Hanging on to War

Here's my reply to a young man in the local student newspaper, hanging on to the presumed righteousness of the Iraq war, in the context of the new terrorist bombings in Bali. I must admit that I failed to pay attention to the Bali question in my reply, and will have to give further thought to the connections. Brian Stewart's column may be found at
http://www.idsnews.com/subsite/story.php?id=31610&adid=opinion

Ah, "Publius", thou art but a young fool, daring to call over half the country "naive" when you still seem to believe that if things are bad enough somewhere, war must be the answer. Basically, you just ain't lookin' at the whole picture. But perhaps the testosterone coursing through your veins has blinded you only temporarily.

Hardly anyone disagrees that Saddam is a bad man, and made for one hell of a nasty dictator. Still, removing even the nastiest of dictators isn't necessarily synonymous with "liberating" the tyrant's country. First of all, the means to the end was horrible, and Americans mostly only viewed sanitized footage of what went on. Thousands of people, many of them innocents, were killed and mutilated by our bombs. Just about everybody else in Iraq has had their livelihood and survival plunged into lasting uncertainty, which brings us to a second issue, the actual outcome of the war, which has been mediocre at best, potentially catastrophic at worst. Sure, the war got rid of Saddam, taking power away from an evil dicator. But did we liberate the people of Iraq? Let me use an analogy. If you meet a family who is in chains, remove their chains, but then, whether or not it is your intention, leave them lying in a minefield without a map, have you liberated them? You can hardly deny that living in Iraq today is like living in a minefield. Aside from the literal minefields there, there is of course the minefield of terrorism.

Who created the minefield of terrorism? Surely it is the terrorists who conspire to create this unholy hell, which somehow they see as a holy act. They seem to believe (somewhat as you do, "Publius") that countering a perceived evil with evil can somehow result in good. They are wrong, wrong, wrong to be doing what they are doing. But, frankly, the war helped them to get there, by creating a vacuum of power and by making the United States occupation look bad enough, whatever our intentions (the subject of a future conversation, perhaps), to create a fertile recruiting ground for new terrorists. This was bound to happen, and saying so is not a matter of hindsight. Months before the invasion began, I downloaded a poster depicting Osama bin Laden dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing a finger and declaring "I Want You to Invade Iraq". A sad comment, indeed, but I knew it was true. Later, by allowing torture to happen and looking for exceptions to our own rules about treating prisoners, "our" side made things that much worse in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, of young Muslims, and of people everywhere.

It is not that we should be afraid of angering terrorists. We can't capitulate to their threats and terror, thus allowing them to realize their ambitions of power. But that doesn't mean that just any old thing we do that is "against" them is morally acceptable, or even helpful. We must dissipate their appeal by acting morally ourselves; Muslims and all other people of good will should have little or no cause for grievance against us, of the magnitude that leads young people toward terrorism. Again, terrorism is always wrong, and, yes, the terrorists bear their own responsibility for choosing this path. But in almost any feud -- whether between families, clans, nations, religions or some combination thereof -- both sides almost always bear much of the responsibility for being stubborn and insensitive to the needs and grievances of even total innocents born on the "wrong" side, for exclusively blaming real and imagined enemies while refusing to look within for responsibility, and simply for either not realizing or not caring that even seemingly righteous violence sows the seeds for more violence, often lasting centuries into the future. Everyone must consider the consequences of their own actions, even if some of those consequences proceed indirectly through provoking "bad" people whose responsibility is therefore also great.

After all of this, we can only hope that a new Iraqi Constitution will not just be approved through the process that has been put into place, but that it will successfully provide the means to govern the country according to just principles, leaving both the people of Iraq and people everywhere better off. If, my young friend, and I do say "if", if that happens, we can reasonably ask "was it all worth it?" Even then, we must take into account the viewpoints of untold numbers of mothers who had their children killed and mutilated by both sides, as well as everything else that has been stirred up. Even if the answer is "yes, it was worth it, and it was the best we knew how to do at the time", we must further ask "Is there a better way for us to accomplish these goals next time?" We might start this inquiry by studying the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There's a lot more to this war thing than meets the eye, "Publius", and a lot more than I've said here. But consider my words well, my young friend, and perhaps we shall speak again.