Peace's longshot odds make war a safer bet

Taufiq Rahim, in his article In This War Debate, No Side Can Claim Moral Clarity (April 2), concludes his article with imagery of a Las Vegas roll of the dice. He says, "So place your bets, but be prepared to deal with the ramifications of your actions and words. Most importantly, always ensure that everything was and is done to prevent war." What Taufiq does not understand is that his bet is a risky wager, and though it has the potential of a big return, it has the greater possibility of complete loss of chips.

In hoping to gain the starry-eyed jackpot return, i.e. world peace without any intervention or sacrifice, Taufiq places a wager with high potential return but extremely low odds. Taufiq's wager has such poor odds because his bet hedges on the prospect of an Iraqi peaceful regime change occurring before Iraq injures us. One need only look at Iraq's history of dealing with political dissenters to realize the non-viability of such regime change, and the detailed U.S. and U.N. accounts of Iraqi accrual of WMD to realize the viability of potential injury towards us. Taufiq's wager hedges on the prospect of the nonviable, not the viable - something all too reminding of the high risk/high-yield Las Vegas bet.

Taufiq uses the examples of South Africa and Soviet Russia to attempt to illustrate his point of the possibility of non-interventionist regime change in Iraq. Let's first examine the case of South Africa. Taufiq rightly points out that South Africa under apartheid was a nuclear power that, although threatening, still experienced a peaceful regime change, not a belligerent one emanating from outside intervention. The comparison though between the regime change in South African apartheid with that of Iraq unfortunately holds no water. South Africa under apartheid, though a horrid state, did not commit atrocities against political dissenters nearly as bad as does Iraq which is what made the Mendelian revolution possible. If one recalls recent history, Mandela and other political dissenters were imprisoned, not tortured and then killed.

Taufiq's wager fails to account for the fact that a mere letter expressing political dissention under the Ba'athist regime gets one killed, making regime change nonviable without intervention — or maybe it accepts the low odds in hope of the jackpot return. When even a calculated U.S. military airstrike against the leadership fails to achieve its end, (witnessed in the early days of the conflict) we see the recalcitrant nature of the regime — it is one that is there to stay unless intervention ensues.

Taufiq, in his article, also "brings us" to the bad regimes of Soviet Russia, Assad's Syria, Jong-Il's North Korea. I would bring Taufiq back to the regime of Soviet Russia and examine it a little closer. Was peaceful regime change in the Soviet Union a result of U.S. nonintervention per se, or was it more accurately a result of a nuclear stalemate? Perhaps Taufiq would prefer that Iraq develop nuclear weapons so that a similar stalemate comes about, one which would, like in the Cold War, result in the same "non-interventionist" policy which is the basis for Taufiq's wager.

Let us recount the evening of Saturday, 27 Oct. 1962. On this clear-skied night, the resolution of the Cold War crisis — war or peace — appeared to hang in the balance. If not for Krushchev's diplomatic willingness to cut a deal with Kennedy concerning the removal of missiles from Turkey, America would have experienced nuclear winter. But would the regime leaders like Assad and Hussein that Taufiq wants us to leave alone (though he concedes their immorality) act with the same political savvy as did Krushchev? This is a wager that I am not willing to take, though it is one that Taufiq is.

You see, Taufiq places his bets on an unrealistic view of the International Community. These bets are based on non-comparable examples of South African and Sovieth Russian peaceful regime change. In doing so, he simultaneously adopts a dangerous form of appeasement, something which Taufiq could have learned from any World War II textbook chapter, is just bad policy.

Now here's my wager. Intervene when the risk against the security of your nation outweighs the chance of security through nonintervention. It's a bet that has a slightly smaller payoff, but with much greater odds. You see, in my wager, we will not win the jackpot of continued world peace without any bloodshed that Taufiq has a miniscule chance of achieving with his wager. But in my wager we have great odds of achieving something almost as good — self-preservation of free nations. Subjective hegemonic whim for regime change is not the basis of this wager. Mill, in his essay Nonintervention shows quite well why this can't be a basis for policy. But what another political philosopher, Hobbes, taught us is that a government exists to protect the very preservation of its people. And it is because of this that we musn't allow our government, or any free powerful governments, to use Taufiq's high risk Las Vegas wager in foreign policy — this wager will ultimately leave the people of the free world with no chips at all. Steven Kamara is a politics major from Manhasset Hills, N.Y