Published by Active Resistance to the Roots of War, a self-described antiwar advocacy group, War Plan Iraq argues against removing Saddam Hussein from power. It does so in six incongruous parts: pleas against war by pacifists who lost relatives in the September 11, 2001 attacks; a Chomsky screed equating U.S. foreign policy with terrorism; an unsubstantiated account claiming the Bush administration declined an opportunity to extradite Usama bin Ladin; a chronicle alleging the United States facilitated Iraqi rearmament following the 1991 cease-fire; photographs showing smiling Iraqi children; and a list entitled “ten reasons against war on Iraq,” which (oddly) does not appear until halfway through the book and devotes only a few pages to address each point.
Revisionist historians may appreciate some recurring themes that weave their way through War Plan Iraq: 1) The 1991 Kuwait war “demonstrated the futility of trying to disarm” Saddam through military force; 2) “There is a distinct lack of evidence that Iraq has played any significant role in international terrorism lately"; 3) “Iraq’s long-range missile program was entirely destroyed by December 1992" and fears of “Iraqi CW [chemical weapons] capability can be laid to rest"; 4) war against Iraq would have no strategic basis whatsoever but would be merely “an act of filial duty, with President Bush, Jr. finishing the work of President Bush, Sr.”
Rai is evidently unaware that the main goal of the 1991 Kuwait war was not to achieve Iraqi disarmament and that Saddam had been openly bankrolling Palestinian suicide bombers for years. The author must have also been surprised by the caches of proscribed al-Samoud ballistic missiles and chemical precursors that have been seized as a direct result of U.S. military pressure and force. Such discoveries, coupled with the smiles coalition troops received in Baghdad from liberated Iraqis, have exposed the fallacy that the war was fought as a “filial duty.”
Indeed, for all of Rai’s professed sympathy for the victims of September 11, he does not address—never mind take seriously— the strategic lessons of that attack, namely: the dangers of inaction and the benefits of preemptively striking terrorist camps and regimes that support them. War Plan Iraq reads like a manifesto and is more fit for an anarchist chat-room than the library, except as an exposé of the mind of a delusional protester.
