Demosophia

Andrew's Question

Clark/Kerry Case

Excerpt:

The question for Clark and Kerry is therefore: where do you disagree with Blair? If Blair came to the conclusion that there was no way that the French were prepared to sign on to serious enforcement of 1441, why does Clark think otherwise? Is he simply saying that he would have had superior diplomatic skills and talked Chirac around? Superior to Blair's and Powell's? I think history will judge that there was no way on earth that France would ever have acceded to serious enforcement of 1441 by Western arms, under any circumstances. If that's true, would Clark and Kerry have acceded to Paris and called the war off? If so, they should say so. But it would have been a huge blow to American credibility, deterrence and the war on terror. And since they favored the process whereby the French were given a veto, what exactly did the Bush administration do wrong? I wish I knew.

Here's a suggestion. Suppose we had simply insisted, loudly and embarassingly, in the strict observance of 1441 regarding the U2 overflights? Blix had established the preposterous situation, acceding to the request of the Iraqis, that all overflights be announced ahead of time, and that there only be one U2 in the air at a time. Suppose we had insisted on a flexible schedule, no prior warning, and multiple flights? The other members of the security council would then either have blocked us publicly, revealing that they had no intention of actually holding to the spirit of 1441, or they'd have allowed such a schedule of U2 flights. The strategy would have required enormous courage on the part of the U2 pilots, because they'd surely have been shot down sooner or later, but at least it would have been Saddam who commited a blatant act of war, and the French would have been hard pressed to ignore the implications. I can't see that we even attempted such a gambit, even though it was perfectly obvious that we had such an option available. It's hard to argue that the absence of such a ploy was anything other than a glaring mistake.

Not that Clark has even indicated he preceived such a possibility, and he certainly never raised it at the time.

Addendum: Not that anyone has pointed it out, but the only reason I can think of for not at least trying the spyplane gambit would be if Saddam weren't capable of shooting down such a plane. And that's not really a reason for not doing it. It's just a possible reason why it might not have worked as a Saddam-supplied justification for the war.

Posted by Demosophist at September 24, 2003 11:10 AM | TrackBack