This is an attempt to capture some of my thoughts on the international states system in general and the war in Iraq in particular. Partly, it's just to make a record. Also, I hope they will provide an alternate viewpoint for a Sydney Shove meeting.
I expect these views to be unpopular, and I'm sceptical that my arguments are going to persuade anyone. But perhaps laying a seed of doubt should be considered success. Or perhaps I should just aim to achieve a greater sophistication of disagreement.
I work for defence, but not in an area all that relevant to this subject. The Commonwealth of Australia has not, to my knowledge, endorsed these views.
A common argument against the war in Iraq runs something like this:
“Iraq isn't the worst place on Earth, and Saddam Hussein wasn't the worst leader on Earth. There were many other countries or leaders at least as bad, or who had at least as advanced weapons of mass destruction programs. For the United States to attack Iraq while leaving these other countries alone is inconsistent.”
There are a number of answers to this.
There are a few ways in which Iraq was unusual, that could morally justify an invasion. First, although Saddam Hussein was by no means the only repressive third world bastard murdering dictator, he was one of the worst. Perhaps not the worst, but his list of peers is short, compared with the number of the world's dictators.
Second, and probably more important, there was a legal basis for an invasion of Iraq. Not as good a basis as the US would have liked, but they weren't going in totally legally naked. I'll discuss this later.
We can start also look at some of the alternatives sometimes suggested, and see whether morally good reasons existed why the United States didn't want to invade them. Applying the Anna Karenina principle (“All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own distinctive way.”) we don't need to find a specific moral reason for invading Iraq. We may be able instead to find a generic moral reason for invading Iraq, that also applies to the other countries, and a specific moral reason for not invading each of the other countries suggested.
North Korea: Even without the nuclear weapons the DPRK may or may not possess, it has enough tube artillery within range of Seoul to cause morally unacceptable civilian fatalities during the opening phase of the war. In practice this is also a practical bar: the war can't happen without ROK support and the ROK wouldn't sacrifice central Seoul by giving it.
Israel: Superficially a nice comparison: a country with some repressive tendencies (even if minor compared with Iraq) with an example not so long ago (Lebanon, 1983) of invading a neighbour. One issue here is a perception in the west that Israel does have a right to exist, in which case it can point to very real security concerns to justify at least some of its behaviour. Another is Israel's democratic government: as long as the peace process has significant support in the Israeli political system there is hope of improvement. We can't realistically say the same thing about Iraq. And whatever their faults, they do recognise limits to their behaviour.
Saudi Arabia: Michael Moore's preferred option, if I understand correctly. The origin of most of the 9-11 hijackers, though I'm not sure why people often mention that. From an internal point of view the government of Saudi Arabia is obscurantist and I'd be happy to see it go. From an external point of view it is perhaps the only force restraining something worse. It's far from clear to me that attacking the Saudi Arabian government would be helpful.
Sudan: The US had a good justification to invade Sudan in 2001, since it was harbouring al-Qaeda just like Afghanistan though not to the same extent [check]. It has an excellent moral reason to invade Sudan, at least as of the last few years, because of the atrocities in Darfur. I wish someone would do something about this, and I'm curious to know how many would support a unilateral US action in this area.
Iran: A democratic government, though it doesn't run the country: people disagree as to just how much faith we should put in Iran gradually becoming reasonable, but it's got to have a lot more hope than Iraq. Also, while it does support international terrorism it isn't killing its own people the way
Maybe someone would like to push forward some other candidates, and I'd do my best to address them.
Suppose Iraq really isn't special. What conclusions can we draw?
One thing we can't conclude, as I see it, is whether invading Iraq was a good idea or a bad one. It's entirely possible, in principle, that all these places should have been invaded, and it's US inactivity in other cases that should be denounced.
Sometimes the argument is used to say that the US is tainted by its inconsistency, and therefore that anything it does in this area must be opposed, regardless of whether it is otherwise morally legitimate. I may be misrepresenting that argument because I don't understand it.
One criticism goes something like:
“Perhaps it's a good thing that Saddam Hussein is gone. But it's wrong that the United States should do it unilaterally. Decisions like this should be taken democratically, by the whole world, not by a single bully state.”This is partly a legalistic and hence idealistic argument. But it also has a pragmatic element to it: that we need a system of dispute resolution which (nearly) everyone subscribes to, and this is impossible unless (nearly) everyone owns it.
I first need to look at some alternatives.
This is the most common answer given. In the UN's current form, decisions of this kind are made by the security council, but most proponents of the UN also favour changes to its decision-making procedures so there's some rubber here. I'm going to assume that the UN uses the same procedures it does now. I think this is valid for the short to medium term, since making changes to the UN decision-making procedures is going to be very hard if it is possible at all. So if we're interested in whether we should trust it for the problems of the far future then it depends on our vision of the far future UN, but for the issues of today we have to look at the UN more or less as it exists today.
