- What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Tony Blair’s recent statements unrepentantly reiterating his conviction that invading Iraq was the right course of action even though the threat posed by Saddam’s WMD ended up being an illusion, at best, or a carefully crafted subterfuge at worst, has presented Shadi Hamid (whose work I enjoy immensely) with a philosophical conundrum of sorts:
I think it’s undoubtedly true that Iraq – and the Middle East – is better off now than it was under Saddam and than it would have been had Saddam not been removed from power. But this is not the same thing as “justified.” This, of course, leads us to into difficult terrain regarding consequentialism and how we judge doing the wrong thing for the right reasons – or the right thing for the wrong ones – or, worse, the wrong things for the wrong reasons which lead, somehow, to producing the right outcomes. [emphasis added]
That is a surprisingly unequivocal statement regarding the outcomes of the Iraq war that does its very best to ignore the actual participants involved. In other words, Hamid whistles past one enormous and awe-inspiring graveyard. Contra Hamid, undoubtedly, the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the hundreds of thousands of severely maimed Iraqis, the millions more left with the psychological scars of lost family members and war in general, the four million internal and external refugees (with many of the women and young girls forced into prostitution in order to make ends meet while refugees), etc., are not better off because of the Iraq war. (Saying nothing of the five thousand deaths of coalition soldiers and contractors, serious injuries, lives ruined, etc.).
Saddam’s ouster, when looked at in a vacuum, is very close to being an unmitigated good, but war is nothing like a vacuum. Nor is it appropriate to discuss the outcomes of war in such antiseptic terms when pondering the basis for which wars are justified or not. When you lose sight of the human toll, wars become very easy to justify - a mundane exercise, really – despite the inextricable anguish unleashed. Unfortunately, Hamid proceeds to elide the enormous human tragedy:
For me, the relevant questions regarding Iraq were always the most difficult to answer:
1. Were we against the war because of its consequences, or despite them?
2. Is what makes such wars immoral the fact that they are pre-emptive, or, rather, is it that preemption, as an empirical matter, fails more often than it succeeds?
How can one assess the morality of war without looking at its consequences in terms of human lives impacted? Opposition to war should not be grounded in mere distinctions between what is and isn’t pre-emptive, or what is and isn’t likely to “succeed” (however that is defined by slippery and shifting goalposts), but rather can the compelling reasons for a given war be so overwhelming and urgent as to somehow overcome the inevitable brutality inflicted. That hurdle should be as high as the pile of corpses to be produced in the offing.
So, at least speaking for myself, I was against the war because of its consequences, never despite of them, and this judgment has been entirely vindicated. An unrepentant Hamid is not finished, however:
1. What if Iraq had succeeded?
And then there are questions of how we will come to view past events through the prism of present ones:
2. What if Iraq succeeds?
How will we make such retrospective judgments and justifications, particularly as Iraq in 5 or 10 years may very well turn out to be the most democratic country in the Arab world (yes, I know, that’s not saying much but it’s still something).
Again, the notions of success as defined by Hamid center around the possible creation of a fledgling and imperfect democracy in Iraq (certainly a possibility). Not a bad thing in itself – a good ultimately – but, again, absent from the analysis is a reckoning of the butcher’s bill attached to our adventure in political engineering. Could anyone consider hundreds of thousands dead to be a fair swap for a nascent, imperfect democracy? Perhaps – especially from a safe distance. That is to say that even if such sacrifice were deemed worthwhile, shouldn’t the inhabitants have a say? Or better yet, the one and only vote and veto?
There is no doubt in my mind that Iraq war proponents past, present and future, as well as aspiring liberal hawks to come, will seize on any progress in Iraq to both justify the unthinkable bloodshed attendant to that conflict, and to argue that the next war will undoubtedly result in the target population being better off (those that survive, and are not psychologically/emotionally wracked by the process, naturally). The rejoinder must always be to point to the human costs, to dispel the allure of heady abstraction with the aroma of burnt and rotting flesh, of fathers and mothers watching their children incinerated, of morgues replete with bins of various body parts to be mixed and matched by next of kin so as to assemble one corpse to bury.
Since I opened with a quote, let me finish with one. This is from Milan Kundera discussing the insidious ability of time to soften the rough edges of traumatic historical events, thus creating a kind of nostalgic amnesia conducive to repeating history’s errors. In this instance, the French Revolution:
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
So too, apparently, the tragic violence that nearly tore Iraq asunder. And Hamid didn’t even wait until sunset, setting out at high noon on the mission of nostalgic embellishment.
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