Our Rush to War in Iraq May Backfire

I got to meet the first astronauts a few years ago, and I was struck by the way they described the view of Earth from the heavens. They spoke with lingering awe of a pale blue orb floating untethered in a vast universe, utterly precious and fragile.

Scott Carpenter called space exploration a “spiritual experience for any man with a soul.” He told me: “I thought I was so lucky to be able to turn my war-making, airplane-flying talents into some constructive effort rather than a destructive one.”

Lovely thoughts. But now it’s 2003, pieces of the space program lie in fields across Texas, and our chief mission as this fragile planet’s greatest power -- with an assist from Britain’s Tony Blair -- is to rally the world to war.

You might call it the Blair Bush Project.

I’m not opposed to war. The deeds of madmen sometimes give you no choice. But this one comes with little reason and great risk. Of course an open, democratic state in Iraq would be preferable to what’s there now. But what is the likelihood of creating such a thing, and what are the risks?

These guys are in such a hurry to move before we get these questions answered, they’re making me all the more suspicious. I find myself transported back 30 years, to a time when I believed nothing my own government told me. Yes, Saddam Hussein is a virus, and Colin Powell and George Bush have counted the ways.

But this is a move that could throw the world into chaos, and the danger is in what they’re not telling us.

A) Hussein hasn’t threatened the United States or anyone else for more than a decade.

B) Iraq’s links to terrorists aren’t nearly as clear or numerous as those of its neighbors, which also happen to have bigger, nastier weapons.

C) When Hussein is gone, we’ll need soldiers on Iraqi soil for years to come at a cost that’s impossible to calculate. They’ll make great targets for every fanatic within 600 miles of Iraq.

D) Memorial services will soon be coming to a town near you. Are you ready for a son or daughter to die in an unprovoked war when a far greater threat to Middle East stability is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the Bush administration conveniently ignores?

E) Suicide bombers and other fanatics will have one more reason to come after us on American soil, so get used to heightened alerts like the one that was declared Friday. The founder of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, has just put out a call for Muslims to “strike Western interests, and hit them everywhere” if the U.S. launches war on Iraq.

F) To protect ourselves, we’ll surrender even more of the freedoms we cherish, and we’ll continue locking up anyone who looks or acts the least bit suspicious.

G) Global conflict grows out of a staggering imbalance of wealth. As a nation that has 6% of the world’s population and consumes 25% to 30% of its resources, what message do we send by marching the most powerful army in history into an oil-rich country?

If I had the space, I could use the entire alphabet.

Look, if Hussein were to make a threat or flaunt his weapons -- like, say, North Korea -- let’s drop the first bomb on his head.

But we’re on the verge of starting World War III without having gotten close to last resorts, and without having discussed whether such a war puts us in greater danger, rather than less.

I don’t care how many canisters Colin Powell can point to in a photograph. What I still want to know is why now, why Iraq, how will we pay for it, why are we in such a hurry, and what will it cost each and every one of us?

I opened the paper Wednesday and saw two headlines, one saying state budgets are under siege, the other saying President Bush wants to shift more costs to the states.

It’s only the beginning, because the war will cost a fortune.

Yes, we face a threat to our immediate well-being, but not from Hussein.

Schools were a national embarrassment even before the budget cuts, and they’ll get worse before they get better. Forty-million Americans have no health insurance. The economy is staggering. We can’t afford to fill 3,000 vacancies in a Los Angeles Police Department that’s outnumbered by gangbangers, but we’re sending 200,000 soldiers to the Persian Gulf.

Who but a few men in Washington have designed a war that now stands as our national purpose? And why should anyone fall into line on the orders of George Bush or Dick Cheney, oil and energy company barons who neatly managed to avoid combat in their day?

Maybe I’m a fool to expect any different. From the beginning of time, man has been determined to conquer and plunder the planet. Maybe you have to let go of gravity and step back as only the astronauts could to see the madness for what it is.

“It looks so lovely, so fragile,” astronaut Alan Shepard said as he looked at planet Earth from the surface of the moon. “Just imagine the millions of people who are living on it and don’t realize how fragile it is.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at

steve.lopez@latimes.com