The current Danse Macabre preceding the second Gulf War would be amusing, in Saturday Night Live fashion, were it not so grim. This is a "we know that Saddam knows we know he knows we’re going to war but it’s just a matter of when" affair, composed of equal parts mock concern about the sensibilities of the rest of the world, preference that at least that part of it we like to call friendly will be on board, and anxiety over whether, having won the war, we’ll also win the peace. No one needs a primer on what’s wrong with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or why defanging it would be a beneficial act for humanity.

As always, the "antiwar movement" is a congeries, as in the last greatly disputed war, Vietnam. One faction can’t abide the prospect of the USA going to war for any reason: the Unabridged Pacifist Coterie. Another isn’t really antiwar, it’s anti-US involvement in any war we might win: the Jane Fonda Redivivus Cabal. A third is unique to this situation: the Arab Street Will Be Pissed Off Sodality, nowadays an auxiliary of the old State Department Arabists. A fourth faction is the one anxious to make life as miserable as possible for Israel, erroneously believing that our upcoming war against Iraq will be catnip for Israel. Harvard president Lawrence Summers is loath to say outright that if it walks like an anti-Semite, talks like an anti-Semite, and smells like an anti-Semite, it’s an anti-Semite, so I’ll say it for him: this faction speaks to Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. This faction hates Israel and the Jews and doesn’t want the US to do anything that might help either. In fact, our war against Iraq may well bring, initially, terrible destruction to Israel, but the Jew-haters don’t know that.

Finally, there’s the faction that thinks this would be the wrong war, certainly at the wrong time, maybe at any time. Its proponents make their case in today’s Phoenix. They err in assuming that a pre-emptive war is inherently un-American and likely to set us on the fast track to many such wars. They assume that attacking, conquering, and "regime changing" Iraq would be a brand-new war rather than the continuation, after an 11-year lull, of the first Gulf War. They assume also that since we don’t have authenticated photographs of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein lolling cozily in a hot tub setting Old Glory on fire, we can’t reasonably assume these bad actors act in concert.

But we can, and must. Islamist terrorism is hydra-headed; recently, most of it has operated along Osama-inspired lines, a brainchild of the Wahhabist belief that everyone must be an ultra-orthodox Muslim or be slaughtered. But a part of this generalized terrorism is its secularist Baathist tentacle, headquartered in Baghdad and with a satellite branch in Damascus. Nazi Germany managed to make common cause with Fascist Italy and to incorporate the Japanese into its Axis as "little Aryans." So, too, the only rhetorically Muslim Saddam Hussein and the Islamist fanatic Osama bin Laden are twin pillars in the Middle Eastern terrorist war on civilization. For both, the enemy of their enemy is their friend.

Forgotten also in the ritual condemnation of pre-emptive wars is that they are often supremely just. Two examples: in 1967, Israel, recognizing what was in store for it were it to wait for Egypt, which was massing troops in the Sinai to tighten the noose, struck first, urging the Jordanians not to get into it; Jordan, as usual, stupidly paid no heed and lost Judea, Samaria, and Old Jerusalem for its pains. And in 1981, as France, the world’s great model of lightning-quick surrender and 21st-century anti-Semitism, was assisting Iraq in building a nuclear reactor that could soon have been converted to weapons-making purposes, Israel struck and destroyed the facility. The whole world bellowed — although much of the civilized world was privately, quietly relieved — and today all but the "antiwar movement" is grateful for what Israel did.

Our upcoming "pre-emptive" war against Iraq will be criticized by much of the world, although a subset of the world secretly will be filled with joy. History will show that the US (and any nations that have the common sense to join us) rescued the world from those dreaded weapons of mass destruction. If the European Union is cranky about that, well, as they say in the EU salons, or at least in the French part of Brussels, tant pis.

Back to the Thoughts on going to war index.