Of course the war was fought over ideology: we believed that Saddam
should not be in power. He believed that he should. Voil`a! an
ideological war.
That fact is that the reasoning for the war breaks down for any of
the stated reasons. Pulled together they resemble sufficient cause,
but looked at individually, they hold no or little water. Let's look,
shall we?
Moral reasons/Liberating Iraq: Saddam is an evil man and horribly
cruel to his people. We have a moral imperative to liberate his
oppressed people! This is one of the big crowd-pleasers, but we
clearly have no intentions of pursuing this course of action in any
of the tens of other countries where abuses as bad or worse than
Saddam's (Myanmar, Sierra Leone, etc.) are occurring. So at best,
the "liberation" of the Iraqis is a fringe benefit and not part of
any sustained ideological campaign to help oppressed peoples.
Weapons of mass destruction: Saddam has WMD and he has used them in
the past, on his own people! We must go in and disarm him before he
strikes again. Well, again there is no consistency. Other belligerent
countries have WMD and have shown a penchant to use them or threaten
to, but we're not lining up to invade China, North Korea, Syria,
Pakistan, etc. Clearly, WMD are not enough to justify an invasion on
their own (btw, personally, if there were evidence that Hussein was
anywhere close to nuclear I would support much more aggressive
measures than I would otherwise, but everything I've seen or heard on
the nuclear front is extremely tenuous at best). But perhaps you are
thinking that Iraq is diffrent. They signed a treaty with the UN that
they would not develop WMD! That brings us to:
We must enforce the UN-based treaty that Hussein signed at the end of
Gulf War I! Otherwise, any state will feel it can make a mockery of
the UN, no one will listen or obey! Well, here I think the UN should
have stepped up to the plate more aggressively, but they didn't.
Still, by stepping in the way we did, we did as much or more damage
to the UN's relevance than they did to themselves. We certainly could
not use flaunting of the UN's rules as justification for war without
showing ourselves to be major hypocrites.
But wait! Iraq was harboring and supporting terrorists, including Al-
Qaeda! We're justified to go in! Firstly, the evidence here has been
thin at best, but even allowing for it to be true, there are many
other states that support or tolerate terrorists/terrorism within
their borders (Pakistan, Indonesia, Ireland, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Somalia, Syria, etc.) -- are we going in to them next? Are we going
to establish a single standard and abide by it? Until we do, it
certainly cannot stand as a moral justification for war, and on
strategic grounds, our primary concern with Iraq was never that they
were in league with Al-Qaeda.
Which brings us to the threat Hussein posed. We went to war in self
defense and Hussein was an imminent threat. Or at least an imminent
threat to the region. Well, the self-defense notion is laughable --
we as a country could not be threatened by a weakened 3rd world
nation. As far as the region goes, Hussein has behaved himself for 13
years and shown no military ambitions, and his military complex (as
we have now seen) was a shadow of what it was in '91 and we know what
we did to it then. Sure, he's been giving money to Palestinian
terrorists, but find an Arab government that doesn't have any
complicity there. The only threat to America is that he might have or
develop WMD, sell them to terrorists, who then might use them on us.
But does this possibility -- a reasonable assumption, but far from
proven -- justify engaging in a preemptive war, killing and
terrorizing Iraqi citizens (because I promise you that living in a
city with bombers and missiles flying overhead for 45 days is being
terrorized -- imagine living through that), alienating most of the
world's populace, and putting a fragile region into further political
chaos?
So let's drop the pretentions of this being a moral war. The
accumulation of all these factors is being used to justify a war we
began for economic, political and strategic reasons, reasons which
have not been made nearly as clear to us because they're much less
pretty, and we like to think we're the good guys.
Take a second and picture almost any other country doing what we just
did for the reasons we gave (India into Pakistan, Israel into Syria,
Russia into Kazakhstan, etc.). We would be outraged, or at least
would do everything in our power to stop it. We would not abide
another country taking unilateral action. Yet we did it because we
could. And that's why we need to be held to a higher moral standard --
because we can.
- David
--- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "7visions"
<7visions_at_p...> wrote:
> For the record, I do have a big problem with the lack of open and
> competitive bidding for the rebuilding of Iraq. There is no change
in my
> position since before I became a vicious reactionary hawk.
>
> But more and more I feel that this war was fought over ideology and
not just
> oil and a few rich shareholders.... and I hate to quote trickle
down, but
> these contracts will help a lot of workers here ( not to mention in
Iraq)
> who did not grow up with the benefit to enjoy the fruits of being
Westside
> Intellectuals.
Received on 2003-04-22 22:08:25
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