I wrote the following last year, in the run up to the US Presidential election, in an email to a friend. But I think it's worth reproducing here to see how much of it is still valid.
As you said in your e-mail, it's strange times we're living through, although I suspect our reasons for finding them so might be somewhat different. Since I seem to make a habit of confessing my deepest darkest secrets to you I might as well confess: I very much hope George Bush wins the election. It is particularly strange to think this way when everyone I know assumes reflexively that anyone with any intellectual and moral standing must naturally want John Kerry to win. To admit an admiration for W. feels somewhat like endorsing the view that the abolition of slavery was, all things considered, a very bad move. Not simply wrong, but inconceivable. However, that is what I do think. The interesting question is whether I can at least demonstrate that I am not 'stupid, wicked or insane' (Richard Dawkins' view of anyone who does not accept evolutionary theory and probably an accurate view of many Kerry supporters towards Republicans).
Before I do that, I would like to advance what I consider the strongest case possible for the election of John Kerry. I'd be glad to know if you think I misrepresent or understate the argument in any way. I will also largely confine myself to the so-called War on Terror, particularly as it's played out in Iraq, leaving aside domestic US issues.
The first, and I think the strongest reason of all to vote against George Bush, is that the war in Iraq was and is an unjust war in itself. This is based on Just War theory, arguments deriving from Thomas Aquinas and adopted over the centuries by secular authorities to define when war was legitimate and to what lengths it could be pursued.
Principles of the Just War
1 A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
2 A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
3 A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
4 A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
5 The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
6 The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
7 The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
Of these 7 principles it seems clear to me that points 4 to 7 can clearly be answered in the positive for the Iraq war. Point 4: Purely militarily, the war was one of the most stunning successes in military history, and even the subsequent events cannot be called significant in military terms.
Point 5: the Iraqis are already moving towards an elected democratic government.
Points 6 and 7: again, those I think can clearly be answered in the affirmative. For a war of this nature, the losses, both civilian and military, have been astonishingly low.
But the real case, as I said, lies in points 1 to 3.
1 A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
Probably the single strongest argument against the Iraq War. The anti-war position here is clear: we could have gone on longer, had further weapon inspections, further sanctions, jawed, rather than warred. This dovetails (pun intended!) strongly with point 2:
2 A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
The argument here being that the war would only have been legitimate with UN sanction as the required legal authority. One of the strongest motivations for those keen to vote George Bush out of office seems to me the deep conviction that in this dangerous world, one of the key ways of ensuring peace and stability is to embed nations in an international system of laws and treaties that will not allow any to act without the at least tacit approval of at least a majority of other countries. Thus the world as a whole will not have to face the hegemony of the United States that it could otherwise enforce as a result of its military, political and economic power, and the various countries can go on in their own way as they see fit, without the interference of Uncle Sam. George Bush, by acting without UN backing, is seen by this view to be tearing up a system of checks and balances that has been carefully put into place over the last twenty or thirty years and substituting it with a foreign policy based purely on US political advantage, to the detriment of the rest of the world.
Finally, point 3 suggests that there was no reason to go to war in the first place.
3 A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
For while the attack on Afghanistan can be justified as self defence, that is not possible to argue with respect to Iraq, which obviously was in no position to attack the US and various reports indicate that there is no conclusive evidence to indicate that Iraq had any role in the 9/11 attacks on America.
That I think, is the basis of the strongest case against the Iraq War and George Bush that can be put. I would imagine that it reflects in some way your own views on the subject.
However, I believe it is wrong. To take point 1. This is the hardest single point to answer, since the requirement is open ended: how can one actually tell when all non-violent options have been exhausted? On reflection, one is struck by the fact that this requires that both potential combatants have to have a reasonably sincere desire for peace for this to work. The classic historic parallel is 1939. We, ie Britain, need not have declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland. We had not done so before, believing peaceful options existed, and we could have continued attempts for peaceful resolution of the difficulties. The problem was that Adolf Hitler had no wish for peace. Negotiations in such circumstances were therefore purely means to allow him to regroup.
Now this is not a perfect analogy for Iraq. But there are some interesting parallels. The Duelfer Report (I believe that's it's correct name) in America, came to the conclusion that while there were no WMDs in Iraq, it was the intention of Saddam Hussein to restart their development as soon as possible. (As an aside, I believe that there is reasonable evidence that some of these weapons did exist but were moved out of Iraq prior to the war. The references are available on the internet if you want to read them and judge for yourself.)
Now one of the arguments for the war was that Iraq had failed to abide by the terms of the cease fire at the end of the first Gulf War, and thus had placed itself once again in principle at war with the signatories to that cease fire. This was in fact generally accepted, the UN weapons' inspectors having had to leave Iraq in the 90s, and so on. Thus Iraq was in breach of the cease fire terms. However, those who argue against the war claim that, since weapons inspectors were allowed back into the country, they should have been allowed more time to do their job and therefore, since it seems they would not have found any WMDs, war would have been avoided. But suppose that had happened. I believe that all the evidence suggests that even if Saddam Hussein no longer possessed WMDs, as soon as was feasible he had every intention of gaining them. Therefore, the first point, that all non-violent options be exhausted is not valid, since one party to the disagreement had no interest in a peaceful outcome, but rather solely in gaining time for his own rearmament.
Point 2. I regard this as the least strong of the anti war arguments. Firstly, a government does have the legal authority to wage war, and the Iraq War was waged with a large number of governments in alliance with the United States.
