| About
Us Feedback Links |
The Bunker of the Formerly BraveThe Immorality of the Cheney DoctrineVice-President Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine” provided thelogical basis for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. It held that even a one percent chance that Saddam could work with Al Qaeda to attack the U.S successfully with weapons of mass destruction was unacceptable. The stakes of such a high-impact, low-probability event were too high. The motives of our “Axis-of-evil” enemies were not beholden to the Cold War logic of mutually assured destruction that kept the U.S. and Russia from full-frontal confrontation. We could no longer afford to wait until an attack upon us was imminent. The smoking gun evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda axis could be a mushroom cloud, we were told repeatedly. We had to go on the offensive against “gathering” threats, not just imminent ones. The deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein expose the flaw in Dick Cheney’s doctrine. What Cheney does not seem to have considered is that by overthrowing Saddam there was at least a one percent chance (or even a likelihood) that we would unleash a chain of events that would result in death and suffering in Iraq on a scale comparable to what the Bush administration was hoping to prevent from occurring on American soil. What happened to that OTHER One Percent Doctrine? The one from the perspective of the people in the shoes on the other feet? Cheney’s doctrine has forced Iraqis to pay in blood for the sake of assuaging our fears. 100,000 Iraqis died so that 100,000 American's could live. What does that make us? Cowards. When did we become knee-knocking, soiled-pants wusses? Was it the War of 1812? Or the Korean War, where America figured it was better to draw the line in the sand 10,000 miles from home? In that horribly bloody conflict, we left a million or two dead Koreans for the sake of saving our scared-silly hides. Add to that a million dead Vietnamese (gotta keep that line in the sand as far from the Beach Boys as possible). If we were serious about Iraq, and about our moral culpability, we wouldn’t have half-measures like incremental “surges”, we'd have a military draft, and as many troops in Iraq as General Eric Shinseki warned us we’d need. We'd be upping our taxes to invest in Iraq's reconstruction. We'd wonder every day how we can make amends for the chaos we’ve helped unleash in Iraq. Michael Moore’s powerful 2002 documentary film "Bowling for Columbine" concluded that the 1999 high school massacre in Columbine, Colorado, occurred largely because we are a nation of hair-trigger fears and anxieties. Add to that an overabundance of self-righteousness, and a veritable national bazaar of weaponry, and you have the makings of disaster without end. The nightly news, abetted by political opportunists, has always told us the bad guys are either on the way or already under our beds - the Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda nexus, the dominoes, the Sandinistas (Just a day's drive from Brownsville, Texas. Dang!), the Chinese and their new blue-water navy, the Goths, the jocks, the Central American killer bees. So we panic, and overthrow nations' rulers - Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, Chile's Salvador Allende, Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Or we shoot up a high school, or stock our cupboards with big-barreled guns that no one can pry from our cold, twitching hands here in the land of the free and the bunker of the formerly brave. |