The Minds of Children

Wednesday, September 22 2004

Back in 1984, I managed to notice national politics for the first time. Since I was nine years old back then, there wasn't much I could do about it but I noticed it. It was Reagan's re-election campaign and a rough time for those young children who already identified with the Democratic Party. Since I believed that all the smart people knew Democrats were better, Mondale would win easily.

Even on Election Night, I thought I saw positive things. Reagan was only winning by ten percent in some states. I hadn't learned about the significance of 60% and how rare it really was. In case you don't realize it, there's a truism about politics that says 40% of the people will vote for each party even if the candidate is the worst ever. It took me years to figure out badly Mondale got creamed.

There are some things I can laugh at now from those days. When I was nine years old, I was fond of weapons and other things that went boom. In theory, I wanted someone to blow up the Soviet Union but I managed to believe that Mondale was the one to do it. For years after that, I still agreed with Reagan's foreign policy rhetoric. Luckily, I grew up and figured out that Americans get killed in wars along with the bad guys. Therefore, we needed to choose our wars very carefully.

Today, I remain a bit of an interventionist. After all, my biggest concern about the invasion of Iraq was that it wasn't being taken seriously enough. How was invading Iraq going to be the best use of our nation's strength? How were we supposed to believe that someone as cynical as Bush would do a good job of leading us when he had such a record of cynicism and corruption? Back then, I was willing to believe that a properly run invasion and occupation of Iraq would improve the world. My objections were on the grounds that it was being done at the wrong time by the wrong people.

The very problems in Iraq today are the same ones predicted by liberals before the war. The right wing is throwing out criticisms about how liberals don't have answers to these problems. Guess what. That's why we opposed the invasion in the first place! Some liberals were so desperate to believe that Bush had good motives that they made up justifications for him.

No one really seems to know why the invasion took place. It wasn't to make lives better for Iraquis. Bush even knows better than to make that claim most of the time. It couldn't have been to disarm Saddam because Bush had intelligence showing that most of the WMD fears were exaggerated. The intelligence wasn't all that bad until Bush decided to ignore all the details.

The actual intelligence given to Bush was something like the following. There was a chance that Saddam had some stockpiles of chemical and/or biological weapons. These potential weapons were of a sort that is ineffective on the modern battlefield and subject to a limited shelf life. These potential weapons were of a sort unlikely to inflict mass casualties even on the least prepared citizens.

Yes, I admitted to not having a specific source to quote in the last paragraph but it is all common knowledge. Sarin gas was used in a terrorist attack on Japanese subways some time ago. The lack of sunlight and relatively poor air circulation made this seem like an ideal target. Nonetheless, the attack failed to inflict mass casualties.

Since the attack on Iraq, there have been a number of successful mass casualty attacks using conventional weapons. The Madrid train bombing sticks out as a strong example. Al Qaeda killed large numbers of people using conventional explosives in a similar environment. More importantly, the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by conventional means. Were we accusing Saddam of stockpiling airliners?

Before anyone accuses me of liking Saddam, let me remind you that I don't give a rat's ass about him. While I oppose the death penalty in principle, I won't shed any tears if he is strung up. This wasn't about Saddam to those who opposed the war. As long as he stayed in his borders and didn't develop nuclear weapons, he was just another dictator. They are all horrible murderers who would be replaced in a perfect world.

This is not a perfect world and everyone but the Bush administration seems to know that. In this world, deposing one dictator can lead to the installation of another even if strong precautions are taken. Those precautions were not taken so now Iraq is in chaos. Compared to chaos, a dictatorship can seem pretty pleasant. Therefore, the most positive likely outcome in Iraq is a new dictatorship. The worst is a civil war that could spread to the rest of the region. Wasn't preventing a wave of violence in the region supposed to be a justification for invading in the first place?

So, maybe we should get back to the third paragraph. When I was eight or nine, I thought things that made big explosions were neat. In fact, I do still like fireworks and historical footage. Maybe some people just can't figure out the difference between those things and explosions that kill people. From the minds of children, we can get explanations of what Bush might have been thinking.