Henri Reynard Speaks Out

It's Monday, The Last Day For Diplomacy?

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My granddaughter loves to play monster, I sometimes even get to play the part of the monster in this highly ritualized game that almost always ends in giggles. I'M COMING TO GET YOU, is greeted with shrieks and peals of laughter, the kind of laughter that can never be derived from a TV show or even a good novel. Of course she cheats and calls on her Nene, my wife, to save her if the fear of grandpa's loud voice gets too intense for even her well-tested nerves. I am stricken with the fact that the mothers and fathers of so many equally well-loved three-year old children are going into harms way in Iraq, probably this week. They are going into a dangerous situation in order to try to establish democracy and order in a region of the world where it has never flourished. The Middle East has always been the birthplace of Empires, and many bloody tyrants. Even the villages of these clan driven societies have had their bloody conflicts. This has not often been a peaceful area of the world. My love and best wishes are with all of these young men and women who will risk so much to offer freedom and democracy to their brothers and sisters in Iraq. That our soldiers are sincere in their ideals I have no doubt.

In this war, that is certainly coming, there will be a lot of untimely deaths. Few of the people in those military units of ours would be there if our diplomacy was working well. Every one of them has somewhere that they would rather be today. Many of them have children; I would like to believe that as a society we are committed to raising those children in security and decent surroundings if either of their parents were to be lost in this series of battles. The funding for veterans' benefits programs is under pressure from this administration, I find this reprehensible and bordering on stupidity. At the same time that we are making decisions that require these young people to risk their lives, we are eviscerating programs that their children will need. This is being done to give a tax cut to many people who never served in the military at all. That makes me ashamed of our leadership. Those tax cuts will injure the very people fighting our battles in Iraq and Afghanistan and their children. This is so ugly that it angers me even in the middle of my sadness about this war.

What is also ugly is the fact that a lot of beautiful children live in those buildings that we are going to destroy in this invasion of Iraq. A lot of beautiful children have already died during our sanctions against a nation cursed with bad leadership for all of its recent history. Our nation has suffered a blow on 9/11 but few of the dead were children. Not so in this war, thousands, perhaps even millions of children have died and at least thousands more will die or live lives of pain, denied the comfort of parents, of health, of security of even the most basic kind. This is what we are losing in Iraq by allowing diplomacy to fail. I hold our past Presidents accountable for the fact that sanction-imposed conditions in the nation of Iraq have cost so many lives and caused so much pain. I call our current President to account for his decision to make this the last day of diplomacy. War is not a video game! These are real human beings that will be torn apart because our President, in an apparent failure of perception, has decided that Iraq must suffer because we are threatened by terrorists not originating there.

Yes 9/11 did require us to do something about the terrorists. I am among the people who believed that the Afghanistan government needed to be changed. Children had died there in war for thousands of years and will keep dying there as long as the culture remains intact. I still hated the fact that people who suffered so much in the war against Russia now had to be killed because their leadership harbored terrorists. I accepted that war as necessary, I am deeply suspicious of what has happened to precipitate this one. It is patently clear that the US public is being manipulated, through its understandable fears, by this administration. I was a child as I watched that occur during the McCarthy era. I watched Edward R Morrow's famous broadcast when he belled the cat of fear created by those who used fear of Communism to get and keep power. We need to get a grip on our fears in this nation today. They are driving us to give up on diplomacy too easily and give too much credence to military solutions.

Saddam has a monstrous ego. It is obvious that someone who believes that he is the reincarnation of Alexander the Great has a loose grip on what most of us recognize as reality. The real question in this equation is, are there any leaders with a firmer grip on reality dancing on this stage today? Yes Saddam is a monster, not at issue in any sane conversation about this problem of Iraq. Yes this is about oil, if there were no oil revenues there would be no chance that Saddam would have the money to support his drive for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not unless he had a sponsor from outside the country. For years we were his sponsor and his covert support for his terrible regime. I blame our past Presidents for that stupidity too. Our current President is another matter.

