Response to Henry Chien's article "Right War, Right Time, Right Place"

Leslie Su Cheng

I was so appalled by the moral callousness expressed in Henry Chien's article "Right War, Right Time, Right Place" published in this paper on 10/28/04 that even the election will be over by the time this response is published, I feel I simply cannot let that twisted view about the war stand unchallenged. No matter who will be our next president, the war is still going on. With American soldiers and Iraqi people dying every day in that unjustified war, as American citizens, we all have the obligation to put the war in its proper place and speak up against any distorted view to claim the war being a right one at the right time and right place.

I have to give credit to Henry Chien for honestly admitting he was not trained in military or game strategy, even though the way he put together his argument has already made this point apparent and thus rendered his disclaimer totally unnecessary. The theory about the war as presented by the author is so contrived and so devoid even of the most basic common sense that it does not take an expert in military or game strategy to see the deep flaws in it.

It is obviously a wishful thinking on Mr. Chien's part to suggest that keeping the terrorists busy fighting the war in Iraq will spare US from another terrorist attack. The cruel reality is that the members of Al Qaeda have now spread to more than 60 countries. They are definitely not too exclusively engaged in the Iraqi War to launch other vicious attacks, the bombing in Spain, and other terrorist attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia being the strong evidences for that. Contrary to what Mr. Chien likes to believe, Iraqi war not only has failed to contain or weaken the terrorists, it has handily provided them with an ideal training ground and the god-sent opportunities to get hold of bountiful explosives and ammunitions that were previously inaccessible to them (because Saddam Hussein had no connection with the Al Qaeda organization).

By asking the question of "why not Iran" and, in turns, not being able to answer it at all, Mr. Chien himself, within the same article, already offers the best counterargument against his own proposed theory. He said, quite rightly so, that there is no way to fight the terrorists in one country because they are all over the places. Precisely because there are too many fronts to effectively fight them with the conventional wars, the war against terrorism has to be fought and won outside the battlefields, with smart intelligence and skillful diplomacy.

Fallible points on strategy aside, the most repulsive aspect of the article is the moral indifference implied in the author's judgment that it is a brilliant plan to have the war fought out in another country so the US can be spared. He is essentially saying that let Iraq be a piece of meat thrown to the terrorists so they will, like hungry dogs, swarm over it. This way the dogs will not bite the Americans. The casualties do not matter, as long as it is not here in America, as long as it is not Americans who get killed.

The author obviously would not even have the slightest qualm over the fact that there have been 100,000 innocent Iraqi lives lost so far in this war. In the article Mr. Chien says patronizingly that his well-intentioned friends are sometimes TROUBLED by the killings in Iraq, as if to detest senseless killings in the war is a kind of sissy squeamishness that needs to be gotten over in order to see the grand plan he proposed. People are not just "troubled" by the killing in a war; they are, and should be, horrified and totally disgusted by the killings in a war. And thank God for this instinctive and righteous abhorrence for killing, the human civilization has the chance to prevail with dignity. War is seldom "right" and can only be justified on the ground of self-defense. In that context, war in Afghanistan is justified because it is directly linked to our attacker, while Iraqi war is an unprovoked invasion of another country. Because of the violation of this basic law, no matter how brilliant it is strategically, war in Iraq is always a wrong war. And it is precisely for the impossibility to explain away this moral dubiousness that President Bush had embarrassedly entangled himself with a series of unconvincing excuses: first, 9/11, then, WMD, and lastly the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The fact that Mr. Chien had to stretch logic to the extreme to come up with his pathetic theory further illustrates that Iraqi war being the wrong war at the wrong time and the wrong place can never be justified or explained away. A justified war, with its moral righteousness, never needs so many different versions of excuses and theories.

It is a bankruptcy of American soul and democracy if we deem it is even remotely justifiable to invade another country and result in tens of thousands of deaths simply because we could "use" the country as a "bait" to trap and occupy the enemies in order for them not to attack us.