OutRight

by Dale Carpenter

THE TASK FORCE AND WAR

The anti-invasion stance of the NGLTF is wrong

Echoing its wrongheaded anti-Gulf War stand of 12 years ago, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) has joined up with a gaggle of peace-at-any-price groups issuing a statement opposed to military action against Iraq. The anti-war stand is wrong for two reasons. First, there are good reasons to support a war if it comes to that. Second, while the issue of possible war is a serious one, it is not a particularly gay issue.

On the substantive question of whether to attack Iraq, NGLTF offers unpersuasive reasons for its opposition.

The anti-war statement the Task Force has signed onto begins by agreeing with the Bush administration that "Saddam Hussein cannot be allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction."

It's worth considering why this is so. Put to one side Saddam's unbelievable cruelty to his own people. He is (1) a megalomaniacal dictator (2) with a long record of aggression against his neighbors (3) in a region of vital strategic importance (4) who is hell-bent on getting his hands on nukes and (5) is surrounded by fearful sycophants telling him he can do no wrong and lose no war.

Those five facts represent an explosive combination. They make Saddam an unusually dangerous man prone to gross overestimation of his power. He attacked Iran in 1980 thinking he would win a decisive victory in short order. He invaded Kuwait and stayed there, believing he could beat the United States and its allies. He attacked Israel with 50 missiles thinking he would spark a region-wide Arab-Israeli conflict. All bad misjudgments.

A nuclear-armed Soviet Union was deterred during the Cold War because its leaders understood the costs of war, as do the leaders of nuclear-armed China and Russia today. Not so Saddam. A nuclear-armed Saddam would be an effectively undeterrable megalomaniac with a megaloweapon.

How do NGLTF and its "progressive" allies plan to prevent what all agree would be a calamity? "We support rigorous UN weapons inspections to assure Iraq's effective disarmament," they say.

Let's pause to enjoy the irony of this statement. Weapons inspectors are in Iraq now, as they were not in the last years of the Clinton administration, only because of the threats of military action issued by the Bush administration, which threats the left has spent the past few months denouncing as war mongering.

Weapons inspections alone will not likely "assure" Iraq's disarmament. Saddam's regime has lied, obstructed, and delayed to thwart them over the past 12 years. It's foolhardy to think a hundred or so inspectors will ferret out all the weapons or weapons programs in a hostile country the size of California.

NGLTF and its peace-loving comrades worry that a war "will increase human suffering, arouse animosity toward our country, increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks, damage the economy, and undermine our moral standing in the world." In fact, a war is more likely to do the opposite of all these things.

Human suffering in Iraq, already at unbearable levels under Saddam, would be alleviated if he were removed. There might be some short-term anger at the United States in the Arab world and some corresponding increase in terrorist recruitment, but in the long term, most (especially most Iraqis) will welcome the elimination of a hated dictator and the restoration of civilization. As for the economy, the last war showed that returning regional stability to the Middle East by beating an aggressor is a boon. And if the "moral standing" of the United States around the world really suffers because we liberate yet another country from medievalism, we'll just have to bear that cost.

What's remarkable about this discussion so far is how none of it has anything in particular to do with gay rights. If there is a gay interest at all, it lies in removing an antigay regime to make the lives of gay Iraqis at least marginally tolerable. But that would counsel gay support for a war.

The Task Force's only explanation of the connection between a potential Iraq war and gay rights is this: "In the aftermath of September 11th, we have become increasingly alarmed," said executive director Lorri Jean in a press release. "Without the constitutional rights and protections now being gutted by this administration, our GLBT movement would not be where it is today."

Jean did not specify which rights it believes have been "gutted"-courts have upheld almost every step taken so far to increase domestic security-but they evidently don't include the right to issue non sequiturs in press releases.

The measures NGLTF complains of came in response to September 11, not in anticipation of military action against Saddam. They would have been taken regardless of whether we attack Iraq.

To the extent the elimination of Saddam would increase American security, as I believe it would, it would relieve pressure to further reduce liberties. Besides, there is no evidence the war on terror has diminished the ability of gay groups to fight for gay civil rights.

Thus, while I share to a limited extent the Task Force's professed civil-liberties concerns, that is a poor reason for a gay group to oppose a war against Iraq.

So we come back to the question, why take a stand at all?

The answer, I think, is that NGLTF has completed its transformation from an organization concerned about gay rights to an organization concerned about all the world's problems. It is no longer a gay organization, and barely pretends to be.

Writing from the conservative end of the political spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a University of Minnesota Law School professor. He can be reached at OutRight@aol.com.

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