If we concede that people who rise to the leadership of nations tend to have large egos I think that we may still be tracking reality. I think Tony Blair must have a very large ego, but then Britain has a history of leaders with large egos. During the last face-off between a dictator and a Prime Minister of Britain Winston Churchill was the man in the hot seat. He also invented Iraq, as an answer about what to do about accessing the oil in the Middle East for Britain. In a sense Winston is at least partly to blame for the current situation. I hope poor Mr. Blair doesn't fancy himself to be fighting a monster on the scale of Hitler; that would be a triumph of ego over common sense of significant proportions. Saddam has little industry and less science in support of his regime. Most of what he has is borrowed from other nations or bought in the international arms trade system. Hitler had the full production capacity of Germany and Austria behind his efforts. Hitler also had a large number of world-class scientists in several important areas of military hardware. Hussein has none. He really only has his Republican Guard and the oil revenues, and the international trade in armaments. So if we took away two out of three of those props what would happen? The Republican Guard would eventually slip away quietly into the night, bet on it.

Today marks the end of diplomacy, we are obviously going to war within a week. It is also St Patricks' Day, to celebrate the mythical Saint who is reputed to have driven the snakes out of Ireland. Obviously he just turned them into visions seen only after St. Patricks' Day is over. And what does the end of diplomacy mean? Why here it means that we are going to quit talking, not to Saddam, but to the United Nations. Obviously we are not pleased with that international body that we helped form to keep peace in the world. Why are we not pleased with the United Nations? Because they refuse to endorse our invasion of Iraq at this time! We have threatened it with "irrelevance" if it does not cave in to our demands. In a world in which we act without convincing the UN to back our use of force it is indeed irrelevant. It is made irrelevant by our impatience with the very process that we set it up to facilitate, world peace maintained by diplomacy!

Our President also has a really large ego. His ego was large enough to allow him to take the reins of power in the most powerful nation on earth with a contested election just behind him and push a very socially conservative agenda forward. He has used every opportunity to push his rigid social agenda forward since that time. He has shamelessly used the tragedy of 9/11 to curry favor with the public and the press on occasions too numerous to remember. He has become the most hawkish President that we have had in our modern era, since nuclear weapons became a consideration. Now he is abandoning diplomacy because he believes he has convinced a lot of people in this country that Saddam presents a clear and present danger to the USA. He has not had any success at convincing the rest of the world, which is why the United Nations has refused to endorse action at this time.

Presidents come and Presidents go but our importance in the world will remain long after they leave office, each and every one of them. Presidents are all responsible for making a lot of decisions; the good ones tend to have had a lot of experience making difficult decisions in their life before the White House became their residence. Their decisions often involve life and death for at least a few people; even environmental policies can have that level of impact. So can the decision to build a large public works project, Hoover Dam cost tens of lives before it was completed. Few modern Presidents have really wanted to preside over a war; this one seems to somehow be an exception. He has defined a policy of preemptive war to protect us against terrorism. That policy itself is a golden opportunity to try and right the wrongs of the world with war. History has shown, time and again, that such a course is not a wise one. Now we are beleaguering the one international body dedicated to peace with our drive to war in Iraq. We may damage the credibility of the whole world peace process that has made so much progress over the last century. Colonialism is dead, and nations that could not point out one peaceful period in their history are working side by side with their neighbors to help peace prevail. We are not casting our lot with them.

We are not an Empire! We; are a Republic! There are a lot more Republics in the world today than there were right after WWII. There are a lot fewer people dedicated to creating empires, and that is a good thing. The purpose of the government in a Republic is to ease the lives of its citizens and protect them in times of threats from outside forces. We are threatened by terrorism. So is Israel, threatened by terrorism. We do have a right to protect ourselves. It is just that I do not believe that declaring an end to diplomacy is the best way to do that. Nor is Saddam a credible threat to our internal security of this nation. Not when we have the power to wipe his nation off of the map of the earth any time we choose.
We will provoke more hatred of our country with this invasion. We will suffer losses in any occupation that follows. I hope our leadership does not betray the idealism of all of those wonderful young men and women that we are sending into harms way. I hope it does not betray the cost in blood of the Iraqi people that will be paid in this supposed drive toward freedom for Iraq. I for one will not tolerate the abuse of that price which is being paid in order to impose democracy on Iraq. I hope most of you are with me in that regard. If we start with war we had better stay the course until peace prevails and the balance is struck for the benefit of Iraq's people. I hope the people of this nation accept the responsibility that goes with waging this war. We are responsible, as soon as this war starts, for creating a Republic where none has ever been. If we do not follow through on that obligation we will have wasted a lot of lives for nothing worth even one. We will have wasted them for our short-term security; which is more threatened elsewhere in the world. We will have wasted them for a victory over the peacemakers in the United Nations and in our own nation. And most of all we will have wasted them for the egos of the leaders who perpetrated this war on their followers. That would be a shame too great to bear.