By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
“I’m not an advocate for Saddam Hussein,” announced Rep. Jim McDermott, as he laid out the reasons he believes the U.S. should not send its army into Iraq.
McDermott said to the standing-room-only crowd at Temple Beth Am in Seattle’s Northend, “I think he’s a brutal dictator, he has a terrible record. There’s all kinds of reasons why it would be better for everybody if he were not in the leadership of that country.”
About 250 people — most of them McDermott supporters — came to the
town-hall-style meeting organized by the congregation’s Social Action Committee on Sunday morning, Dec. 8. The audience greeted the popular Democratic congressman with a standing ovation when he was introduced.
He went on to say that the question of whether the U.S. should take military action to force regime change, as Pres. Bush has said is the policy of his government, “is a much more complicated question than that.”
“If we say, ‘We are the United States; we’re the most powerful country in the world, if we don’t like you we’re going to take you out,’ that’s a change in policy that says the United States can take out whoever they want,” McDermott said. “If you say you’re going to be the leader of the world — and we say we are — then we have to think about the precedent that we set when we take an action.”
At its heart, McDermott said his disagreement was centered on the strategic force doctrine that the Bush Administration made public last September. The Bush Doctrine that the United States will be dominant, and the idea of unilateral action buried in it, said McDermott, “basically lays the groundwork for what we’re doing in Iraq and everywhere else.”
“Where do we stand,” he asked, “when the Indians come to us and say, ‘Look we’re so tired of what the Pakistanis are doing in Kashmir, we’re going to invade Pakistan’? What are we going to say? Where do you get the moral authority to say to the Indians, ‘You can’t invade Pakistan?’”
As for the controversy around his trip to Iraq, McDermott said the message he delivered to the Iraqis was to accept the inspections program as the only way to avoid a war. He said that as a physician he wanted to see how much of the country’s public health and sanitation infrastructure had been rebuilt since the Gulf War ended.
“In 1991,” he said, “we took out the water, the sewer, the electric, the telephone; we bombed the pumping stations for the sewage system. There was standing sewage in the streets. They were pumping raw sewage into the Tigris River.” Most of the water and sewage systems remain in shambles, he said.
McDermott did not deny that while he was in Iraq he said Pres. Bush would lie to the American people, but he said the televised remarks came in response to a reporter’s question. He noted that he had said the same thing weeks earlier in front of one of the House office buildings, in front of “30 television cameras and more than 100 press, including people from all over the world.”
“Eighteen or 19 of us went out there and I said ‘I believe the President will lie to take us into war. He’s so intent on taking us into a war that he’ll say anything to get us into it.’ You never heard about it. It was like I never said it.”
McDermott then drew a distinction between “pre-emptive” and “preventative” military strikes.
“If the Canadians were massed on our borders, about to invade Buffalo, New York, you would say it would be reasonable for the United States to attack first. That’s a preemptive attack.
“But what we’re talking about here is not preemptive. We’re talking about a preventative attack: ‘we know that you want us and one of these days you’re going to come after us, so we’re not even going to let you think about it. We’re going to put you out right now,’” he said. “When you take that position, you better have a very good reason for doing it.”
“This weapons of mass destruction question is a very interesting one,” he said. “The likelihood of Saddam Hussein firing one missile into the United States is about as close to zero as you could have. We’re using it as a pretext. It is no threat to us,” said McDermott. “If we’re talking about people who are a threat to us, if we’re talking about one country that had done nothing to us and had a rotten leader, and another country that had sent 20 or 25 terrorists into our country and had rotten leaders, which one would you go after? Ask yourself: Why is Saudi Arabia not there?”
McDermott instead suggested that control of the oil resources in Iraq, and the potential routes for oil from across the Caspian Sea in the new republics that broke away from the Soviet Union were the real reasons for America’s desire to install a friendly government in Baghdad.
Toward the end of his talk, the congressman called for a crash program to develop energy alternatives to the U.S.‘s dependency on imported oil.
McDermott stayed to answer questioned for nearly two more hours, touching on a variety of subjects from the prospects for a Presidential candidate who would openly stand against a war with Iraq to how grassroots actions could be organized to pressure the government. Yet he dodged the few questions that came up about the role of other Middle-Eastern states or the potential threats to Israel.