THE
FEARS AND TENSIONS in the aftermath
of September 11 created an unusual political
climate in the US, in which it became
possible for the government to lead
an invasion without having to explain
precisely why. Nobody seemed to quite
know who or what was guiding the administration
as it led the charge for war: was it
utopian neo-conservatives trying to
reshape the world in America’s
image? Was it isolationist hawks trying
to wipe out an old foreign foe? Was
it oil-hungry Texans? Was it paranoid
security advisers, regretful of their
failures and with a new bent for pre-emption,
no matter how distant the threat?
Years later, the war is far from over
and the reasons for it are still not
quite clear. Everyone seems to agree
that the situation in Iraq is, at the
least, a mess, but not everyone will
agree that it had to be thus or that
it will not be fixed, and there is still
ample room on all sides for certainty
and strong convictions. So, for those
who want to argue, there are facts aplenty
to be marshalled, stressed and convoluted.
There has been good (the quick war,
the removal of Saddam Hussein, the election
turnout); and there has been bad (the
insurgency, the Sunni boycott, Abu Ghraib,
the lack of weapons of mass destruction).
Pick up the Wall Street Journal and
you will find a tendency to the good;
pick up The Independent and you will
find a tendency to the bad. But the
predispositions have already been predisposed;
the minds have largely been made up.
Each person has his or her filter to
let the facts drip through.
Back to late 2002 and, from within that
mixed bundle of messages that the US-led
coalition proffered as justification
for the invasion of Iraq, two stood
out: there was the threat that potential
Iraqi WMDs posed to the West, and the
threat that Saddam posed to his own
people. For those who supported the
war as a form of pre-emptive self-defence,
the latter threat was used primarily
to bolster the former. So, for instance,
Saddam’s use of chemical weapons
against his own people was seen as evidence
of his propensity to use such weapons,
if he had them, against his foreign
enemies. But relying on the sheer brutality
of Saddam was unlikely to provide, on
its own, just grounds for war. Instead,
during the lead-up, the political leaders
of the US and its allies generally stressed
the self-defence argument, as they tried
to convince other states and the UN
of the war’s rightness. A week
before the war in March 2003, Prime
Minister John Howard said at the National
Press Club:
If
Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn’t
justify on its own a military invasion
of Iraq to change the régime.
I’ve never advocated that, much
in all as I despise the régime.
But … I get a bit tired of the
humanitarian argument all being on
the one side. It’s about time
that the humanitarian argument was
put into a better balance and people
understand what a monstrous régime
we are dealing with.
Howard
was criticising opponents of the war
for failing to concede the benefits
that Saddam’s removal would have
for the people they were purporting
to defend. Even for Howard, régime
change was not the object of the war
but a welcome prize. The object was
to remove the threat of Saddam’s
weapons. Since then, the self-defence
argument has foundered in the absence
of WMDs.
It may be, as Christopher Hitchens argues,
that Saddam’s régime belonged
to ‘a notorious group of nations
that sought to obtain illegal weaponry
by stealth’. Saddam may have ‘sought’,
but, as we now know, he failed. Whether
or not there were sound reasons before
the war for believing that Saddam had
mobile chemical labs or missiles that
could reach Europe within forty-five
minutes, the self-defence justification
has been discredited. The world may
or may not be safer without Saddam in
power; but we now know the ostensible
reason for the war rested on flawed
intelligence.
This is partly why the debate —
as the publication of these two books
attests — has moved on. The political
leaders of the coalition governments
can defend their decision to go to war
by stating that the belief in Saddam’s
weapons was prevalent even among their
opponents. But, in the absence of WMDs,
they are left to emphasise the removal
of Saddam and the steps toward democracy
as the spoils of war. In October 2004,
for instance, after the chief US weapons
inspector told Congress that Saddam
destroyed his weapons stockpiles in
1991, Howard said, again at the Press
Club: ‘I’m not in any way
apologetic about the fact that we were
involved in a campaign that removed
Saddam Hussein. In dealing with the
here and now the important challenge
is to make sure that Iraq becomes a
democratic country.’
Meanwhile, those who supported the war
as a humanitarian exploit and gave little
or no substance to the threat of WMDs
can, in a strange way, claim vindication.
So, in A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian
Arguments for War in Iraq, journalists,
academics, church leaders and political
leaders lay out a liberal-left defence
of the war and seek to demonstrate that
it is possible simultaneously to oppose
the policies of George W. Bush and to
support the invasion.
Some of the contributors, such as Hitchens,
Tony Blair and Jeffrey Herf, continue
to advance the dual justification: that
the war was necessary to remove both
WMDs and a despot. Indeed, the reprinted
speech by Blair, delivered in March
2004, continues to subsume Saddam’s
brutality within a security-based justification
for the war, and seems to run at odds
with the book’s humanitarian thesis.
In Blair’s view, the spread of
democracy should not be pursued for
its own sake but because it is likely
to create solid and stable international
partners. He questions whether international
law should continue to desist from intervention
unless a régime’s oppression
falls within the definition of a humanitarian
catastrophe, but only because ‘our
own self-interest is ultimately bound
up with the fate of other nations’.
