REVISITING IRAQ

I used to be so exasperated by the Iraq war critics' bad or non-existent reasoning that I stopped giving them the time of day. When I come across them I groan and click somewhere else. But maybe that's too complacent. After the bloodshed of late, a lot of them probably think war supporters are just avoiding the subject because it's too embarassing. Here's Josh Marshall from the Talking Points Memo blog.

Back more than a year ago, when it first began to dawn on many that stabilizing, let alone democratizing, Iraq would be a great struggle, the challenge was often framed around the unacceptability of allowing Iraq to 'become another Lebanon' or descend into civil war.

Let's be honest with ourselves. That's already happened. That's the clearest reason why yesterday's violence garnered so little attention. It's not surprising any more. A year ago, when a bomber blew up the Jordanian Embassy, it sent a shock through the United States. The same was more or less the case in the bombings that followed through the rest of 2003 and into early 2004.

Iraq has quite simply become a disaster for the United States. And while people disagree over why this has happened, no thinking person can now fail to see that it has happened.

Hmm. A "disaster?" I can't help but think that if a real disaster were to strike-- say, an Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange, or a suitcase nuke blowing up Chicago-- this kind of language would seem a bit absurd. If 9/11 is the yardstick for disaster, Iraq doesn't measure up. And 9/11 is nothing compared to, say, the AIDS epidemic. A sense of proportion is called for here. Before the war, I'm under the impression that the UN predicted the war would produce 250,000 dead and millions of refugees. Maybe it was just 250,000 refugees. Either way, events have made nonsense out of such predictions. I don't recall hearing any apologies. I myself would have guessed that a few thousand US soldiers would probably die, and tens of thousands of Iraqis. A terrible price, but again, a sense of proportion is called for. Saddam killed millions. Nor does the term "civil war" seem appropriate. There are not large armies of Sunnis fighting against large armies of Shias or Kurds. A "conventional wisdom" has coalesced, it seems, that the neocons and Bush were naive, the war critics prescient. Neither side of that conventional wisdom seems to me to hold any water.

But certainly a lot of blood and treasure, and perhaps diplomatic capital, has been spent, so-- was it worth it? It's worth revisiting the case for war, to try to measure it up. The reason I stand by my support for the war goes back to the original case, which consists of a three-point positive case for war, and a one-point negative case.

THREE-POINT POSITIVE CASE
(1) According to the best information we had at the time, Saddam possessed, or was seeking, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, in violation of commitments he had made at the end of the last Gulf War. He had played a cat-and-mouse game with the UN inspectors, before throwing them out in 1998, and then, when forced to let them in by the imminent threat of force in 2003, he returned to his cat-and-mouse game.

(2) Saddam had ties to terrorists, including al-Qaeda. He had sponsored terrorist attacks in Palestine and, for all we knew, might well sponsor them in the United States.

(3) Saddam's regime was a murderous tyranny, and we wanted to give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and democracy, after 35 years of the foulest oppression. We hoped that Iraq would become not only a democracy, and the first Arab democracy ever at that, but a beacon of democracy to the whole Middle East. Liberty is God's gift to humanity. Surveys show that Muslims want democracy. Free and democratic peoples are not inclined to engage in terrorism, which is a product of oppression and the narrow-minded fanaticism that festers in the absence of freedom. Totalitarianism is evil. It is a great and noble mission, and our duty as those fortunate enough to be born to the blessings of freedom, to fight it, to show a spirit of brotherhood with the less fortunate.

Point (1) comprised the legal case for war; taken together, points (1) and (2) made the war in the US national interests (since a direct attack from Iraq on the US was hardly a plausible threat); point (3) was the emotional and idealistic core of the case for war, but where would it lead us, if we tried to follow it consistently? This ideal has come to define Bush's foreign policy vision since. As John O'Sullivan at The National Review observes:

[Bush] outlined [at the RNC] a bold foreign policy based on spreading the blessings of liberty, principally to the Middle East but in principle to wherever men labor under tyranny. Even if one disagreed with this argument or was skeptical of its practicality, one could not withhold admiration for the eloquence with which it was expressed or the sincerity that plainly inspired it.

I like The Washington Monthly as a source of critiques of Bush and the neocons, because however bitingly critical, there's always an undertone of acknowledgement of the radicalism, if in their view misguided, of the vision.

The last few years have constituted a grand experiment, a test of what would happen if Washington threw out the standard foreign-policy playbook and just winged it. The results are now in, and they ratify most of the conventional wisdom that the Bush administration initially rejected. And although Bush and his lieutenants will never say as much publicly, and may not even admit it to themselves in private, their recent behavior shows that at some level they understand the point and don't want to be burned again...

Bush's campaign line, "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein," sums up the three-point positive case for the war in a punchy, persuasive way.

But if there were only the positive case, I might not have as strong a stomach for the rising death toll. The three points can be turned around: (1) regime change in Iraq increased the incentive for countries like Iraq and North Korea to get nuclear weapons, (2) the invasion of Iraq created a wave of anger in the Muslim world and fueled terrorism, (3) what follows Saddam's demise might be (so it is said) civil war or theocracy, something worse than Saddam. I don't buy (3). Saddam's regime was so bad that there was hardly any risk that the war would make them worse off. But (1) and (2) are good points.

What is decisive for me is the negative case.

ONE-POINT NEGATIVE CASE
(4) The status quo before the war was morally intolerable. Economic sanctions had impoverished Iraq while doing no harm to Saddam, if anything helping him shore up his power. We had helped bring Saddam to power. We had supported him in the war against Iran. We had encouraged the Shiites to revolt and then let them be slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands of children died because of the sanctions, lacking medical supplies. The Iraqis were living in a prison state, and we were complicit in it.