The implicit assumption, in backing the UN as a decision-making body, is that UN decisions on whether to intervene are a reasonable reflection of the decisions a moral person would wish to have made. Or at least that they are a better reflection than those of the US. So let's look at when the UN did intervene, and when it didn't.
The UN has existed for something over fifty years, and has authorised use of force twice. One of those times was against Iraq, after it invaded Kuwait. It was just after the cold war ended: a moment of international goodwill, with the west's long term peer competitor prostrate and walls, both literal and metaphorical, tumbled to the ground. It has never quite been repeated.
The other time was the Korean war, and that was simply a freak occurrence: an astonishing tactical error by the Soviet Union, to boycott a vote they could have vetoed.
And that's it. The massacres of the Bosnian muslims, the atrocities in Darfur, the Rwanda genocide, the Soviet Union's imposition of communist rule on Eastern Europe (on multiple occasions), Libya's invasion of Chad, Argentina's attempted enforcement of its claim to the Falklands, China's Cultural Revolution, Pakistan's abominable treatment of Bangladesh, Iraq's war on Iran, Syria's suppression of the Muslim brotherhood, multiple Arab-Israeli wars, Biafra, right-wing repression in South America, Indonesia's annexation of East Timor, the Ethiopian and Congolese civil wars ... it would be easy to add to this list. None of these was worth intervention, in the UN's collective opinion. Some of them got solved by other people, some didn't. Between them they killed an awful lof of people. But the UN stood aside for every one.
Some of that is because of the veto power. Some is because historically most of the UN's members have been uninterested in the sort of objectives that motivate the UN's supporters in the west. This is getting gradually better: democracies are much more common now than they were a few decades ago. But the appointment of Libya to head up a human rights body, for example, is evidence of just how far the UN has to go before it can be relied upon to do any job more important than toothless talking shop. Basically, the UN can't do this job because the UN doesn't care.
The idea that only the UN can reasonably authorise force is mostly recent. If you'd told either side in the cold war that they could only use force if their enemy was kind enough not to veto then you'd have got a very odd look.
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The US never got the legal justification it wanted to have: a specific security council resolution in 2002. The US did, however, have some legal justification for using force against Iraq. (This is done form memory, check.)
To understand why we have to go back to 1990 or so. Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and the UN Security Council passed a resolution saying that Iraq should withdraw. When Iraq didn't, the UNSC passed another resolution requesting member states to use whatever means were necessary to enforce the previous resolution, and all other relevant UNSC resolutions. Under the circumstances, that meant force.
The reference to other resolutions was an interesting choice of words, because at the time there don't seem to have been any other resolutions that were relevant. One interpretation of this section would be that this section therefore means nothing. Another would be that the section refers to other resolutions that might be passed (and indeed were passed) in the future.
A US-led coalition invaded Iraq, which sued for peace. The UNSC then passed a new resolution imposing limits on Iraq's right to arm itself, and creating the arms inspection and sanctions regimes (but not the no-fly zones? check). It also mostly suspended the resolution that had authorised force, subject to Iraq complying fully with the conditions placed on it. If Iraq didn't comply fully then the old resolution came back into force.
To turn this into a UNSC authorisation for the US invasion we have to establish several things:
In some ways the surprising thing about the Kuwait war was that it ended with Saddam Hussein still in power. (See, for example, Three Kings for a movie about this.) When Germany, Italy and Japan were thrown back on the defensive in World War Two the allies pressed for occupation and regime change. Looking back, I'm very glad they did. And I wish they had in 1991 as well.
The US didn't use the legalistic justification. Nor, initially, did it use a justification based on the good of the Iraqi people. Instead it argued that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, and lied about, or at least exaggerated, their evidence.
It's uncertain whether they were intentionally deceptive about the WsMD themselves. I suspect they honestly believed Iraq had them, or was developing them, and figured they could lie about it now and get away with it because the evidence would all come through when they got in. But it's hard to know for sure.
Some people see this as an argument against US intervention. They say that the US should only be allowed to intervene if its motives are pure. The exact level of purity required varies, but it's usually pretty high.
I'd answer that with a thought experiment. Suppose you see Bill Gate's daughter fall into a river and she's about to drown. You're a greedy person, and it immediately leaps into your head that Bill Gates would probably reward the saviour of his daughter with colossal amounts of cash and a lifetime's free supply of bloated software. It's not the only reason you'd like to save her, but it's a factor. The question is: is it morally right to fish her out?
For myself, I'd rather be saved by a sinner than left to die by a saint.
I don't think imperialism is a good description of US foreign policy. During the cold war it was motivated mainly by a desire to contain the Soviet Union, and where possible roll back its influence. But the motive was fear of a military peer competitor.
