'A moral war'

The Christian Science Monitor ^ | 1/16/044 | Tom Regan

[Valin]

Even without WMD, more than a few liberals support invasion of Iraq.

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The invasion of Iraq was a good thing for the entire region. Even without the existence of weapons of mass destruction, ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a positive outcome. And it doesn't matter if the Bush administration may have come up with a completely different raison d'etre for the war after the first one (the existence of those WMD) didn't fly – freeing the Iraqi people from years of torture and fear is reason enough.

Normally this kind of pro-war statement is attributed to conservative supporters of President Bush. But these days one also hears these arguments from another group, 'liberal hawks.' They are not necessarily Bush supporters, but did support his invasion of Iraq. Slate.com is currently hosting several of the more well-known members of this group for a debate on the war.
(Fareed Zakaria, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Jacob Weisberg.)
Recently, in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Pollack (a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq") said he was rethinking his support of the war because he believed the Bush administration had "engaged in creative omissions" about WMD which created a momentum that led to war before Americans really knew if the US had to fight one or not.

But other members of the group continue to support the Iraq invasion, even if they may or may not support President Bush, or have some concerns about events in Iraq after the invasion. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and the author of "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad," argues that Iraq was a problem the world could not afford to continually postpone.

After 9/11 we came to realize that we couldn't let the Middle East keep festering in its dysfunction and hatreds. It was breeding anti-Americanism and terror. With Iraq in particular, business as usual was becoming increasingly difficult. Throughout this discussion we have assumed that there was a simple, viable alternative to war with Iraq, the continuation of the status-quo, i.e., sanctions plus the almost weekly bombing of the no-fly zones.
In fact, that isn't really true. America's Iraq policy was broken. You have to contrast the dangers of acting in Iraq with the dangers of not acting and ask what would things have looked like had we simply kicked this can down the road.

Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens also believes the WMD argument is illogical, according to the Jewish Forward. Freeing Iraq from "a genocidal tyrant" had been a long-held American policy objective, says Mr. Hitchens. In addition, he argued that recent conciliatory actions by Libya, Iran and North Korea were directly attributable to the removal of Saddam.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has said the main reason he supported the invasion was that the creation of a democratic state in Iraq would have a hugely positive impact on other states in the Middle East. In his latest column in the Times, Mr. Friedman argues that there will be two great trials happening in Iraq in the next few months.
The first will be the trial of former dictator Saddam Hussein. The second will be of the Iraqi people themselves as they try to form a democracy – not an easy task, considering the obstacles.

You don't want to miss this show. This is pay-per-view history. If, somehow, Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, Turkmen, Christians, Assyrians and Shiites find a way to embrace pluralism, it will be a huge boost to moderates in the war of ideas all across the Muslim world. Those who scoff at the idea of a democratic domino theory in the Arab world don't know what they're talking about.
But those who think this is a done deal don't know Iraq. If Iraq is going to be made to work as a decent, pluralistic, self-governing entity, noted Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the United States Institute of Peace, all the key factions there will have to accept being "reasonably unhappy." All will have to settle for their second-best dream in order to avoid their first-class nightmare: chaos or a return to tyranny.
Journalist William Shawcross is another well-known liberal who strongly supports the war. In fact, writes James Traub of the New York Times, Mr. Shawcross has penned a polemic ("Allies: The US, Britain and Europe in the aftermath of the Iraq war") ardently endorsing "the Bush administration's aggressive use of the doctrine of pre-emption, Donald Rumsfeld's distinction between old and new Europe, the neoconservative case for regime change, the perfidy of the French, the indispensability of the Americans and much else to gladden hearts in Washington."

Shawcross only briefly touches on the administration's manifest mistreatment of Blair [in his book], and in any case blames Jacques Chirac, rather than George Bush, for endangering the international order. Indeed, Shawcross hates the French president the way many of his former comrades-in-arms hate the American one.
He writes that Chirac donned the anti-American mantle in order to distract French voters from his budding reputation as the "Super Menteur," or "superliar"; that he outdid even the Kremlin in his eagerness to do business with Saddam Hussein; and that since he "must have known" that his threat to veto a second United Nations resolution would make war inevitable, he has "the blood of American and British soldiers on his hands."
But Edward Rhodes, dean of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, writes in The Australian that the "righteous pursuit of human liberty and international order," often mentioned by writrs like Zakaria, Friedman, and Shawcross, "misunderstands the nature of both liberalism and what threatens it, and risks undermining not only the US's own liberal republican values but also international institutions."
Mr. Rhodes argues that by focusing the question of "human liberty" only on the case of Iraq, is "as dangerous as it is natural."

Building a new world order is thus truly a millennial task, one that exceeds even the US's enormous power. A liberal world free from tyranny and terror may – and hopefully will – come, but it will not come soon, nor will it come as an act of American will. Governance based on consent rather than on force, amity between peoples, and the rule of reason and law cannot be meaningfully imposed or long sustained at gunpoint.
This is not an idealistic or naive call for pacifism. In the violent, imperfect world that exists today, the US may need to act – even to use violence – to protect from harm its own people and others who depend on it. This need to employ power for self-defense should not, though, be confused with a divine calling to do with military power what cannot be done with military power. Power's ability to change behavior is well documented.
No tyrant, terrorist or torturer doubts it. Power's ability to change beliefs, though, is far more limited, more indirect and more slowly operating.

And Micheal Tomasky, writing in American Prospect, takes on the "morality" argument made by his liberals peers. "Moral," he argues is always "flashed as a conversation stopper," and a very useful one, for who can deny that capturing and bringing to justice a man like Saddam Hussein is wrong. But there is another kind of morality – whether or not a nation's actions comport with its stated ideals.
Tomasky says there has been far too little debate about this second point. I grant to the war's supporters, such as the "liberal hawks" parleying over at Slate, that on my first criterion, a moral case for the war exists (although I worry that, given the laws of unintended consequences, time will have something to teach us about that as well). At the end of the day, the saved lives of Iraqis are no small thing to weigh against the debasement of "mere" ideals.
But the latter concern deserves far more attention than it's been getting. It isn't enough for a writer or an intellectual to assert that it didn't matter what Bush's reasons for the war were; that if one had one's own reasons, those were good enough, and what this administration told the public was not, finally, relevant.
And it's exactly that abnegation that prevented us from having the debate we should have had years before [former Treasury Secretary] Paul O'Neill came along to start it [earlier this week].
Finally, in Iraq itself, the International Herald Tribune reports that, the Bush administration is joining Iraqi leaders to press the United Nations to play a role in choosing an interim government. The move is an effort to salvage its plan to restore sovereignty to Iraq, which has been somewhat thrown off track this week when a leading Shiite cleric said he would not support the US's plan in its current form.