WHEN THE news broke last month that Saddam Hussein had been captured -- disheveled and disoriented, hiding in a dark hole in the ground -- it was hard to overstate the magnitude of the shockwaves that reverberated around the world. World leaders and regular citizens across the globe felt an exhilarating sense of satisfaction knowing that this ruthless dictator would finally answer for his heinous crimes. It didn't take long for pundits here in the States to begin theorizing about the political fallout from this long-awaited event either. The most elementary political calculus tempts us to chalk up Saddam's capture as a big political victory for the Bush administration -- right on the eve of the Democratic primaries no less, and just less than a year before the election. But thinking of Hussein's capture in this way doesn't just lack sense. It also trivializes our national security and casts an ominous prospect of just how much harm another four years of Republican-led foreign policy could do to our country.
On the most simplistic level (which is how most Americans think of politics), one could imagine that capturing Saddam is a significant victory in the "war on terror." But like most issues, the real matter is a little more complicated. If we think back to last year, when the sitting president was eagerly selling the war to a reluctant American public (one wishes it worked the other way around), our primary justification for invading Iraq was that it posed an imminent threat to our country in the form of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to terrorist organizations. The anti-war coalition has been all but been proven right in refuting these two counts -- we now know, as Washington insiders did then, that Iraq did not in fact possess an active nuclear weapons program and destroyed nearly all of their chemical and biological weapons over twelve years ago. In fact, according to the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency or the nonpartisan and widely respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Iraq never possessed those weapons in the amounts Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and other hawks claimed. Neither the Iraqi government nor Saddam Hussein had any ties whatsoever to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the September 11th attacks, and even the current administration didn't bother to submit a single shred of evidence that suggested otherwise. In fact, the only thing that Hussein and bin Laden (who railed against the Iraqi government almost as vehemently as he did against the United States) appear have had in common were that they were both Arab and Muslim. One hopes this isn't all that it takes to convince the American public that they were in league.
Meanwhile, after a much longer and larger scale search, Osama bin Laden -- the man most directly responsible for a long terrorist campaign against our country -- remains at large. The United States has completely lost the international goodwill and sympathy that September 11 evoked by defying international criticism and the United Nations, invading Iraq unilaterally on pretenses that were flimsy then and demonstrably false now, and causing a cavernous and long-lasting rift between the United States and most of our deeply trusted allies. Though domestic issues are vitally important -- like the passage of the callous Bush tax cut plans for the very rich, unconstitutional infringements on a woman's reproductive rights, galling favors to the very corporations most of the Bush administration has close ties to and the loss of 3.1 million jobs, the most of any single administration in 60 years -- this administration's two-faced disregard for our national security is hard to ignore. Even while the Republican party veils itself in terms of being almost obsessively security-conscious, we see studies that indicate that "Homeland Security" is being under-funded, under-manned and required to rely upon supplies from many of those corporations to which the Bush administration is close.
The increasingly anxious anti-Howard Dean cabal went apoplectic when he dared to caution Americans that Hussein's capture "does not make America any safer." With some basic analysis, it's clear he's right. Hussein was just one of dozens of bloodthirsty and tyrannical dictators with no regard for democracy or human life that America had no problem dealing with just a few years ago and with whom we still do today. While his departure is truly uplifting for its humanitarian implications, to say that America is made materially "safer" because our efforts against terrorism are being skewed towards cravenly political ends is simplistic and dangerous. America must decide whether it prefers slogans and politics or concrete policies in our fight against terrorism -- and decide so soon.
(Blair Reeves' column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at breeves@cavalierdaily.com.)
Read More
PATEL: Personal development courses support students beyond the gradebook
By Heer Patel | YesterdayThe University must rethink its approach to education beyond traditional major-specific requirements and mandate personal development courses.
EDITORIAL: Commercialization threatens U.Va.’s educational mission
By Editorial Board | 2 days agoAfter all, measuring the University’s worth in terms of accrued capital, operational efficiency and numerical rankings molds this space into just another cookie-cutter institution.
YOUNIS: Why every U.Va. student should say yes to English
By Ayat Younis | January 9, 2025Every student at the University, regardless of their primary field of study, can professionally and academically benefit from engaging with the English department.
