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    The War In Iraq: Just and Wrong

                      by H. Lee Rucks

This article was first published here in December 2003.  Much has happened since that time, but nothing, unfortunately that was not foretold and explained in these pages. It remains therefore a useful, coherent, and accurate discussion of the rush to War in Iraq, its rationales and its by now well-known perils. --the editor

CONTENTS

    The War in Iraq: Just and Wrong

    by H. L. Rucks

    “The reality is that these times bring not only dangers but also opportunities.”           -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 29, 2002

    “If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all.” -- Teddy Roosevelt, Inaugural Address

    What about the argument, advanced by the Bush Administration and others, that the war in Iraq is justifiable on humanitarian grounds, even if no weapons of mass destruction are found? The following is an attempt to answer that argument, both as an abstract moral and as a practical political question. 

    PART 1:  The War to Make Iraq Safe For Iraqis

    Deposing bloodthirsty dictators is always morally just.  Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his followers were about as bad as rulers get. Furthermore, as far as I know, the conduct of the war to get rid of them has been as humane as anybody could reasonably expect. The Administration may in fact have every right to claim that it was the most humane war ever conducted on such a scale. President Bush put it eloquently in the speech he gave on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003: “No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”  It is indeed a great advance. Our military and our troops have brought credit upon themselves and their country.  Everybody was awed by the speed and relative painlessness of the invasion.  It seemed to everybody the war to get rid of Saddam might fulfill our fondest hopes. It had been short. It had been relatively humane. It seemed possible for a time that it would result in the liberation and self-determination of the Iraqi people. This perception of a successful mission, in the early days of the occupation did much to mute opposition.

    Deposing homicidal dictators is always morally just, but moral acts can and do sometimes have horrible consequences. Regime changes have a long history of illustrating the “out of the frying pan and into the fire” syndrome. Thus Caligula gave way to Nero, Louis the Sixteenth to Robespierre, Lenin to Stalin. US foreign policy decisions in this century have had a less than immaculate record seen from a humanitarian perspective.  We were instrumental in replacing Batista with Castro, Prince Sihanouk with Pol Pot and the communists in Kabul with the Taliban.  The US may have had perfectly moral grounds for these actions; their consequences, however, have not been more justice for humanity.

    In the atmosphere of euphoria that accompanied our triumphant entry into Bagdad, the reasons for the war seemed less important than they had in the months leading up to the invasion. No weapons of mass destruction had yet been found, but few doubted they would be in good time.  It seemed less urgent that we sort out the series of shifting rationales the Administration had given us for the war, even though some of these by now were beginning to look quite suspect.  Time dragged on, however, and there were still no huge stockpiles of WMD as the Administration had claimed. By mid-June increased attacks on American troops had led to more than fifty US deaths since the President had declared the end of major combat operations on May 1. Criticism of the Administration for lack of post-invasion planning began to grow. So did questions about their pre-invasion rationales. 

    On July 7, the story broke about the now infamous “16 words” in the President’s State of the Union speech back in January, in which he had included a remark about British Intelligence claiming Saddam had sought to obtain significant quantities of uranium in Niger. Ensuing revelations seemed to substantiate charges that the Administration had included the statement to hype the threat from Iraq in full knowledge the information had been discredited. The intensity and duration of the media flak caught the Administration off guard.  Various explanations were given for how such suspect intelligence got into the President’s speech.  CIA Director George Tenet tried to take the blame.  Condoleezza Rice claimed the story had come “from many sources”. Anyway, she said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on July 14, it didn’t matter:

    “The president of the United States did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa. He took the American people and American forces to war because this was a bloody tyrant, who for 12 years had defied the international community, who had weapons of mass destruction, who had used them in the past, who was threatening his neighbors, and who threatened our efforts to make the Middle East a place in which you would have stability and therefore not people with ideologies of hatred driving airplanes into the World Trade Center. That's why we went to war.”

    So, according to Rice, the nuclear threat President Bush had been touting to the world and the American people as the paramount reason why we must attack Iraq without delay was irrelevant. The real reason we had gone to war was because Saddam was a bloody tyrant.

