The following is excerpted from a speech by Barack Obama, in 2002. Yes, 2002.
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perles and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income; to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That’s what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.
I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, in other news, the incoming president, 이멍박, is saying he plans to merge the republic's foreign and "unification" ministries. This seems like a very good idea – currently, there is a sort of dissonance between the tones of the two – almost as if the republic has two completely separate foreign policies.
The foreign ministry keeps a somewhat hard line and handles positions in multilateral negotiations involving the north, e.g. with the U.S., China, Russia, et al., trying to contain the north's weapons programs. At the same time, the unification ministry is a much kinder, gentler bureaucracy that seems focused on nothing so much as extending South Korea's immense wealth and successful social welfare programs to the miserable north, regardless of the extent to which the north's government is complicit in creating all that misery.