Tom:
If Iraq tried to justify war with Iran or Syria with a similar laundry list of depredations, would you take it seriously? Wouldn't you point out that Iraq is responsible for things as bad or worse, and is therefore utterly unlikely to be motivated by repugnance for war crimes? Wouldn’t you refuse, at that point, even considering throwing in support for Iraq’s war effort on the grounds that it has failed to candidly make any case for mass destruction, before reaching the equally compelling question of whether Iraq is likely to provide a better alternative?
If your response is something like, but Iraq is a totalitarian dungeon and the U.S. is a free and open society, I agree, but so what? When it comes to how these two countries treat foreign states, the US has a far greater record of aggressive military intervention and support for repressive regimes around the globe. It used military force abroad more than 50 times in the 20th century (besides the major wars). See, e.g.,
http://216.239.57.100/custom?q=cache...n&ie=UTF-8 The US supported dictatorships and repressive governments to the detriment of democratic forces in virtually every country in Latin America, as well as dozens more on other continents. See, e.g.,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US...y_Parenti.html
I think you will agree that our record of doing this does not prove that the U.S. is an intolerable threat to the world or justify the use of preemptive military force against the U.S.
If you further contend that the U.S. is committed to democratizing and liberating Iraq for the benefit of Iraqis, then let’s see the evidence instead assumptions that whatever we do can’t be much worse. What safeguards exist to prevent the US from supporting an autocratic Iraqi regime that murders and tortures Kurds and Islamic fundamentalists, that privitizes oil resources for the benefit of foreign corporations and an inner circle of cronies, or generally that the US will let Iraq to be Iraq instead of imposing its own will to further U.S. interests? They don’t exist.
The crimes you cite (and they are indeed serious) are similar to those fomented with U.S. support by Turkey, Indonesia and Israel, and actually pale by comparison to the horrific crimes of US-supported Guatemala (via Israel) and El Salvador (openly and directly). Iraq and Turkey both murder and imprison Kurds for the crime of wanting independence, yet we condemn Iraq while giving Turkey lethal aid. Your list of Iraqi crimes is not problematic because of the hypocrisy, but because it is utterly irrelevant to the discussion of whether the U.S. can justify going to war with Iraq. The only purpose it can serve is to provide a false moral justification to wage war for unrelated reasons.
"I can envision the responses now, the US has supported dictators in the past...."
I'm sick of that phrase. Although every fact is "in the past," apologists for US policy constantly invoke it to subtly suggest that its all over now, that before we might have been bad -- "mistakes were made" -- but we are at the dawn of a new era, etc. (One never finds the same phrase used to describe what Iraq did 20 years ago).
U.S. support for aggression, torture and terror is part of a pattern, not an aberration from a norm. It resulted from the interplay of particular institutions, including a means of getting the American public to tolerate them. Those institutions remain unchanged and support for US crimes "in the past" is not even acknowledged by US policy makers. So no, not in the past, right now, this very second: the US is making no efforts to have clients like Morocco comply with solemn obligations of UN resolutions and international law, the US is giving material assistance to those that imprison and torture political dissidents in Egypt and Turkey, the US is supporting state terror in the West Bank. The US itself was found guilty in the World Court of “unlawful military force” against Nicaragua, and remains to this day unwilling to acknowledge the verdict.
"...and whatever other obfuscation that directs attention from the issue at hand i.e. Saddam Hussein being in possession of weapons of mass destruction, his violations of UN resolutions, and his proclivity to provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists organizations thus participating in state sponsored terrorism."
If these are the issues "at hand," why did you being your post with a laundry list of unrelated bad things Iraq has done "in the past?" If US support for dictators and state terror obfuscates the issues of Iraq's WMD, violating UN resolutions and support for terrorism, then why does the list of other bad things Iraq has done not amount to the same?