    This shifting of ground was not subtle, but neither did it signal any retreat. Each time evidence seemed to close in on one of the Administration’s justifications for the war they resorted to a humanitarian justification. Seemingly discredited rationales, however, never went away. Six months into the post-war occupation we had no luck finding any WMD, yet the hawks continued to claim either that ample evidence for WMD had already been found or soon would be. This in spite of the Kay ISG Interim Report that strongly suggested the vaunted Iraqi chemical weapons capability had been neutralized long before the invasion:

    “Information found to date suggests that Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW [chemical weapons] munitions was reduced – if not entirely destroyed – during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections.”

    Although the report went on to cite ample evidence largely obtained from “detainees and cooperating sources” and unconfirmed that Saddam never wavered in his ambition to posses WMD, they overwhelmingly suggest weapons programs constrained to contingency planning for a hypothetical time when Iraq might be free of UN sanctions. Of a nuclear weapons program the report stated, “Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.” The main evidence of biological weapons so far were some vials containing "reference strains" of biological agents found in a private home, including one of botulism, a well-known and common food contaminant. Administration officials and the right-wing propaganda apparatus responded to the Kay Report with some ambivalence. On the one hand they dismissed its significance because it was incomplete.  On the other hand they seized upon unconfirmed, speculative interpretations of information obtained from the afore-mentioned “detainees and cooperating sources”—information that for the most part established little more than ongoing research connections to chemical or biological weapons—as  evidence that usable weapons must have existed and therefore justified the haste of the US invasion.  Given this obstinance in the face of our own findings, it began to seem to many that the Administration had either been the victim of some spectacularly unreliable intelligence or, more sinisterly, had taken the country and the “coalition of the willing” to war on false pretenses.

      In the meantime, who cares?  A young woman in the audience at a speech at Georgetown University recently startled Paul Wolfowitz by yelling at him, "We hate your policies!  Killing innocents is not the solution but rather the problem!" Wolfowitz quickly regained his poise and snippily replied, “I have to infer you'd be happier if Saddam Hussein was still in power." When all else fails—meaning, when any other justification for the war gets shot down—there is always the nastiness of Saddam Hussein.   Wolfowitz quickly enlightened his Georgetown audience by reciting the mantra of Saddam’s transgressions and then claimed the war in Iraq was “not an ideological, but a moral issue”. 

    While it is entirely valid to point out that Saddam Hussein and his Baath regime have been an absolute humanitarian disaster for Iraqis and their neighbors—as everybody from the UN to the Iranians have known for over a decade--  this fact simply is not sufficient to fill the gap between why George W. Bush said we had to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003 and what he and his supporters say now. The Bush Administration finds it very difficult to admit they may have been mistaken about WMD, because to do so would call into question their very competence.  By rushing the nation and a few allies into war they went against the advice and wishes of most of the nations of the world. The presence of a clear and imminent threat from Iraq to use or aid others to use WMD against nations outside the region was the key element in the urgency of the war. It was this urgency, we were led to believe, that drove a wedge between our leaders and our allies. In his September 12, 2002 speech to the UN, President Bush spoke of the “grave and gathering danger” posed by Iraq and claimed the lives of millions of people were hanging in the balance.

    In the absence of WMD, this assertion lacks much of its credibility. The lack of a credible threat from non-conventional weapons in a hidden and illegal Iraqi “arsenal of terrorism” vindicates those who preferred a less precipitous, and less bloody approach.  Through containment we might have been able to get rid of Saddam and free the Iraqi people eventually without war. The operative word here is “eventually”. Containment “eventually” freed the Soviet peoples and Eastern Europe without a nuclear holocaust.   Containment (and Engagement) “eventually” softened the totalitarianism of Communist China without an all-out Sino-American catastrophe. The question is, “How long are you prepared to wait?”-- and that question begs the corollary, “Is a long wait worth it?” In Iraq the Administration’s answer obviously was no.  What is so puzzling—and what demands a clear and definitive answer if we are to asses the value of the new Bush Doctrine—is why this should be the case in Iraq and not in other “rogue” nations, of which North Korea is only a single troubling example.

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