However, as I said above I think the reason this objection looms large with those against the war has to do with the points I raised: that George Bush has single handedly trashed the international order and thus made the world a much more dangerous place. This, I think, is wrong.
My first argument here is that the UN in actual fact has a poor record of summoning up the political will to deal with conflict even where the need for military intervention is almost universally agreed. In fact, about the only occasion I can recall this happening before was with the first Gulf War. However, since then we have had numerous occasions when some form of UN intervention would have saved countless lives, but nothing has happened: Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, etc. And when the UN has attempted to help with policing a previously negotiated ceasefire, such as in Bosnia, the result was Dutch UN troops standing to one side while Serb militias entered the refugee camp the UN troops were supposed to be guarding and abducting and executing all the Bosnians they could find. Not much of a track record. In fact, the only conflict in the 90s were action was taken and many lives saved was Kosovo, where NATO, ie the Americans, acted without UN authorisation, thus bringing about the overthrow of Slobodan Milosovic and a gradual return to peace in the region. Those committed to the idea that only the UN can authorise a war would thus have to conclude that this action was illegal and should not have occurred. They would also have to explain why the UN did nothing when a million Rwandans were killed, and why it is allowing the Sudanese government get away with genocide.
Apologists for the UN would also have to explain quite how it managed to preside over the largest fraud in history, when Saddam Hussein managed to milk the Oil for Food programme of billions of dollars, using that money, it would appear, to buy influence with various members of the Security Council not to mention many UN officials, apparently including Kofi Annan's son.
Thus the UN, I would argue, consisting as it does of the conflicting interests of so many governments, is generally incapable of action and thus unable to do anything even when the need is most urgent. With some thought, the reason for this is fairly clear: too many of the governments that make up the UN want to hold as sacrosanct the rule that what a government does within its own borders is no one else's affair. After all, if that changed then all manner of rather unpleasant regimes might be looking over their shoulders.
Point 3. A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause.
Well, where was the self defence here? But first, self-defence is not the only wrong that can be suffered. 'In the classic just war tradition, "just cause" was understood as defense against aggression, the recovery of something wrongfully taken, or the punishment of evil.' (Quote from George Weigel.)
It seems clear to me that 'the punishment of evil' can apply to Saddam Hussein. I remember reading the testimony of a man that he had tortured in Iraq. His heavily pregnant wife was brought in, and his torturers informed him that they were going to rape her into a miscarriage. Despite the best efforts of the men concerned, that did not happen, so they then cut the woman open, removed the baby from the womb and smashed his brains against the wall. The woman was then killed.
I apologise for the details, but sometimes one needs to be reminded of what genuine evil is capable of, it being too easy to see reports of thousands tortured and dismiss them, overwhelmed by the impossible numbers.
But of course it is possible to argue that this is all very well, but in punishing Saddam Hussein we have also punished, maimed and killed a great many innocent Iraqis along with the torturers and killers who maintained him in power. This cannot be denied. It is though true of every war, many innocent Germans dying in World War II. However, in answer to this, it is also true to say that the extraordinary military technology now available to the Americans mean that unintended casualties can be kept to levels lower than ever before in history. Furthermore, I have seen estimates that suggest, if one averages out the total number of Iraqis Saddam Hussein killed during his time in power as the number of deaths per day, then we have the truly unprecedented situation that fewer people are dying on average per day while a war is being fought than died under his regime.
It is also worth adding that now the vast majority of Iraqi casualties are being inflicted not by the Americans but by those supposedly fighting the occupation, but doing so by killing ordinary Iraqis and fellow Muslims. It is strange that the Americans should be held responsible for deaths caused by the very people they are fighting.
This I think is in itself sufficient to answer the objection of point 3, however I also believe there is a legitimate self-defence argument too. It is this: can you, if as President you are entrusted with the care of your people, wait to be attacked before responding? The world we are living in is one where de facto alliances are formed between governments and terrorist organisations, the latter carrying out the former's dirty work. Not just Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, but Indonesian militias in East Timor, the janjaweed in the Sudan and so on. But given the recent record - 9/11, the bombs in Bali, Madrid, the massacre of children in Beslan, not to mention countless attacks in third world countries that never make the TV news in the west - we appear to have the evidence to suggest that these terrorist groups would not hesitate to use the most lethal weapons they could acquire in attacks against civilian targets, the worst possibility of course being the detonation of a nuclear device in a city.
Just war theory as it currently stands suggests that one should wait for that bomb to go off before taking action. However, I believe that the catastrophic nature of such an attack means that if we have reason to believe a tyrannical and barbarous regime, such as Iraq, has acquired WMDs, or intends to acquire them, then we may now have to ensure that this does not happen. Therefore, I think it is incumbent upon the President to stop such weapons coming into the hands of people like Saddam Hussein, as we have every reason to believe that they would then be passed on to others, with different ideological axes to grind against us, but united by the universal principal of sharing the same enemy. It's a murky world in this field, but there is reasonable evidence of contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda before the war, and we do know that Zarqawi was already resident in Iraq in 2002, I believe. Given the nature of the regime, that is not likely to have happened without Saddam Hussein's approval. So, with respect to point 3, I think it is possible to further argue that one can no longer wait to be attacked before responding, the consequences of a further successful attack being possibly too horrible to contemplate.
On a tactical note, militarily it's also worth noting that it's far easier to win a war if the battle is taken to the enemy. A purely defensive war is pretty well unwinnable.
That constitutes the main points of my argument for why the war in Iraq is just, and thus why George Bush should continue as US president.
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