Exactly a decade ago, when Bush-Cheney's war machine was hell-bent on invading Iraq and few Washington power figures were brave enough to get in the way, I made this appeal to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The Cassandra business of warning about catastrophes that come true is certainly a thankless proposition. But it's hardly the time to stop trying when ten years later, the consequences of instituting the "preemptive war" doctrine have become even more painfully obvious and bankrupting. If not for the newspaper's word limit, my op-ed below (published March 3, 2013 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune) could have been stronger in dissecting the whole stupid notion of "preemption" which relies on utilitarian ethics -- adopting a conclusion without even knowing the facts.
Macho guesswork and rationalizing backward over false premises is what goes into "act utilitarianism" and it's even what psychologists have found indicative of the psychopathic mentality. The secret memos in the news that purport to legalize U.S. drone assassinations are undoubtedly based on this pernicious form of fact-free utilitarianism, enabled thus far only due to their secrecy. It's not only why governments should never conjure up "intelligence" to go to war and why "torture doesn't save lives," but it's why "preemptive war" is wrong, illegal, horribly unwise and counter-productive.
Ten Years After Iraq
Ten years ago, I made the ultimately futile effort of writing to FBI Director Robert Mueller warning that he needed to tell the truth about the Bush administration's unjustified decision to preemptively invade Iraq and the likelihood it would prove counterproductive.
To its credit, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran the story on March 6, 2003 ("Agent: War would unleash terror, and FBI not ready"), one of only a handful of such cautionary news stories in the war-fevered weeks before the United States launched its catastrophic invasion.
At the time, Mueller well knew of Vice President Dick Cheney's lying about Saddam's connection to 9/11 and other administration exaggerations to gin up the war.
My letter compared Bush-Cheney's rush to war with the impatience and bravado that had led to the FBI's disastrous 1993 assault at Waco, where "the children [the FBI] sought to liberate all died when [David] Koresh and his followers set fires."
On a much more tragic scale, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions more were wounded or displaced. Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed. Severe problems remain with lack of clean drinking water, electricity and a lack of professionals in Iraq to help rebuild.
Even worse, the flames of sectarian hatred were ignited, based on religious and ethnic differences, leading to violent civil strife, ethnic cleansing and terror bombings. Those fires continue to burn. Instead of bringing democracy, it was violence and war that spilled over to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
U.S. national interests were also hurt by the recklessly launched war for regime change when Iraq's new leadership aligned with Iran. What's more, the looser "preemptive strike" rationale did migrate back home. Provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act now purport to authorize the indefinite, due process-free detention of American citizens.
The Obama administration's "white paper" on drone bombing policy claims that an "informed official" can, without any judicial process, place U.S. citizens on a "kill list" and otherwise act as judge, jury and executioner on "the global battlefield."
More laxity in law enforcement's use of deadly force has even come to pass. The shooting meltdown engaged in by the panic-stricken Los Angeles Police Department in response to the "war" launched by Navy Reservist and Iraq veteran Christopher Dorner is just one example. Veterans increasingly bring the war home, suffering high rates of suicides and homicides.
This blowback is a scary proposition considering that domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh, John Muhammad (the "Beltway sniper") and Robert Flores (who shot three nursing professors and then himself) were all products of Gulf War I.
No matter how comforting it may be to believe that it's possible to preempt terrorism or other violent crime, "Minority Report" ability is nothing but fiction. Preemptive prosecutions, roundups for indefinite detention, preemptive drone strikes and preemptive wars are essentially characterized by lack of adequate factual justification.
No one should be surprised that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. None of the hundreds of immigrants detained after 9/11 were ever connected to terrorism; a large percentage of those imprisoned at Guantanamo (for whom bounties were paid) were later cleared, and researchers have found that only 2 percent of those killed by drone bombing are actually high-level Al-Qaida terrorists.
As a result, Iraq and other post-9/11 wars and war-crime abuses have only increased hatred of the United States, spawned new anti-American terrorist groups and served as a recruiting tool for existing ones. Recent polls show that more than 75 percent of Pakistanis view the United States as their enemy. Analysts estimate that during three years of drone bombing in Yemen, the Al-Qaida-inspired group there has grown from about 200 to more than 1,000.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
