If you're looking for the correct way to pronounce "monsieur" inorder to impress a pretty girl the next time you order wine from the maitre'd, the French are the folks to ask. But as helpful as our transatlantic neighbors might be to you in your pursuit of the fairer sex, their expertise does not extend so far into the realm of foreign policy. Said French, along with the Russians, the Germans and a host of other very dignified European nations that would have fallen long ago to either fascism or communism without the aid of the U.S. military, have been the harshest critics of any U.S. military plan to intervene in Iraq. To them, it is unpalatable to think of liberating that nation from the clutches of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime.
The impetus for our action against Hussein is painfully clear and simple. In the past he has aggressively used weapons of mass destruction against civilians in his own nation and in neighboring countries. He has extensive ties with anti-Semitic and anti-American terrorist groups, including al Qaeda; unconfirmed intelligence dossiers indicate that one of his personal agents met with a September 11 hijacker shortly before the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He is now developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. A defector from his nuclear research lab claims that the day on which Hussein will obtain a usable nuclear warhead is imminent.
If a man is loading a gun, working a bullet into the chamber, and beginning to aim the muzzle at you or your family, you don't wait for him to fire before you defend yourself.
"The use of military force against Iraq would be brutal and destabilizing to the region," harp the likes of Jacques Chirac and Vladimir "Pootie-Poot" Putin. Well, monsieurs, wouldn't that be tragic? Instability and brutality in the Middle East! If we were really unfortunate, maybe millions of fundamentalist Muslims would suddenly become rabid anti-Semites, angry enough at our "Zionist" nation to seek our destruction and that of Israel through any means possible, including subversive terrorist attacks against civilians. That certainly would be awful. Except, of course, for the fact that these conditions already exist. Brutality is a way of life in the Middle East, with violent anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among the only stable factors in the region within the last half-century.
"Diplomacy is always the best option," chide our alleged allies from their chateaux in the Alps. And they are right, though they forget that diplomacy presupposes two nations with an equal desire for peace and prosperity. They do not remember Hussein's past hatred of peace and they do not realize his characteristic apathy toward his country's prosperity, or they refuse to acknowledge it. When Hussein allows weapons inspectors free reign -- and I mean free reign -- within his country, when he renounces his terrorist ties, and when he begins to show an interest in something other than himself or his own zealous ideology, then we can begin to speak of diplomacy. But not before.
Our critics cry, "think of the children and the innocents who will be harmed in an attack!" They speak of the Iraqi innocents and children who live every day without freedom, who are subject to beatings or death at a whim for saying or believing the wrong thing. The innocents and children who live in a nation where the monopoly of violence is held by a sadistic dictator who gets his jollies by using nerve toxin on citizens whose religious beliefs he finds disagreeable. The innocents and children who are forcefully shackled in intellectual darkness, devoid of the benefits of free speech or a free press, and kept ignorant of the flow of reality around them. The innocents and children who starve while a madman flits among them, from extravagant palace to palace, spending all he can steal on a weapons program fueled by his hatred for democracy, equality and justice. Yes, let us consider these innocents and children when we decide what to do about Iraq.
But what will we do when it's all over with? When the tanks have rolled over the last of Hussein's Republican Guard, when the despot himself is captured, dead or in exile? The same thing we did in Japan, the same thing we did in Germany, and the same thing we're doing now in Afghanistan.
We will, with or without the help of the French, help Iraq establish for itself a system of government that does not subsist on the misery of its subjects nor strive for the destruction of freedom on Earth. We will try Hussein and any of his surviving supporters as war criminals, and we will affirm to our friends and enemies alike that we will not allow the maniacs of the planet to arm themselves in the shadows while hordes of timid appeasers give them moral and political shelter.
While the majority of western nations turn their noses up at us, we will have neutralized one of the greatest threats the western world has ever seen. And all the snobs worldwide who sneer about the populist propaganda and barbaric brutality of the ugly Americans will sleep a little easier at night, knowing they are just that much less likely to be vaporized in the morning.
(Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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