William Franke – Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian

I hope that the strategy here is to accomplish what is necessary with the THREAT of war. So it has to SEEM imminent. However, I am pessimistic. I could not believe it the day bombs started dropping on Kabul–that was the date when we became the losers, not 9/11. And it doesn’t look like our attitude has changed fundamentally since then. That sort of conversion comes about only from deep, harrowing, prolonged suffering. Most of us have evidently not yet been touched nearly enough for that. We still act as if American lives count more than others–or are even the only ones that count. I can see the other side too. I do not think Bush is evil or stupid. It hurts me to see the crude, cynical views of our government coming from the left.

I admire the courage to stand up and say that the world will not tolerate tyranny. If only it were the world as a concerted whole saying that and not simply the greatest power trying to bully some of the others. I know that the world behaves like children and sometimes someone is called on to be the adult. I just fear that we are still in a tragic phase of history that we naively delude ourselves was left behind in the old world.

It looks to me like we are repeating the same old mistakes of attempting colonial domination (now called economic freedom and globalization), motivated by the same delusions of superiority, and will naturally provoke violent reactions and our own downfall. America can be powerful only where its presence is genuinely desired. Otherwise we will simply provoke others to muster their power against us. Our strength can only be in the consent of the governed (and the craving of the consumer), not in the unscrupulous force of the genuine tyrant, which we are not and do not have the will to be.

I hear people saying that this situation is hopeless and without any good alternative. But I see a possibility of a good outcome to it all. We are the ones who could bring it off. There are no good choices only if we stay frozen in our bellicose attitudes. All we have to do is to honor the united nations and the democratic will of the peoples of the world. We should welcome the resistance to our plans and turn over the authority to decide about using force and war to the UN.

What a relief it would be to have the world take responsibility for problems like Saddam Hussein. And the UN as a world authority could be effective and even use arms without having it be perceived as conquest by a superpower. If our army is needed then let the UN call for it and we will come in as heroes again, as in the world wars that are being recalled. But the policy we are following is causing us to be cast rather as the villain. Anything we try to do abroad on our own will and initiative now is bound to be resisted and fail. Even if we succeed militarily we become only less credible to the rest of the world as a force for peace. There are situations all over, like the Korean nuclear threat, that need to be dealt with immediately and probably with force. But if we make it OUR force then we ourselves become the number one threat.

I agree that peace is not a matter of doing nothing. Quite the contrary. It is a matter of constructing positive relations with our neighbors all around the world. What a brilliant gesture it would be if George W. Bush would now remit his authority to wage war to the UN. Everything would change immediately. That would be even more wilely and effective than Saddam Hussein’s challenging Bush to an open debate. And it would not let Saddam Hussein off the hook. Then all our threats would be seen to have served a necessary purpose in the interests of the whole world. Bush and Blair have been right all along to confront the threat Hussein poses. They have forced the world not to ignore it.

If we back off from our unilateralism now, the world would have the responsibility of disarming Hussein as all have agreed must be done. In one fell swoop it would deprive him of all his political capital, his one ground for legitimacy and popularity, which he knows how to exploit—standing up against and defying the USA. We would simply have to admit that this is not a matter of our “prevailing” but of our accepting the general will which is being clearly articulated on this issue.

Rather than declaiming that we will prevail, which other peoples are never going to accept without fighting us, we must accept and submit like everyone else to the common will of the world community. It would be possible, so possible, in precisely this instance because there is a consensus, even a universal consensus, that Saddam Hussein must be disarmed. This would be the precedent for dealing with North Korea and all sorts of other problems with a coercive authority that can be effective rather than counterproductive.