Saddam's Toaster

In the days leading up to Thursday's overwhelming House vote to let the President attack Iraq, consultant Bob Shrum and pollster Stanley Greenberg were sending a memo to Democratic candidates explaining how to handle the vote without getting burned. The stakes were high. Elections are three weeks off, and the public loves the President's position on this one. If the U.S. has to go it alone against Saddam Hussein, the country will be in favor, by 46 percent to 29, according to a Harris poll. With an okay from the UN Security Council, support for the operation rises to 91-2.

Shrum and Greenberg proposed to get their guys out of a pickle by having them take both sides of the Iraq issue. Peaceniks could avoid looking soft on Saddam by burying their objections beneath assurances of "support for the war on terrorism in general." But gung-ho warriors should also hedge their bets, since, according to Greenberg's polling, "the down-the-line supporter of the President in Iraq actually runs significantly weaker than the proponent with reservations."

Democrats followed this strategy to a T. Florida Sen. Bob Graham said he backed the resolution, but claimed to worry about "the sleepers among us," and wanted more focus on Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry backed the resolution too, but using the French rationale: An invasion could be undertaken only to neutralize Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, not to remove Saddam himself. (Although if Saddam should?whoopsy-daisy!?get removed by accident, that would be ideal.) Even Nancy Pelosi of California, the loudest of House doves, explained that she was arguing for inaction only because it was the vigilant thing to do. "The war we are in now is a war on terrorism..." she said. "Going into Iraq now...poses a risk to the war on terrorism. It will unravel the coalition. It will make Arab countries that are friendly to our cause now shaky. They won't be able to give us the cooperation."

Clearly, the Shrum-Greenberg argument works splendidly for supporters of the war. But Pelosi's argument?that we ought to handle Al Qaeda before we take on Iraq?is so manifestly illogical that one fears she will be laughed off the hustings. First off, any journalist who has reported from Iraq can tell you that it's wrong to speak of "Arab countries that are friendly to our cause." They despise our cause. But they fear our military might, and need our money. As The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg noted recently on Slate, and as Bernard Lewis has noted nonstop for the past year, exerting force in the Arab world enhances one's prestige. A credible attack on Iraq makes it more, not less, likely that we'll receive cooperation in our war on terror.

But more importantly, with Saddam in power, the war against terrorism will eventually become impossible to wage. On more than one occasion in the past couple of decades, Saddam has been months away from getting a nuclear weapon, and his rocket program is sufficiently advanced that he could be only a few years away from being able to build intercontinental ballistic missiles. That is assuming he doesn't have nukes already. Or ICBMs from Russia. Now, imagine if, after the next Sept. 11, Al Qaeda retreats not to Stone Age Afghanistan but to Atomic Age Iraq.

The peaceniks have a pat answer to this: Oh, bin Laden and Saddam would never join forces, because the former is religious and the latter is secular. Gosh. In fighting us, the atheistic Soviet Union didn't seem to have much trouble backing radical Catholic front groups in Brazil. Nor did we seem to mind backing the mujahideen in Afghanistan. But maybe it's just that bin Laden and Saddam are nicer people than we were.

But the problem goes deeper than that. Those who say we can simply deter Saddam even if he gets nuclear weapons assume he is, like Stalin, sane enough to be deterrable. Even if they're right (and I don't think they are), there's something else that comes with the Stalin role?proprietorship over all the countries in your "sphere of influence." So Saddam will march into Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait, and control most of the world's oil. At that point, Al Qaeda turns into a detail?at best the pestering wing of a larger totalitarian menace.

And that's why the President, too, is barking up the wrong tree by hinting at links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne made this point well last week. Like everyone of every political persuasion, I agree with Dionne exactly 50 percent of the time. His latest column on Iraq was one of those occasions. "The administration has fed doubts by constantly shifting its rationale for war," Dionne wrote. "[I]f Hussein's weapons are as dangerous as the administration says, Bush shouldn't need an al Qaeda link to justify war. One clear rationale for war feeds public confidence that the war is necessary. Many rationales for war feed the public's anxiety that this is a policy in search of justification."

The President got his resolution, but probably not due to his speech in Cincinnati last week. Larding on the threat of "unmanned aerial vehicles" flying toaster-sized nukes to the United States actually weakens his case. So do attempts to prove an Al Qaeda link on a technicality?such as that one guy received medical treatment there in recent months.

So the attack on Iraq has nothing to do with whether Saddam was involved in Sept. 11. But if, after invading, we open up some filing cabinet in some government office and discover he was involved, I won't exactly fall out of my chair.

Hope-a-Dope

So now that the resolutions have passed, Democrats get to talk about their gimme-more-money agenda. They're doing it already. In Iowa, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is running a lachrymose ad for Tom Harkin that seeks to link his challenger Greg Ganske to Enron. A woman narrates: "When Enron collapsed, all the years of hard work that my dad put in before he died were lost. Everything he'd left my mom was gone."

Sorry...can we ask why Mom bet Dad's whole pile on a fly-by-night energy company? This may be a sad story, but the Democrats can hardly claim that what was lost is "all the years of hard work that my dad put in." (If that was their worry, wouldn't they have been more sympathetic to efforts to eliminate the estate tax?) No?what was lost in the recent spate of bankruptcies and corporate corruption scandals was the divine right of 50-percent returns on investment, which rewarded novice investors with the kind of profits that used to be reserved for people who'd actually invented something.

It is not certain the Democrats will be able to win with this economic message, because they refuse to attack the heart and soul of the Bush Economic Plan: his two rounds of tax cuts. Perhaps the Democrats are watching polls. Perhaps they share the fear, widespread among economists, that the country is in danger of Japanese-style deflation?and that the deficits and weakened dollar that will result from Bush's Keynesian cuts are what the economy needs. But Republicans should, by rights, take a pasting this year. Not because they are responsible for a cyclical economic downturn but because they campaigned last time out on the idea of privatizing Social Security. Under current market conditions, this makes them look frivolous, wacky and as complacent as the Enron lady in the Iowa ad.

Dan Allen of the National Republican Senatorial Committee complains that Democratic ads keep reminding voters of this little misstep. "They want to demonize [our plan] with one word: privatization," he moans. Well, sorry, Dan. In this context, "privatization" is the mot juste, and Republicans are going to have to do better than merely accuse the Democrats of "scare tactics" and "trying to frighten voters." The proper response to scare tactics is to show people why they shouldn't be scared.

Whenever I hear whiners like Dan Allen, I'm reminded of the mantra of Hubert Humphrey, late in the 1968 campaign, when Richard Nixon began to pull ahead of him by addressing Americans' insecurities about crime. "You can't vote your fears," Humphrey would howl at an outdoor rally, with a simpering moue and several melodramatic shakes of the head. "You gotta vote your hopes!" Clips of him saying this are always spliced into documentary films about the Nixon presidency.

Humphrey's words are supposed to remind us that, instead of a Devious Eavesdropper, we could have had a Happy Warrior. To my mind, they show no such thing. Gotta vote your hopes! The sentiment is despicable. The only proper response of self-respecting citizens of a democratic republic is, "My vote is my own. I don't 'gotta' vote shit."