“The administration is tossing around this word ‘link,’ but what does that mean?” said Belfer Professor of International Affairs Stephen Walt, who signed the advertisement in the Times but not the online petition. “Does that mean one Iraqi intelligence agent might have talked to one member of al Qaeda, but we don’t know what he said?”
Walt’s Kennedy School of Government colleague Steven E. Miller also signed that advertisement, which was funded by academics carefully selected for their reputations as non-pacifists and argues that war with Iraq would divert U.S. focus from the greater threat of al Qaeda.
“This is a gift to Osama bin Laden,” said MIT professor Stephen Van Evera, who joined in signing the Times advertisement.
“Bin Laden’s strategy was, I believe, to provoke us into a war in the Middle East so he could mobilize the Islamic world,” he said.
Walt said he believed invading Iraq could provoke it to collaborate with al Qaeda.
“Bin Laden is an Islamic extremist and Saddam Hussein is a secular dictator—they don’t have a lot in common, their agendas are not very similar, and there’s no reason why you’d expect them to back each other,” he said. “I worry that [the U.S.] would be unwittingly giving them a reason to collaborate.”
Walt called Iraq a “threat, but not a serious threat.”
“If they do have weapons of mass destruction, they cannot use them without facing devastating repercussions,” he said. “Iraq is containable for the indefinite future, even if they were to require a handful of nuclear weapons.”
But Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse said Hussein’s past actions justified an immediate attack despite the political scientists’ predictions.
“This is not a man whose mind they know—what embarrasses them would certainly not be the same thing that embarrasses him,” Wisse said. “I’m sure that they would not have gassed thousands of Kurds.”
David B. Adelman ’04, president of Harvard Students for Israel, said while he favored military action against Iraq, he did not think the petition would be as controversial as the drive for divestment from Israel.
“I think this is nothing new, it’s something a lot of Americans agree with,” Adelman said.
Walt and Nakayama said that taking up Hussein’s recent offer to return weapons inspectors to the region was the logical next step despite Iraq’s past violations of U.N. regulations on inspection.
“Even if we can’t get 100 percent reliability, the mere fact of putting inspectors back in Iraq makes it much more difficult for them to sustain any kind of weapons program,” Walt said.
The petition can be found at www.noiraqattack.org.
—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.