The Week

“If Iraq came across the Jordan River, I would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die,” Bill Clinton told a dinner for a Jewish charity in Toronto. And what would he have said to an Iraqi audience?

Speaking of Iraq, Dick Armey said, “I don’t believe that America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.” Armey does not believe that Iraq’s refusal to comply with U.N. weapons inspections is sufficient provocation: “What if the French decided they wanted to inspect American military facilities?” A fine analogy, if America had recently tried to conquer Canada through force of arms; tried to assassinate the former prime minister of France; used weapons of mass destruction; and had a totalitarian government with an expansionist ideology. Armey added that international law would not permit us to make an “unprovoked attack.” What Armey is illustrating here is the intellectual decline of anti-interventionism on the right. He is not, after all, making the traditional libertarian or Old Right arguments against war; he is employing leftist tropes, asserting moral equivalence between America and Iraq and vaguely invoking international law. Conservatives have looked to Armey for leadership on a great many things over the years, but we expect that very few are going to follow his lead this time.

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“If Iraq came across the Jordan River, I would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die,” Bill Clinton told a dinner for a Jewish charity in Toronto. And what would he have said to an Iraqi audience?

Speaking of Iraq, Dick Armey said, “I don’t believe that America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.” Armey does not believe that Iraq’s refusal to comply with U.N. weapons inspections is sufficient provocation: “What if the French decided they wanted to inspect American military facilities?” A fine analogy, if America had recently tried to conquer Canada through force of arms; tried to assassinate the former prime minister of France; used weapons of mass destruction; and had a totalitarian government with an expansionist ideology. Armey added that international law would not permit us to make an “unprovoked attack.” What Armey is illustrating here is the intellectual decline of anti-interventionism on the right. He is not, after all, making the traditional libertarian or Old Right arguments against war; he is employing leftist tropes, asserting moral equivalence between America and Iraq and vaguely invoking international law. Conservatives have looked to Armey for leadership on a great many things over the years, but we expect that very few are going to follow his lead this time.