A Thinking Reed

Category: Iraq

  • Clinton and Iraq

    Michael at Levellers expresses some well-justified outrage at Bill Clinton’s recent attempts to whitewash history and portray himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war. But as I mentioned in a comment to Michael’s post, not only did Clinton not oppose the war, his Iraq policy made it much more likely than it otherwise would’ve been.

    His administration did everything it could to hype the danger posed by Saddam’s regime, talked up the threat of WMDs, officially supported a policy of regime change, etc. After 9/11 happened Saddam was already poised as the Hitler du jour in the minds of most policymakers and pundits. Clinton did as much as anyone to promote the idea of Saddam as a great menace to the U.S. and world peace.

    Needless to say, this had numerous real-world consequences, such as the no-fly zone enforcement and the UN-approved sanctions regime. The human toll of this exercise in “soft power” is disputed, but no one denies that the people of Iraq suffered terribly, not least because they were prevented from rebuilding their country’s infrastructure which had been so badly damaged during the first Gulf War. So, far from being “opposed” to war with Iraq, the Clinton administration carried on a low-grade war against Iraq for nearly ten years.

  • As we go marching or It’s the war, stupid!

    Ross Douthat offers the logical response to this Jonah Goldberg column wondering why mainstream Republicans and conservatives are down on Ron Paul (who, after all, believes most of the things conservatives are supposed to stand for) and not Mike Huckabee, who exhibits many more deviations from conservative ideology:

    [T]he reason Paul has been treated differently than Huckabee by the right-wing media is very, very simple, and it has nothing to do with size-of-government issues: Paul opposes the Iraq War (and war with Iran, waterboarding, and all the rest of what’s increasingly defined as the right-wing foreign policy package) and Huckabee doesn’t. Full stop, end of story.

    I think he’s right and it shows to what extent the war (and attendant issues) have crowded out traditional conservative concerns. The popularity of Rudy Giuliani is another example of this phenomenon at work.

    It’s illuminating to recall that during World War II there were people with impeccable progressive credentials who opposed the entry into the war and were castigated by FDR and his supporters as reactionaries. Two notable men of letters, Oswald Garrison Villard and John T. Flynn, were liberals who ended up on the wrong side of FDR and became victims of a seismic political realignment..

    Villard wrote for the Nation, was a founder of the anti-imperialist league, and advocate of civil rights. Flynn was a left-wing populist who wrote for The New Republic. Both men opposed U.S. entry into World War II and were associated with the America First committe. And both ended up breaking with their erstwhile allies who supported the war (Villard stopped writing for the Nation and Flynn was fired from his regular spot at the New Republic). They found themselves with new allies on the Right who opposed foreign intervention and both became harsh critics of FDR and his policies.

    What’s interesting is that both Villard and Flynn apparently underwent an ideological evoultion, becoming more right-wing in domestic as well as foreign policy (at least as right-wing was understood at the time). Both became sharply critical of the New Deal, calling it a precursor to an American form of fascism.

    This suggests that war has a way of bringing about political realignments. If “the Right” continues to be defined by a preference for preemptive war, the unitary executive, and “harsh interrogation techniques,” critics of these policies will find themselves to be on the Left de facto if not de jure. But it also raises the intriguing possibility of an ideological metamorphosis on domestic questions too, a la Villard and Flynn. Ron Paul, for instance, while clearly having libertarian leanings, couches a lot of his arguments in rhetoric drawn from the populist tradition. You see this when he talks about returning to the Constitution, about U.S. sovereignty, in his criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, and so on. And this kind of rhetoric has a lot in common with Left-wing populism.

    This doesn’t mean that I agree with conservative critics of Ron Paul that he’s a “leftist,” but once one raises the kinds of questions someone like Paul raises not just about the Iraq war, but the very premises of “conservative” foreign policy, it opens the door to further questions about the foundations of American capitalism as it’s currently practiced, about police powers, about the military-industrial complex and other traditionally “left-wing” issues.

    Personally speaking, I considered myself a fairly conventional conservative in 2000 and voted (reluctantly) for Bush, but became increasingly appalled at the conduct of the administration and the support it received from organized conservatism beginning around the time of the run-up to the Iraq war. But this eventually led me to re-think the entire panoply of conservative positions and abandon many of them. If conservatives could virtually en masse be so disastrously wrong, I thought, about foreign policy and issues like torture and executive power, what else were they wrong about? Since then I’ve departed from conservative orthodoxy on enough points that I would be hard-pressed to self-idenify that way anymore (politically I’m registered as an independent). But it was the increasing self-definition of conservatism in terms of the positions connected to the war that initially pushed me into the other camp.

  • Is Ron Paul crazy?

    Well, maybe. But he also manages to combine uncompromising rhetoric with political savvy, according to Jeremy Lott (via). This may help explain why Paul is doing better than anyone expected (his campaign reportedly now with more cash on hand than John McCain’s, for instance).

    One of the interesting thing about Paul is that he’s able to attract a variety of people who would otherwise likely be at odds with one another: libertarians, American nationalists skeptical of free trade and the “New World Order,” Christian homeschoolers, anti-war conservatives, and at least a few people on the left. The Republican base, however, remains steadfastly opposed to Paul’s anti-war stance and he’s probably too much of a libertarian for the mainstream Christian right, but it now looks like he at least has a chance of having a significant impact on the race, rather than simply being a gadfly.

  • Just War theory and the “charism of discernment”

    This post from Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh revisits some of the arguments of pro-Iraq war Catholics, in particular papal biographer George Weigel (link via Eric).

