Last Christmas, my brother gave me the Onion’s "Our Dumb Century" calendar — with fake 20th-century historical headlines such as KENNEDY AT BERLIN WALL: ICH BIN EIN IVY-LEAGUE PLAYBOY MILLIONAIRE. But it’s a gift that has been as startling as it has been amusing. On October 30, for instance, I tore off the previous day to find the headline: CNN DEPLOYS TROOPS TO IRAQ. It was more eerie than funny.

Another Bush in the White House contemplating another war in Iraq is a recycling bonanza. Pull out your copy of the Geto Boys’ 1992 We Can’t Be Stopped and cue up "Fuck a War." Yes, Bushwick Bill’s politics can get a bit bizarre at times ("You’re lucky that I ain’t the president/’Cause I’d push the fuckin’ button get it over with"). But when Bushwick raps that "I ain’t gettin’ my legs shot off/While Bush’s old ass is on TV playin’ golf" and his cohort Willie D growls, "I ain’t goin’ to war for a shit-talkin’ president," a decade closes to the present day with fearsome velocity.

But recycling is easy. Too easy when it comes to sorting out the impending war with Iraq. And Bush’s new war poses difficult questions for its opponents. They are questions that resist the recycling of the antiwar slogan "No Blood for Oil" used during Gulf War I. Simple intellectual honesty compels Gulf War II opponents to admit that the last two uses of American power before 9/11 (Bosnia and Kosovo) had a "humanitarian" rationale. By this yardstick, the case for attacking Iraq is equally strong. Intellectual honesty also requires an admission that sanctions have not worked. As happened in Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, sanctions have only strengthened Saddam Hussein while enslaving his populace in grinding and miserable poverty.

These are difficult admissions, yet they do not preclude a strong and principled opposition to a new war with Iraq — and particularly now. In fact, the best case against this war can be found in the radical recycling of those who are stumping most actively for the conflict. If the "humanitarian" case for war against Iraq is strong, one must remember that this is an administration that actively campaigned not only against such interventions, but also against the investment of US troops to ensure the peace wrought by those interventions. The Bush White House’s recycling of Clintonian humanitarian military intervention is morally bankrupt. The public must hold the current administration accountable for this switch.

Another radical recycling by proponents of a new Iraq war is found in our opponent. In a post-9/11 landscape dominated by concerns about national security and self-defense, singling out Saddam simply doesn’t pass the sniff test. One can argue with the tactics employed, but the war to extirpate Al Qaeda is a necessity. The United States didn’t choose bin Laden as an opponent; he and his gang impressed themselves upon us.

Yet those who clamor for war have chosen Saddam. Why? In the ruthless logic of post-9/11 US homeland defense, we have a better pretext for declarations of war against North Korea and Pakistan (or at least the latter country’s "lawless" western provinces). Saddam is a soft target. He’s a prefab object of hate. Picking this particular fight with him — right here, right now — is a cynical recycling project.

But the strongest argument against the war is contained in that simple question: "Why?" Why Saddam? Why now? The answer is that those who are pushing hardest for war — Vice-President Dick Cheney, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, professional foreign-policy agitator Richard Perle — are busily recycling Leon Trotsky’s much-abused notion of "permanent revolution." Like Trotsky, they want to use violence to tear up the existing order and redraw the world according to their own ideals. In their minds, they’re already past Iraq and on to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The permanent war sought by these radical Bush-administration hawks is a vulgar and dangerous political romanticism doomed to failure. It seeks out soft targets to demolish rather than engaging in the hard work of building nations, exporting democracy, and extending security. It eschews patient diplomacy that reinforces American values for clamorous rhetoric that undermines it across the globe.

Set against a backdrop of the Bush administration’s declaration of a permanent war on civil liberties — a furious assault of wiretaps and government secrecy and detention without judicial review — the permanent war proposed by these radicals is downright terrifying.

The new Iraq war is where the radical lie of reshaping the world for its own good with violence begins. And there’s no better place to try and stop this recycling project before it gains any more terrible momentum.

Back to the Thoughts on going to war index.