Some people see economic imperialism as a US objective, and that may have played a part in, say, the toppling of Allende. But mostly the US worried about military concerns: the US wouldn't have dreamed of using its army to restrain Japan, for instance, though Japan had become a serious threat to American economic power.
Since the cold war ended the US has intervened in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq (twice), Somalia ... if there's a common thread it's saving people from oppression. Only Iraq had real economic relevance, and the US has shown no interest in annexing any territory from its victories, in any sense.
Up to the late nineteenth century the US expanded at the expense of the Amerinds and, briefly, Spain. Since 1900 or so, however, it has been the least imperial power I can recall. I'd be interested to hear suggestions of less imperial great powers from history.
Yes, it was a country that supported Saddam Hussein. No, it wasn't the country that supported Saddam Hussein. The US saw Iraq as an ally of convenience throughout the 1980s, because it was fighting Iran. Iran was seen as the real threat to the region: considerably stronger than Iraq, and with an interest in exporting theocracy and terrorism. So for a time Iraq was the beneficiary, in some dubious sense, of American hardware.
But it was never the only supporter. Inspection of Iraq's military equipment, for instance, turns up far more Soviet designs than anything else, sometimes built in third countries like China or Yugoslavia. A lot of the rest is European, particularly French, and then there's some US and one item from Brazil. This is probably a reasonable proxy for the contributions various countries made to Iraq's armament: I think we can safely rule out the US helping Iraq buy Soviet equipment while the cold war was still on.
Once again, I'm not sure what it would prove if the US had been the main armer of Iraq. Certainly not that they should therefore leave it alone.
Yes, they're doing it for the oil. No, they're not just doing it for the oil. The real world is usually more complicated than single motives allow. The US has a wide variety of motives, noble and ignoble, including:
Iraq is already unpopular, and likely to become more so. Without the stain of Iraq, Bush would have been far more comfortable. This argument requires the US leadership to be idiots as well as evil, and they aren't. Well, not all of them.
Probably. But terrorism is a greatly overrated threat. Third world dictators are actually a much more serious problem, so I wouldn't rule out action against them just because it aggravates a relatively minor problem like terrorism.
Very bad indeed. Worse than I expected, worse I'm sure than the US decision-makers expected. A pragmatic decision is based on what you expect to happen, not on what actually happens. So I see this as an argument in favour of the invasion, rather than against.
That isn't a straightforward question to answer. It's also, essentially, a utilitarian argument, so idealists may not care about the answer.
How would we measure well-being?
If I have a statistical chance of one in a thousand of being killed by a Ba'athist guerilla or terrorist, versus an equal statistical chance of being killed by a Ba'athist secret policeman, is that an even comparison?
How do I compare the right to vote in elections, against an electricity system that works? How does either of those compare with the risk that Saddam Hussein will deliberately starve a town?
How bad is it to live in fear of arrest for being an enemy of Saddam Hussein, versus living in fear of arrest for being his friend? Is American insensitivity as bad as Ba'athist malignancy?
This isn't an easy problem. I suppose we could survey people, but I'm not familiar with surveys on this question that I would call reputable. The ongoing violence is one reason for that, of course.
There's serious debate about how many people are dying in Iraq now, about how many died in Iraq under Saddam, about how long the violence is likely to go on, about whether it is likely to be followed by something better or something worse.
It also depends on what part of Iraq you're talking about.
Kurdistan, at least, seems to me better off. Its people need no longer live in fear of Saddam Hussein reestablishing central control, or warfare between the Kurdish factions. The economy is moving ahead (better than pre-war? check).
The Marsh Arab minority would appear to be better off (check) if only because their oppression under Saddam Hussein before was so vicious.
I'd guess that the Shi'ite south of the country is also better off. There's some terrorism there, but nothing like as much as in the Sunni triangle.
For the Sunni triangle it's hard to say. A lot of people are being killed, but then a lot of people were being killed beforehand as well. The economy is a shambles. On balance, people seem to be materially worse off, but maybe their intangibles have improved.
Another question to ask here is what the baseline is. Do we compare Iraq today with Iraq before the invasion? Or with what Iraq might be like in the absence of sanctions? Given that the sanctions were kept on to a significant extent by American pressure, the natural comparison is with sanctions off. But sanctions off has implications as well, which I'll discuss later.
There's an argument that rejects such comparisons, and says that because the American invasion has made some innocent people worse off (e.g. those who are dead, who probably wouldn't be dead otherwise) therefore it is immoral. This sort of Pareto criterion strikes me as too restrictive: if governments were expected to live by this law then they would never, for instance, be able to build a road, since people would die on it who otherwise would have lived.
I know I would put up with a lot, in poverty and/or risk of death, to get rid of a leader as horrible as Saddam Hussein. If the Iraqi army came to Australia and did that, that would make me much happier than if they didn't. And if they were loud-mouthed arrogant prats ... well, there are worse sins.
Please send feedback to the author, David Bofinger.