The moral case for war

Bob Kerrey, ex-senator, Vietnam vet and Bush critic, tells Salon why liberals should support ousting Saddam.

By Michelle Goldberg

Nov 11, 2002 | Bob Kerrey is a fierce critic of the administration's unilateralist bluster. A former Nebraska Democratic senator and president of Manhattan's progressive New School university, he's also a decorated Vietnam veteran dogged by excruciating memories of combat and accusations about his role in a massacre, and he knows that a war with Iraq will be expensive and painful. "We civilians cannot expect to liberate 25 million Iraqis on the cheap," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal Sept. 12. He believes our current military might is enough to deter Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction. He says President Bush has weakened the country's credibility by failing to commit enough troops to maintain some semblance of order in Afghanistan.

So why is he part of a new group created to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people?

Along with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Kerrey is part of the newly formed Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group meant to shore up support for regime change. Unlike Democratic hawks in Congress, he has little to gain politically by getting behind this war, and he doesn't have to pretend to have much respect for Bush's leadership. He's involved, he says, because he believes the U.S. has a moral duty to get rid of Saddam, and he wants to convince liberals that this war should be their cause.

Kerrey, in fact, has been calling for regime change in Iraq for years. In 1998, he was a co-sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act, which enumerated Saddam Hussein's crimes and said, "It should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." He points out that Bush, at the beginning of his term, floated the idea of ceasing patrols of the no-fly zones protecting Shia Muslims in Southern Iraq and Kurds in the North, effectively abandoning our military presence in Iraq.

So it's not that he's following Bush's lead, but the other way around.

On Sept. 12 you wrote, "Given all the other assignments --particularly the war in Afghanistan which is by no means over, and the risk of conflict between Pakistan and India, which has by no means passed -- we are not ready to conduct a successful war to liberate the people of Iraq." What has changed?

In September we were simply not prepared. We've done a substantial amount of organizing since then, not just militarily but diplomatically. This needs to be a multinational effort. The administration wasn't close to the kind of diplomatic success they needed [in September]. We're not ready today -- you couldn't make the case you could do it today -- but preparation is under way.

The polls show that support for a war against Saddam is diminishing. A recent Pew poll has it down to 55 percent from 64 percent. What's affecting public opinion?

I don't know. I think in part what has gone down is [support for] unilateral action on the part of the United States. The polling info I've seen shows support for a multilateral effort.

There are lots of misunderstandings about the circumstances surrounding this effort in Iraq. If you polled Americans and said, "Are you aware that the United States has for 11 years been participating in a multinational military effort against Iraq [in the no-fly zones] and we may have to sustain it forever," most wouldn't know. We have a moral burden that's different than most other countries. We're not picking Iraq because we've just decided that's what we want to do. There's been a policy of containment in place since 1991 and we've been enforcing it with substantial military action.

Does that moral burden come from our support of Saddam before 1990?

No, it does not. It may come in part from that, but that would not be sufficient to justify changing our military strategy today. The moral burden comes from answering the question, "What if we stop flying military missions in the North and South?" The French were flying missions and they quit. The Bush administration was thinking about [quitting] when they first came to office. But the day we stop, Saddam Hussein moves seven divisions north and a lot of Iraqi Kurds die. America and Britain share the burden of knowing they have a very bad set of options. We can continue doing what we're doing, putting our pilots at risk. We can change our strategy to eliminate the need for military action, or we can stop military action altogether.

If we cease military action, Iraqis are going to die. That's the burden on us.

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