September 11, 2002

NELSON MANDELA WAS right when he said that attacking Iraq would be "a disaster." A U.S. invasion of Iraq would risk the lives of U.S. military personnel and inevitably kill thousands of Iraqi civilians. Such an attack would violate international law and the United Nations Charter and isolate us from our friends and allies around the world. An invasion would prevent the future return of U.N. arms inspectors and would cost billions of dollars urgently needed at home. And at the end of the day, an invasion would not ensure stability, let alone democracy, in Iraq or the rest of the volatile Middle East region and would put American civilians at greater risk of hatred and perhaps terrorist attacks than they are today.

It is now clear that (despite intensive investigative efforts) there is simply no evidence of any Iraqi involvement in the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The most popular theory, of a Prague-based collaboration between one of the Sept. 11 terrorists and an Iraqi official, has now collapsed.

We are told that we must go to war preemptively against Iraq because Baghdad might, some time in the future, succeed in crafting a dangerous weapon and might, some time in the future, give that weapon to some unknown terrorist group – maybe to Osama bin Laden – who might, some time in the future, use that weapon against the United States. The problem with this analysis, aside from the fact that preemptive strikes are simply illegal under international law, is that it ignores the widely known historic antagonism between Iraq and bin Laden.

While estimates of casualties among U.S. service personnel are not public, we can be certain they will be much higher than in the current war in Afghanistan. We do know, from Pentagon estimates of two years ago, the likely death toll among Iraqi civilians: about 10,000 Iraqi civilians would be killed. And the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as water, electrical, and communications equipment would lead to tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands more civilian deaths, particularly among children, the aged, and others in the most vulnerable sectors.

The most recent leaked military plan for invading Iraq, the so-called inside-out plan, based on a relatively small contingent of U.S. ground troops with heavy reliance on air strikes, would focus first and primarily on Baghdad. The Iraqi capital is described as being ringed with Saddam Hussein's crack troops and studded with antiaircraft batteries. What is never mentioned in the report is the inconvenient fact that Baghdad is also a crowded city of four to five million people; a heavy air bombardment would cause the equivalent human catastrophe of a heavy air bombardment of Los Angeles.

International law does not allow for preemptive military strikes, except in the case of preventing an immediate attack. We simply do not have the right – no country does – to launch a war against another country that has not attacked us. If the Pentagon had been able to scramble a jet to take down the second plane flying into the World Trade Center last September, that would have been a legal use of preemptive self-defense. An attack on Iraq – which does not have the capacity, and has not for a decade or more shown any specific intention or plan or effort, to attack the United States – violates international law and the U.N. Charter.

There is no democratic opposition ready to take over. Far more likely than the creation of an indigenous, popularly supported democratic Iraqi government would be the replacement of the current regime with one virtually indistinguishable from it except for the man at the top.