This part of the case for war is invisible. No one mentions it. Which makes me wonder: am I dreaming? Did I read a couple of spurious sources and conclude with no good reason that my country was guilty of a terrible crime? Sure, America has done a lot of nasty things abroad that most Americans don't know about. But with Iraq being the center of a huge national debate for three years now, you would think this argument would have been mentioned. If nothing else, war supporters would put it in their arsenal. So maybe I'm missing something. And yet as far as I know it's as true now as it was three or five or ten years ago that the sanctions were murderous. They worked, from the point of view of national security. Even if we didn't know we were keeping Saddam from getting WMDs, it was pretty clear he wasn't much of a threat. We got our own security: but at a morally intolerable price.

Here a distinction between sins of omission and commission might be in order. Allowing the genocide in Rwanda was a sin of omission. Hundreds of thousands died, and it's shameful that we didn't do more to stop it, but it was still someone's crime, and whatever we are guilty of, it's not murder. But in Iraq it's different. Our sanctions caused those deaths. This sin shades over from omission to commission.

When you think of hundreds of thousands of children dead, it's hard to get exercised about 9/11. I think we deserved 9/11. I mean, not that those particular people deserved it. Not that it was right. What justice there is in human events tends to be messy. Osama was punishing us for (1) stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, (2) supporting Israel against the Palestinians, (3) the sanctions on Iraq. He was right about all three. I know there's supposed to be a distinction between honorable war and terrorism, which I guess I endorse though at the deepest level I'm not sure I understand why. So in those terms, Osama did wrong. But I can see his point of view.

The negative case changes the whole argument. If the status quo was morally intolerable, we had two choices: (a) lift the sanctions unilaterally, (b) regime change. If the alternate is (a), then points (1) and (2) of the positive case become much stronger. Sanction-free, Saddam would probably have had the means, and he certainly had the will, to get WMDs and give them to terrorists. And maybe point (3) becomes stronger too: we owed the Iraqis liberation, after the iniquitous way we had treated them. (Maybe...)

It depends ultiamtely on values. For me, anti-totalitarianism and the critical importance of freedom of conscience are extremely valuable. More valuable than my own life, for example. "Give me liberty or give me death," is a decision more suitable to make for oneself than for others, admittedly. Still, it's this principle that leaves me with scarcely a doubt that the war was right.

As for the rest of it...

Despite the widespread claim of "incompetence," I'm not convinced. We shouldn't have dissolved the army, some say. Maybe, but a lot of Iraqis thought we should then, some still think so now, and it's natural to want to level the remnants of a regime as evil as Saddam's-- if it was a mistake, it was an understandable one. We should have sent more troops, it is often said. But I don't get it. Even now, I often read that the Marines could take out Sadr's Mahdi army, or overrun Fallujah, but that it's politically dangerous because it would inflame anti-American feeling. If so, how would it help to have more troops there? Maybe more troops at the beginning of the war would have pacified the country and denied the insurgency time to grow. Or maybe they would just have blown more things up and killed more people and made more people mad. I don't think we'll ever know. I don't see any reason that I should believe someone else could have done it better.

I'm not as determined that America must not "cut and run" as some people are. As I see it, the biggest thing we could do was remove Saddam Hussein. And we were justified in doing that because Saddam was not a government but a murder-master with no legitimacy, a pirate, bearing the mark of Cain, whom anyone might destroy at will because by his crimes he had forfeited his rights as ruler and as man. It's nice of us to stick around and help with the reconstruction, too, but we don't have to. Having overthrown Saddam does not create that obligation.

Also, I wish we downplayed democracy as a goal, and instead saw our role as guarantors of liberty. For a number of reasons. Iraqis desire democracy more than they understand liberty. Democracy needs liberty but not vice versa. An imperial power can impose liberty (by preventing violations of people's rights) but not democracy. We would have to foster democracy too, because it's the only form of government Americans know of, and the only one that enjoys legitimacy in the contemporary world, and because Iraqis want it.

Beyond Iraq, what does this mean for the world, and in the long run? Hegel speaks of progress in terms of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. The 1990s world order, post-Cold War, liberal and marketizing, with the sanctity of borders firmly established and America firmly on top, was the "thesis." For Americans at any rate, it was great: peace, prosperity, freedom, hegemony, as far as the eye could see. But the Third World was still poor, and in some cases racked by new problems, such as AIDS; the sanctity of borders left tyrants unmolested and ethnic minorities trapped and angry; some Americans and many in the Muslim world were alienated by the somewhat hedonistic character of the emerging world culture; and the atrophy of a narcissistic West's will-to-power left many parts of the world to succumb to anarchy and state failure, or to weak, corrupt and unresponsive government. Robert Kaplan does a good job documenting the dark side of the 1990s. From 9/11/2003 to 4/9/2004 was the "antithesis": peace was suddenly interrupted by a hate-driven group that rejected all of the values of the "thesis;" then, in its reaction, Bush's America repudiated the narcissism of the 1990s, plunging into distant wars, weakening the principle of the sanctity of borders and the supremacy of international law; guided instead, at times by a Hobbesian vision of a world radically endangered by terrorism, but also, and increasingly, by a soaring neo-Wilsonian vision. It is this vision, a global liberal and democratic transformation, which is the "synthesis," with Bush as its towering articulator. If he wins in November, his vision will come to dominate this decade and perhaps this generation.