To return to the subject of Iraq . . .

General Zinni (USMC retired) is the former head of US Central Command in the Middle East. He served in Vietnam, commanded troops in the Gulf War, and was most recently the Bush administration's envoy to Israel and the Palestinians. No one could describe him as a dove, but he's not at all sanguine about the need to take action against Saddam Hussein at this particular time.

Diehard lefty though I am, I don't think the current situation with Iraq is necessarily about American imperialism. Yes, we're pigs for oil, but there are easier ways to get it. Sucking up to the Saudis has paid off handsomely for many years, and we're now kissing fruitful new bottoms in Russia. Iraq is no doubt part of the consumption calculus, but war for oil seems to me too simplistic. Instead of imperialism, I think what we might be talking about is American hegemony and its consequences. We are now the sole superpower. We're overwhelming, and we're everywhere. Even if we were entirely altruistic and benign--and we're clearly not--we'd still be the target of a good deal of festering resentment, some of it well-earned. We use a disproportionate amount of the world's resources while we unilaterally exempt ourselves from international treaties. We take an out of sight, out of mind approach to international problems, and then wonder when they rise up to bite us on the backside. If we could be graded as a nation on the Piaget scale of development, I think we'd be a two; we lack a sense of object permanence.

That said, while I'm cynical about our rosy cheeks and goodness, I'm not a pacifist. I can think of some situations in which might, even if it doesn't make right, at least encourages it. But I think that war should only be a last resort, after all other options are exhausted. And I mean truly exhausted . . . I want U.S. diplomats panting for breath and sweating blood before we start dropping bombs on anyone. The reason I oppose war in Iraq is because this administration has not shown that Saddam Hussein is the greatest threat now facing us.

Attempts to link Iraq to Al Qaeda have been feeble. They seem like desperate afterthoughts. Apart from the fact that both are headed by nasty characters and declared enemies of the United States, they have nothing in common. Perhaps they're capable of hooking up for some mutual advantage, but I don't see what that might be. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein despise one another. Saddam is just the sort of tin-pot secularist and one-time U.S. puppet that bin Laden is out to destroy. What's more, Saddam not only has but needs a return address. His power is geographically specific; without Iraq, there is no Dictator of Iraq. And I don't subscribe to the "Saddam is a madman" theory. He's homicidal, genocidal, and power-hungry, but I see no evidence that he's self-destructive. Deterrence worked with Stalin. Does anyone really believe that Saddam is scarier than Uncle Joe?

First things first. Let's use our military might to finish routing Al Qaeda, the people who actually attacked us. Let's broker some sort of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And let's stop throwing our weight around senselessly and begin fostering some international good will. We should speak more softly on the world stage; they already know we have a big stick.

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