The doctrine of ‘international
community’, which Blair has been
advocating since the NATO-led Kosovo
inter-vention, is not ‘a vision
of idealism’ but a practical safeguard
in an age of terrorists and WMDs: ‘The
best defence of our security lies in
the spread of our values,’ he says.
In the end, then, Blair is willing to
curtail the guarantees of national sovereignty
set out in the treaty of Westphalia,
but only to further the domestic interests
of nation states.
For most of the contributors, however,
the spread of democracy — or the
forcible removal of sufficiently vicious
despots — is a worthy enough cause
in itself. The following declaration,
by the philosopher Jonathan Rée,
fairly sums up the book’s consensus:
I
cannot imagine agreeing with Bush’s
judgments on many things, and I was
quite unpersuaded by the specific
claims he made about Iraq: it always
seemed unlikely that Saddam’s
Baathist régime would have
backed Islamicist terrorists or that
it could pose any military threat
to Europe or the United States …
But the important point was not the
machinations of the Washington élite
or their rich fantasy life (as I said
rather sanctimoniously in a discussion
at my local Labour Party) but the
long-term welfare of the twenty-five
million people who live in Iraq.
Rée
goes on to express regret for the ‘dark
and im-plausible’ case for the
war espoused by the allies, which he
says distorted the public discussion
and focused the debate on the ills of
Bush, Blair and their assistants rather
than on the opportunities for the Iraqi
people. However, as seen from Howard’s
and Blair’s comments above, the
coalition’s leaders did not believe
the humanitarian spoils were a sufficient
justification for the war.
All this will do little to convince
those who opposed the war, for whom
the continued violence in Iraq has already
undermined the humanitarian argument
(just as the lack of weapons has undermined
the self-defence argument). Now that
the war has occurred, the humanitarian
cost-benefit analysis is a hypothetical
question, to which the answer is not
a fact but a belief. Opponents of the
war will point to the mounting civilian
death toll, while supporters point to
Saddam’s mass graves and the election
turnout. Pamela Bone, a columnist at
The Age and the book’s only Australian
contributor, supported the invasion
and estimates that it probably saved
more people than it killed: ‘How
can you trade lives off against each
other, saying that these lives must
be sacrificed to save other lives?’
she asks. ‘Yet this is what war
is.’
Of course, few would argue that the
removal of Saddam was not a benefit
of the war. The question is whether
his removal was warranted by an invasion.
While some of the contributors to A
Matter of Principle admit to doubts
about the war as the cost rises, the
book does not seek to establish a framework
for deciding when, and whether, a humanitarian
crisis and the failure of alternative
policies warrants the use of force.
This is the subject of Righteous Violence:
The Ethics and Politics of Military
Intervention, a collection of articles
by academics and defence strategists
on the problems of humanitarian intervention,
particularly in Iraq and Kosovo, and
on the role of the United Nations.
The contributors essentially oppose
the war in Iraq because they believe
the use of force was disproportionate
to the potential humanitarian benefits.
Tony Coady, the book’s co-editor
and a professorial fellow in applied
philosophy at the University of Melbourne,
criticises a tendency towards moralism
in US foreign policy, which he says
blinded President Bush and his advisers
to the anarchy and disruption that would
follow the invasion. Coady prefers a
realist approach, which would take account
of the cultural barriers to intervention
in countries such as Iraq and would
recognise that there are massacres,
plagues and disasters that may be less
costly to address.
Frequently, however, the moralist and
realist approaches will overlap. As
Hugh White points out, the most significant
motivation for the Bush administration
was a strategic attempt to promote pro-Western
régimes in Iraq and the Middle
East. This attempt to reshape the world
to suit US interests is ‘revolutionary’
and ‘imperialist’, and would,
if it became a universal right, result
in anarchy. White rejects the application
of this doctrine to Iraq but believes
there is a case for American exceptionalism
when it comes to the use of force. In
this, White occupies a relatively rare
position among non-American commentators,
and it makes his views on Iraq compelling.
White is not afraid of American power
and believes that the US has overwhelmingly
been a force for good in the world;
but he also believes a confluence of
events led America’s usually reliable
political processes, in the case of
Iraq, to a rare and tragically careless
mistake. He believes that the enterprise
in Iraq was beyond America’s capability
— and that this, in itself, invalidates
the humani-tarian and strategic grounds
for war.
The advantage of White’s analysis
is that it takes account of law, practice
and politics. In contrast, several contributors
focus almost exclusively on the tenets
of international law to determine the
moral legitimacy of intervention. The
presumption, stated by a retired Australian
army officer, Paul Muggleton, is that
unilateralism, other than in self-defence,
is dangerous. This leads to the search
for international bodies and charters
that can be relied on to guide moral
multilateral interventions. But this
is where these two books — and
many minds — tend to diverge: on
the facts and rules that need attention.
One emphasises the injustice that needed
ending; the other emphasises the need
to end it justly.
