Over at Common Fantasies, Jeremy Cahill has an article that describes the history of Don Rumsfeld's diplomacy with Saddam and Iraq almost twenty years ago, during the Iran-Iraq war.

I'm not sure what the point of his article is. Is he saying that Rumsfeld can't be trusted to solve the problem now? If all he's saying is that we made foreign policy mistakes back then, and weren't sufficiently concerned about Iraq's chemical weapons at the time, I suspect that Mr. Rumsfeld would agree, looking back with twenty-twenty hindsight. But I don't know what kind of present policy conclusions we're supposed to draw from this.

In 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was in a position to draw the world?s attention to Saddam?s chemical threat. He was in Baghdad as the UN concluded that chemical weapons had been used against Iran. He was armed with a fresh communication from the State Department that it had ?available evidence? Iraq was using chemical weapons. But Rumsfeld said nothing.

Washington now speaks of Saddam?s threat and the consequences of a failure to act. Despite the fact that the administration has failed to provide even a shred of concrete proof that Iraq has links to Al Qaeda or has resumed production of chemical or biological agents, Rumsfeld insists that ?the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.?

And like all other anti-war types, Mr. Cahill makes the mistake (I'll be generous and assume that he's not just being disingenuous) of thinking that there have to be links to Al Qaeda to justify preemptive action. Of course, there are links to Al Qaeda, because the White House is now confirming the meeting between the Iraqis and Atta in Prague (which makes me think that we're getting ready to initiate something significant). But anyway, it's not necessary.

Last September 11, we faced the reality that oceans no longer protect us from hostile foreign powers. If we are threatened (and there's no reason to think that Saddam wouldn't mind slipping a nuke to someone to detonate it on American soil, if he had one), then we will deal with the threat.

Den Beste has an excellent post on just this subject today.

I just finished Den Beste's insightful post. I t occurs to me that his analysis also explains why Israel is such an anathama to the arab world. They, too are a highly visible and visibly successful enclave of "infidels." They, too wear blue jeans, listen to rock music and, most of all, allow women to be human beings - they even serve in the Israeli armed forces!

What Mr. Scahill failed to address was the regional situation then. Iran was considered the greater threat and the Iraq-Iran War kept them from promoting Islamic revolution to other nations.

Mr. Cahill's point, I believe, is that Donald Rumfeld is himself a ruthless man who doesn't care at all whether innocent people are killed with weapons of mass destruction, just so long as the guy doing the killing is on our side. (As Saddam was in the 1980's.) Therefore he is both monstrously immoral, a liar and a hypocrite who will do anything, so probably no, I don't think he should be trusted to "solve" the problem now.

Less on the unfortunate Mr. Rumsfeld and more on decades of U.S. foreign policy, I think the larger point is that "problems" such as Saddam Hussein occur largely because of our support for those very same people - as we now support brutal and repressive dictators in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and several former Soviet Republics ending the word "stan." Which one of those will be the next Saddam Hussein.

- Gordon Clark