The old white guys are at it again. Last week, American and British aircraft conducted operations against command and control sites in Iraq. Operations and command and control are euphemisms for lethal attacks against living persons in those sites. Firing another salvo against the evil people of Iraq isn't going curb Saddam Hussein's megalomania. Solving problems with expensive, sophisticated hardware is the American way, but it doesn't seem to be working in this case. Perhaps another approach is needed. Let's wait him out instead, and leave the pyrotechnics for a real war, like that 1991 drive-by shooting in the desert.
Isolating a regime like Hussein's works. It takes time, it hinders commerce, but it works. Soviet Russia fell, taking its satellite governments with it, leaving the world a better place. We didn't attack Russia. We didn't send cruise missiles into Moscow's streets as we did in Baghdad, trusting our technology to work and expressing dismay and incredulity when the streaking weapons missed their mark. Patience and disciplined adherence to a far-sighted vision brought the Russian bear to heel.
North Korea is at the end of its extremist road. It could collapse any day now, and although that isn't in the plans of the South Korean government and its business community, the fact remains that North Korea teeters on the edge of bankruptcy and its people are starving. The decades old policy of containing the North Koreans, preventing the spread of their hard-core version of communism through isolation from the first world, has worked extremely well and we haven't shelled, bombed or sent rockets screaming into the empty avenues of Pyongyang.
Cuba waits for the death of Fidel before the end comes there. What have we lost by holding the line against this cold-war holdout so close to our shores? Nothing, except a few good cigars and a sunny place to gamble, and we've already got one of those, there's just no ocean nearby to cool a brow fevered at the tables. Cuba will fold and it will be because of our foreign policy, not because of the Bay of Pigs or by cratering it with 10,000-pound bombs anonymously dropped from 35,000 feet. It'll be only a few more years, maybe days, before we can reclaim those fantastic hotels and all those antique Chevys.
Systematically blockading their shores and borders, abandoning their merchants in the international marketplace and withdrawing diplomatic outposts have been effective measures in dealing with recalcitrant governments since WWII. We have used military force since then, but it mostly had no long-lasting effect, witness the debacle of the Vietnam conflict. The Korean War is an example where the policy of isolation didn't work, however. That act of aggression against a free people required a deliberate response from the United Nations. The mobilization of thousands of U.S. military personnel after the invasion of Kuwait was another response dictated by the actions of an outlaw regime, but those are signal exceptions. The fact that we were there because of the oil and not the aggression is beside the point. Let me quote Jesse Jackson to prove that: "If Kuwait was exporting bananas, we wouldn't be there."
Thousands of innocent people die because we isolate a government that preys on its neighbors. The citizens of pariah nations live in backward squalor because of the actions of dominant governments. Children suffer from the sins of their parents. Grandpa and grandma are left hungry and alone. Yes. These are true and horrible facts. This is the reality of modern international politics. Innocents suffer because crimes against humanity aren't tolerated. Why should Iraq be any different?
If we continue to bomb Iraq, hoping that our precision guided munitions actually go where they're aimed after they're launched from billion dollar aircraft lurking behind the horizon, then we must accept the fact that we are actively taking innocent lives. If we choose to enforce our beliefs in concert with our allies, then we as a nation must be willing to accept the guilt that comes with using the fist. If we're not willing, if we want what President Bush calls a "culture of life," then we need to lay off the technology and let the sanctions continue. We can't have it both ways. It would be simpler to let the sanctions already in place do what they are supposed to do, they've only been enforced for 10 years. For some, it may seem to be taking too long, since North Korea has been around for almost fifty years, Cuba as well. But, history teaches us that time and deprivation erode a country's will; sophisticated explosives used against the guiltless only strengthens it.