March 18 2003

IT APPEARS AT this point that war against Iraq is inevitable, that President George W. Bush will defy world opinion, defy the United Nations, defy the wishes of most Americans, defy logic and common sense, and launch a dangerous and unprecedented invasion of a sovereign nation that has not attacked and does not seriously threaten the United States. It is and will continue to be a profound foreign policy disaster.

The invasion itself makes no sense: there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat to the United States or the rest of the world right now (he's certainly less of a threat than North Korea, and there's no talk of invading that country). In fact, for all of Bush's blasts at the U.N., the peaceful weapons-inspection process is actually working: Iraq's deadly threats are contained.

The war will almost certainly be bloody. Bombing Baghdad will kill thousands of civilians, many of them children. Ground troops will likely find armed resistance in the urban areas, and they will have to fight block by block, with countless casualties. The endgame is unclear at best: Will the United States install a military viceroy in Iraq – with all of the obvious incumbent problems? Who will pay to rebuild the civilian infrastructure?

The war will likely wreck the U.S. economy and spur even further domestic repression. There's already extensive opposition, at home and abroad, and it will only grow as the costs and problems of war mount.

But on a larger level, Bush has taken a big step toward the destruction of the U.N. and the isolation of the United States. He's single-handedly moving to dismantle institutions and traditions of multilateralism and international consensus that have taken decades to build. He's turning this country into a rogue state – and that legacy, and the damage that it does to U.S. interests, will take a long, long time to repair.