A debate on Iraq has been orchestrated by N.Z. Bear and the bloggers at Stand Down, with each side posing five questions to the other. Here are the hawk questions, and my answers.
1) If you were President of the United States, what would be your policy toward Iraq over the next year? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in your proposed policies versus the current path being pursued by the Bush administration?
Well, it’s hard to give a full answer since, of course, it would depend on future developments, but I would continue more or less as we have to date: attempting to hamper Iraq’s ability to acquire or develop weapons technolgies through economic and diplomatic pressure. Or, for that matter, pull our troops out altogether and wash our hands of involvment in the region, leaving Hussein as a problem for his neighbors to cope with. The notion that it matters very much what alternative to war we would propose is predicated on the assumption that it’s critical to prevent him from accquiring WMD by some means or another, and that Hussein is or ought to be “our problem.” But since I don’t buy those premises, I don’t much care what else we do.
The advantages of any alternative approach are basically negative: that is to say,the bad consequences not realized when compared to the option to invade. Since, as I’ll elaborate a bit further below, I don’t take even a WMD-armed Iraq to be a a very serious threat, the lower chance of that coming about should we invade weighs only pretty weakly in favor of war. The “liberation” of Iraq would be a side benefit — if, indeed, a stable post invasion regime were the result, which I’m not sure it would be. But it could only be that — a side benefit — and not a justification for war. On the other side, though, we have the flip-side. There’s the moral cost of killing civillians — and I’m of the ethical camp that believes it’s far worse to cause a harm yourself than to fail to prevent the occurrence of a comparable one — even if at some point the magnitude of the harm you can prevent is so large that it justifies doing so despite innocent deaths as a side effect. So even if Hussein would kill roughly as many people during the rest of his time in office as a bombing campaign, it would be better not to bomb. I’m also just not that optimistic about the prospect of creating a little Japan in the Middle East by force of arms, given all the tensions, external and internal, which are by this point of the debate familiar enough not to be worth rehashing. Finally, this would confirm to a lot of people in that part of the world the imperial intentions of the U.S. That we harbor no such intentions in reality would not matter much if the appearance were enough to push a lot of young Arab men who now merely have a general dislike of the U.S. to actually sign up with its enemies. People who don’t worry about this seem, often, to harbor the bizarre notion that hatred of the U.S. is some kind of cosmological constant, that there’s nothing we can do on the foreign policy scene to either assuage or inflame it.
2) Is there any circumstance that you can conceive of where the United States would be justified in using military force without the support of the UN Security Council — or does the UN always have a veto against US military action for whatever reason?
This is an easy one: bollocks to the U.N. Maybe that’s a little strong — it is probably not a bad idea, at least in principle, to have some sort of international coordinating body that can help to find non-military solutions to disputes — solutions a single country might have trouble carrying out. It helps to restrain nations from using force as a first resort. Still, given a genuine and imminent threat, of course the U.S. should do what it must to protect itself, and screw what the French think. By the same token, an unnecessary military strike — one which is not a response to a real threat — is illegitimate even if the U.N. approves it.
3) American and British military force has allowed Northern Iraq to develop a society which, while imperfect, is clearly a freer and more open society than existed under Saddam Hussein’s direct rule. Do you agree that the no-fly zones have been beneficial to Northern Iraq — and if so, why should this concept not be extended to remove Hussein’s regime entirely and spread those freedoms to all Iraqis?
Because job of the U.S. military is to protect the U.S., not to travel the world like Kwai Chang Caine doing good deeds. Moreover, I hope it’s fairly clear that there’s a difference between preventing military forces from going into a stretch of territory, and actively removing a government. It’s the difference between, say, blockading Hawaii and staging a coup in Washington. The latter would be destabilizing in a way that the former wouldn’t. Also, a lot of the reports of al-Qaeda activity in Iraq have been of activity in that Kurdish northâ?¦ it’s at least possible that the U.S. no-fly zones have prevented Hussein from clamping down on the activity of a group that is a threat to him as well as to the U.S.
4) Do you believe an inspection and sanctions regime is sufficient and capable of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of the Hussein regime — and should this be a goal of U.S. policy? In what way is an inspection/containment/sanctions regime preferable to invasion? Civilian casualties? Expense? Geopolitical outcome?
I’m not entirely certain on this point, but it does seem that inspections are at the very least capable of hampering Hussein’s ability to develop WMD. If they were no obstacle, why would he have been so reluctant to readmit them? At the end of the day, though, I don’t actually think it’s that important to stop Hussein from getting those weapons. Their primary usefulness is deterrent, not offensive. Since Iraq has no capability to reach the U.S. directly, the worry that’s always brought up is that they’ll be handed off to a third party, like al-Qaeda. But Hussein has had ample opportunity to do this in the past, and has refrained. That’s not really that surprising: WMD are hard enough to acquire that he would be reluctant to simply pass them along to someone else. He’d also have no guarantee that they wouldn’t be used against him, and if that kind of collaboration were ever uncovered, it would surely spell the end of his regime. Under those circumstances, I too would support war. But as it stands, a war would be unnecessary. It would involve, of course, the killing of civillians, the cost of sending troops, and the potential destabilization of the region. And while it might be worth risking these things if the mere existence of WMD in Iraq posed a serious threat, there is no reason to do so if that’s not the case.
5) What, in your opinion, is the source of national sovereignty? If you believe it to be the consent of the governed, should liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s regime be U.S. policy? If so, how do you propose to accomplish this goal absent military action? (And if in your view the sovereignty of a state does not derive from the consent of the governed, then what is the source of sovereignty?)
We can speak of two kinds of sovereignty. One is moral — founded, as the question suggests, on the consent of the governed and some basic principles of justice (even overwhelming consent cannot legitimize certain things). The other is more pragmatic. Morally speaking, of course, the Iraqi government is entirely illegitimate, as are many others. If it were to collapse tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed a tear. The second kind of sovereignty, though, is the pragmatic sort: certain countries are just recognized, de facto, as sovereign for the purposes of international relations. The reason for this is just that we get a more stable system when countries aren’t worried that invasion could come at any time on the basis of some more powerful nation’s decision that the government is no longer legitimate — even if, as in this case, it isn’t. Without that guarantee, the incentive is to arm as heavily as possible — to count on force to deter where the international system cannot. You can’t easily carry on long-range diplomacy without some sense that the other side won’t decide tomorrow that you’re illegitimate and can be freely deposed. After all, it may be useful in many cases to negotiate with one of the dozens upon dozens of regimes that would not meet the test of legitimacy for most political theorists (and, of course, there is hardly agreement on just what the standard is– “consent of the governed” can be cashed out a thousand different ways.) But even ignoring that, for the reasons stated above, I don’t think that deposing even clearly illegitimate rulers should be part of the mandate of the American military.
