Depriving All Saddams of the Bomb

This issue reviews the technical aspects of illicit nuclear bombs and how far Saddam might have been away from one. But as I have been saying for 18 years, the real safeguards against nuclear weapons are not technical; they are entirely political.

The eradication of violence, terrorism and war is not as abstract a dream as often imagined. It is an incontrovertible fact of history that never, never, has one democracy attacked another. Violence is bred by tyranny, both as justifiable defense by the op-pressed, and by the inevitable instability and lust for ever more power that is bred by unbridled coercion.

To the contrary, armaments in general, and nuclear weapons in particular, are an unwelcome burden for democracies. Mem-bers of the Western World such as Israel or South Africa would never choose to build nuclear weapons if that world were not abandoning them to the threats of savages who have decades to go before being able to handle democracy.

An effective foreign policy of peace with security would there-fore be based on unflinching support of democratic countries and resolute refusal to cooperate with tyrants, with no-nonsense ways of preventing their war machines from getting threateningly strong.

Unfortunately that is almost the opposite of the feeble and op-portunistic policy of the US and the West. By mid-January Bush was still teetering on the brink, offering Saddam peace for withdrawal from Kuwait, with his nascent nuclear and tested chemical weapons intact, and his 1-million man army bristling with modern weaponry, supplied by Soviet strategy and Western stupidity. At five to twelve, Neville Mitterand and Hans-Dietrich Chamberlain still tried to push the world over the brink; the growing threat of disaster was not averted by Western perspi-cacity, but by Saddam's pigheadedness. Bush is now tottering back to the brink by accepting a Soviet formulation requiring no more for peace than Saddam's definite commitment and time table to leave Kuwait.

Saddam is a tyrant whose military machine has become an in-tolerable threat to the West - including Israel, the only democracy in the area and a firm part of the West in spite of its socialism and theocracy. Therefore I believe the Gulf War is a just one, and that Bush deserves support whenever he blunders into the right decision.

That is not an overly frequent occurrence. US official policy is doing its utmost to bolster the arguments of the peace-at-any-price freaks. Bush claims to defend a small country against the forceful annexation by a lawless neighbor; yet in the case of the Baltic republics, he refuses to recognize their governments, elected for the first time since just such an annexation in 1940-thus following the policy not of Roosevelt, but of Ribbentropp. He is allied with Assad of Syria, indistinguishable from Saddam of Iraq in tyranny, atrocities or aggressiveness. He begs Israel to renounce its right to self-defense, lest the hand amputators and women enslavers of Saudi Arabia, God forbid, be rubbed the wrong way - as if the Saudi princelings were doing the US a favor by letting it defend their harems.

Nuclear proliferation, the spread of terrorism and the neces-sity to wage war have but one ultimate root: weakness and reluc-tance to oppose evil. The Middle East would now be awash with blood if the advice of the peace-at-any-pricers had been fol-lowed. Only the antiquated Patriot missile stood in the way of carnage in Tel-Aviv and Riyadh; and only the high-tech weapons now in use prevented a reckless tyrant from dominating a crucial part of the globe. Yet every single one of these weapons was dog-gedly opposed by defense dismantlers such as Rep. Pat Schroe-der (D-Colo.) and hundreds of others in similar positions of trust. SDI, the best home defense against Saddamy, was ridi-culed (each member of Congress was given an "80% effective" umbrella full of holes, remember?), and finally gutted by Con-gress on the eve of the Kuwait annexation. Development of hundreds of other weapons, including that of the Stealth bomb-er, was killed. And the cruise missile was to have 'been abolished in sham-treaties with the Soviets.

There would have been no bloodshed if strength had been used in time, and now the choice is a familiar one: less blood now, or more later. Yet the very peace-at-any-pricers whose policy led to this hard choice now try to demoralize the country with talk about body bags.

Yes, there will be body bags. And every one of them should be imprinted with "Courtesy of Patricia Schroeder and friends."