    Weigel’s notion of a “charism of political responsibility/discernment” is muddled at best. Here’s the relevant passage from his “Moral Clarity in a Time of War”:

    If the just war tradition is indeed a tradition of statecraft, then the proper role of religious leaders and public intellectuals is to do everything possible to clarify the moral issues at stake in a time of war, while recognizing that what we might call the “charism of responsibility” lies elsewhere-with duly constituted public authorities, who are more fully informed about the relevant facts and who must bear the weight of responsible decision-making and governance. It is simply clericalism to suggest that religious leaders and public intellectuals “own” the just war tradition in a singular way.

    As I have argued above, many of today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals have suffered severe amnesia about core components of the tradition, and can hardly be said to own it in any serious intellectual sense of ownership. But even if today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals were fully in possession of the tradition, the burden of decision-making would still lie elsewhere. Religious leaders and public intellectuals are called to nurture and develop the moral-philosophical riches of the just war tradition. The tradition itself, however, exists to serve statesmen.

    There is a charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service. That charism is not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies. Moral clarity in a time of war demands moral seriousness from public officials. It also demands a measure of political modesty from religious leaders and public intellectuals, in the give-and-take of democratic deliberation.

    Now, you could legitimately argue, I think, that public officials have the unique responsibility for making decisions to go to war, but that’s no reason to suppose that they are given a unique gift of discernment or judgment. It’s true that they will often have access to privileged information (though, fat lot of good it did ‘em in the case of Iraq) but that’s a separate issue.

    What Weigel seems to imply is that public officials are granted almost supernatural aid in deciding whether or not a given war is just. I can’t imagine what in the tradition would support this claim unless we’re reverting to the idea of the king as God’s anointed.

    Cavanaugh puts it well:

    Regardless of the facts of this particular case, moral judgments about war, like all moral judgments, are not primarily a matter of good information. Good information is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for sound moral judgments. Sound moral judgments depend on being formed in certain virtues. Why a Christian should assume that the president of a secular nation-state would be so formed – much less enjoy a certain “charism” of moral judgment – is a mystery to me. “Charism” is a theological term denoting a gift of the Holy Spirit. To apply such a term to whomever the electoral process of a secular nation-state happens to cough up does not strike me as theologically sound or practically wise.

    It’s also worth pointing out that the Constitution envisioned war being declared by Congress, not the President (Article I, Section 8). While again it’s true that public officials have a unique responsibility for making these decisions, they aren’t guaranteed a special wisdom. It seems to me that only an inflated, quasi-monarchical concept of the presidency would even be tempted to impute this kind of “charism” to the occupant of the Oval Office. If the decision to go to war was kept with Congress (or, heck, with a plebiscite), there would probably be much less temptation toward this kind of obscurantism.

  • Augustine, just war, prevention, preemption, etc.

    Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a follow-up on the question of preemptive/preventive war & Just War Theory. He riffs on an article from the Journal of Religious Ethics that discusses Augustine’s view of these matters (not available online, alas).

  • Preemption, prevention, and the Pope

    Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus have both offered some critical comments on Pope Benedict’s Easter address where Benedict reiterated (by implication, at least) some of his criticisms of the Iraq war. Novak has consistently remained a steadfast supporter of President Bush, so his comments aren’t particularly novel or surprising; he offers the now-cliched rebuttal that the Pope, much like the “American Left” is ignoring all the “good news” coming out of Iraq.

    Neuhaus, by contrast, has expressed at least some misgivings about the war over the last several months, but here tries to get the Bush Administration off the hook for its embrace of “preventive war,” which, as numerous theologians, including the Pope himself, have pointed out, is incompatible with Catholic teaching on Just War:

    Talk about preemptive war was part of the Bush administration’s less than careful (others would say arrogant) strategic language, most assertively expressed in the statement on national security of September 2002. Language about preemptive war was provocative and entirely unnecessary. As George Weigel has explained (here and here) in the pages of First Things, traditional just-war doctrine adequately provides for the use of military force in the face of a clear and present threat of aggression. Such a use of force is more accurately described as defensive rather than preemptive, and it is worth keeping in mind that in 2003 all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.

    There needs to be a distinction made between “preemptive” war and “preventive” war. Fr. Neuhaus is correct that preemption is allowed for in Just War thinking. If a country is facing an imminent threat it needn’t wait for the other side to attack before engaging in defensive action. The textbook (literally) example of this is Israel’s preemptive attack which began the Six Day War.

    But “preventive” war refers to initiating hostilities when the threat is only hypothetical. Daniel Larison dissects some of the problems with this concept here, but it is to say the least far harder to justify according to traditional Just War criteria.

    Fr. Neuhaus, unfortunately, seems to be engaging in a bit of sleight-of-hand here when he talks about the supposed threat from Iraq as “clear and present threat of aggression” and says that “all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.” The “threat” posed by Hussein’s regime was always a very hypothetical one, relying on a chain of inferences involving its possession of WMDs, its alleged ties to al-Qaeda (always the weakest of the Administration’s arguments), and the claim that it couldn’t be deterred from launching what would appear to be a suicidal attack on the U.S. via these terrorist proxies. Even Administration spokesmen shied away from describing this “threat” as “imminent.” In fact, President Bush himself in his 2003 State of the Union address said:

    Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

    In fact, after it became clear that the threat from Saddam’s Iraq was largely illusory, there was a concerted effort by Administration spokesmen to deny that they ever claimed that the threat was “imminent.”

    Now, it’s open to the defender of preventive war to argue that a threat needn’t be imminent for war to be justified, but that would represent a serious departure from the Just War tradition; to mention only one problem it’s very difficult to see how preventive war could be reconciled with the criterion of “last resort.” But, if so, it should at least be admitted that it is a departure. Either the Administration was claiming that that the threat from Saddam was imminent, in which case it was either wrong or dissembling, or it was not claiming the threat was imminent, in which case it went to war in contravention of accepted Just War principles.