up as a corrupting influence, and one that renders war with Iraq immoral. "Don't kill for oil," read the placards a decade ago, and so goes the refrain today. This is unmitigated nonsense. The interests of Big Bad Big Oil are the interests of average Americans—and French, and Canadians, and Germans. The difficult truth is that our way of life, as well as that of average Arabs, is intrinsically dependent upon the continued affordability of the world's most precious commodity. Cato the Elder once argued before the Roman Senate that the price of figs from a then-subjugated polity of Carthage was being intentionally manipulated to drive domestic farmers into destitution, and thereby create an artificial dependence on foreign fruit. This after a single trip to the market, where Cato found himself aghast at the difference in cost between local and Carthaginian figs. The Third Punic War ensued, and Carthage was utterly razed to the ground.

We have, as a civilization, evolved considerably since then. The fact remains, however, that at this moment in time an aggressively expansionist Saddam Hussein, in possession of a single nuclear weapon, would be capable of wreaking economic hardship on the entire world whose effects would be nothing short of cataclysmic.

This of course raises the specter of whether Western, and in particular American, prerogatives extend to preventing an entire subset of the global population from possessing weapons that the Western powers have themselves stockpiled for generations. The red herring of "racism" is paraded before us by the likes of Edward Said, but this theory fails to convince. The dream of an Arab Bomb nurtured by Hussein and, secretly, by many of his Arab critics, would be a nightmare for civilization not because of some conception that dark-skinned peoples cannot behave themselves. Rather, it is quite reasonable to assume that fully-functioning constitutional democracies, characterized by such Western niceties as the Rule of Law, are the only contemporary forms of government that it would be sensible to permit even limited access to such weaponry. This has little to do with race and everything to do with the awful prospect of thermonuclear blackmail, to say nothing of arbitrary and petty wars of conquest, which still loom as a fixture of inter-Arab politics.

Nevertheless, I am uneasy. It has been pondered by such staples of conservative thought as the editorial board of the National Review that the president is employing a sort of English longball strategy. The scenario goes something like this: Saddam Hussein is defeated in about twelve minutes. This in turn discourages the PLO, and creates a climate on the West Bank that is not conducive to continued reliance on terrorism as a tool of negotiation. Iranian citizens are likewise inspired to overthrow the ruling Mullah Mafia in that country. Saudi Arabia becomes less relevant as a strategic centerpiece, allowing the U.S. to shop around for foreign oil elsewhere (say, Russia) while simultaneously using that threat as a stick to compel reforms within the Kingdom. Israel rests a little easier, having seen their most powerful regional adversary go the way of the dinosaur. All is well in the Middle East. Eventually.

If this is Bush's program, it is a complex one. War is an uncertain enterprise under the best of circumstances, and such a plan necessarily contains prodigious intuitive leaps that had better be carefully explored. Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, has recently argued in Reason Magazine that at present, America's foreign policy objectives are breathtakingly expansive. A "vision" such as I have laid out could take many presidential administrations to achieve, and while I applaud the president's initiative in taking concrete steps toward realizing such a goal, I am constrained to think that a more narrowly-focused blueprint for confronting the terrorist threat is needed.

Perhaps the threat cannot be faced in such a way. But at present, the left is not raising these objections. The dialogue coming from the left presupposes too much that is at odds with reality, such as the idea that "peace at any price" can properly be described as "peace" at all.

On weighing the matter of war with Iraq, one must take heed that at the end of the day, the coming conflict will be an absolute horror show. Dead Iraqis are not distinguishable in any ethically defensible way from dead Americans. Bush's policy appears to follow a brutally teleological pattern, adding up the debits and credits of corpses on different sides of the globe, comparing the prospects, and proceeding apace with what will be a damned grisly affair in any event. Frankly, I support that. It's sensible, and it isn't at odds with what we know to be true about the real word. But I sure would feel better about it all if we had an opposition party with creative and productive alternatives to offer, as opposed to empty platitudes about social justice and the nobility of the oppressed. More than anything, we need a practical left, one that is willing to concede defeat and deal with issues as they present themselves, as opposed to how they would be if Bill Clinton were King.

In the meantime, we should console ourselves with the idea that our president is a man of action. Having supported Gore in the previous election, for reasons that still elude me, I am desperate for a reason to be conflicted about war. For that misgiving is the signature of a healthy, just, and morally conscious society. Whatever the ankle-biting hamheads in Brussels or Paris might say, I am proud to be a part of this one... come what may.