Berman -- A Hawk 20 Years in the Making

The letter, addressed to Congressman Howard Berman, was written by a constituent in Studio City.

“I urge you to oppose this planned invasion of Iraq,” it began, “and to help us as a country get off this idiotic obsession with war.”

Berman, an 11-term Democrat who’s ready for battle, didn’t flinch.

Eighty percent of the mail that streams in, thousands of pieces of it, tells him he’s wrong. Democratic friends have accused him of selling out to the other side.

His own daughter, an Ivy League history major, has told him he could end up bringing down the wrong regime.

They’re all wasting their time. Berman, who protested the Vietnam War, has been behind this one from the beginning, and he isn’t turning back now. He wants Saddam Hussein gone.

And so we sat face-to-face in his Capitol Hill office this week, the hawk and the dove.

“My guess is I can’t talk you out of it,” he said of my tendency toward antiwar rants.

He was probably right, but I wasn’t there to have him try. I just wanted to hear, in person, why a respected man with 20 years of experience on the House International Relations Committee feels so strongly that war is the answer.

Berman didn’t make any points you haven’t heard. But he did a fair job of distilling the argument for war. The fact that he’s been studying Iraq for years -- and warning past presidents about chemical weapons and other dangers since 1982 -- gives his words a little more weight.

Here’s his pitch:

Hussein has used weapons of mass destruction and he’ll use them again. The United States underestimated the extent of Iraq’s arsenal for 20 years.

Hussein would no doubt like to develop nuclear weapons. He is a threat to use them against neighboring countries and beyond, or to pass them into the hands of those who would. Containment has not reduced the threat.

I asked Berman if being Jewish has influenced those positions, most of which are debatable. Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles into Israel during the Persian Gulf War and is accused of payouts to suicide bombers.

A lot of things have influenced him, Berman said.

“But I could never take a position to send American troops into combat because it’s good for Israel.”

Some of his Jewish constituents in the San Fernando Valley, he said, are “the most vociferously opposed” to his pro-war position.

If that’s true, and the mail is running 5 to 1 against him, where does he get off ignoring the people who elected him? “I don’t think my job is just to take a poll,” he said.

Berman wrote a letter of explanation to constituents, telling them he hadn’t always approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq. As an example, he cited the moment when Bush took international discourse to a new level by saying of Hussein, “He tried to kill my Daddy.”

“But with all the things I don’t like about George Bush,” Berman told me, reeling off half a dozen domestic policies, “Saddam Hussein is the enemy, not George Bush.”

My pick would have been Osama bin Laden.

Berman says he was summoned to the White House last year and told Bush he’d be an ally against Iraq, but only if the president considered war a first step in bringing economic development and stability to the Middle East.

“I told him I wanted no part of it if he was against nation-building. I said, ‘I want to know if you’re in it for the long haul.’ ”

It could be a very long haul, and it’s bound to cost billions. So what does Berman tell folks back home who might prefer to see their tax dollars widen the San Diego Freeway rather than build bridges in Baghdad?

“I believe the people of Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys desperately want a transforming event that doesn’t pit American and Western democracies against the Muslim world for decades and decades down the line,” Berman said.

He thinks this war can prevent such a collision. I could argue just the opposite, but I don’t have to.

Berman knows his subject well enough to know the risks. One thing I like about him is that he’s not some gung-ho warmonger who wants to see how big a hole we can blow in the sand. He’s struggled with this from the beginning, and he hears the arguments in his sleep as war draws near.

“I have a sense we can do this with relatively few casualties,” he said hopefully, “but I’m not sure.” His 23-year-old, a student at Brown, brings him no peace.

“My daughter is quite taken with great civilizations having ended over the hubris she thinks we might be showing.”

But not friends, nor family, nor letters from home can shake Berman from a decision 20 years in the making.

“Look, I’m out there on a limb, because a lot could go wrong,” he said. “But the cost of not doing anything is great.”

We may never know.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com