The US debate on war with Iraq is spreading. The key issues - interests of Iraq's people, justice and morality of war, US power and UN role - were discussed at a major New York University event on 22 November. Two observers summarise and critique the panelists' views.
In the past two months, increasing numbers of Americans have broken their post-9/11 silence and have begun to question the Bush administration’s foreign policy. In its National Security Strategy paper, the Bush doctrine expresses an unprecedented lust for imperial extension as it outlines a willingness to wield pre-emptive military force on any potential threat to American hegemony anywhere, any time.
span class="pullquote-right">The event Ambiguities of Intervention: Iraq and After was held at NYU on 22 November, 2002.
Facing worldwide criticism of its rhetoric and a sceptical response to its motives, the administration has vilified critics and threatened opponents. American anti-war protestors, never slow in the art of vilification themselves, have stepped up the attacks on Bush’s overblown rhetoric. But they are partially missing the point. Irresponsible as the Bush doctrine may be, outright dismissals of American power equally abdicate intellectual or moral responsibility. The question of the moment is not whether America exerts its will, but how.
Appeasement versus imperialism
Two events at New York University (NYU) last week illustrate the different responses being articulated in the US. On 20 November, a thousand NYU students staged a ‘walk out’ to protest against policy on Iraq. ‘This is what democracy looks like!’ echoed down the stone corridors of Broadway as the students breached a half-hearted police line and flooded into the street. ‘No Blood For Oil!’ boomed through Washington Square, where the students burned mock draft cards and speakers virulently denounced American imperialism.
Protesting against a war that may never be waged, the demonstrators were uninterested in the complexities of the Middle East. Such matters were swept aside by the heavy hand of the anti-imperialist, old-left ideology that dominates the peace movement’s public persona.
Two days after the students’ protest, a panel convened two blocks away to discuss the ambiguities of the situation. The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, former United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary General Sir Brian Urquhart, former Iranian Ambassador Mansour Farhang, historian Frances Fitzgerald, political scientist Michael Walzer and cultural critic Todd Gitlin explored a set of pressing questions.
Can a democratic Iraq come into existence? Is the US morally obligated to help create it? Does this obligation trump considerations of just war among states? In what way is the new American foreign policy – as spelled out in the Bush doctrine – a radical departure from the past? Can pre-emptive war be justified, morally as well as strategically? Does the UN matter, above and beyond its immediate purpose as a policy instrument? If not, what might be the fallout in the international order?
NYU professor Susie Linfield said in her opening remarks that she organised the panel in reaction to the excessive narrowness of the debate over Iraq on both the right and the left. Until now, dual paradigms have framed the debate: Munich and Vietnam. The spectre of appeasement confronts that of imperialism. As negative expectations, the twin scenarios reveal the fatalism of the current discussion, which is largely beholden to the politics of fear. Trapped within this framework, many Americans feel a deep ambivalence about their government’s motives in Iraq, yet they also feel powerless to oppose its policies.
‘War in Iraq is not a smiley-faced option,’ Todd Gitlin said. ‘Neither is the absence of war in Iraq. I don’t see how to have a nice day one way or the other. Certainly not for Iraqis. But the Bush administration does think it knows how to have a nice day by giving war a chance.’
Democracy and revolution?
Kanan Makiya argued that Bush is right. He said that the Iraqi people – who would pay the greatest price – overwhelmingly support a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In addition, he revealed that ‘arch-warmongers’ Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had fully supported the exiled coalition, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and its democratic project, in which Makiya himself is a key player. By contrast, he said that Colin Powell was ‘completely uninterested’ in Iraqi democracy.
In Makiya’s vision, a US-sponsored regime change would liberate Iraq and lay the foundations for a democratic Iraq. This new Iraqi state would relinquish its Arab character, protect minorities and voluntarily disarm, providing a new and desperately-needed model in Arab politics.
Makiya challenged his fellow panelists – and Americans generally – to move beyond the tactical considerations of Saddam Hussein’s disarmament, into a moral realm of argument. The INC, ‘incoherent, confused and fractured that it is’, is properly revolutionary because it informs us of the unfulfilled potential for a democracy established from within an Arab state.
‘The past is no precedent for what I am talking about,’ Makiya insisted. ‘You can crush us if you oppose this war. Or you can support democrats in Iraq and demand that this war be fought for a higher purpose. Even if there is only a sliver of a chance that what I am talking about might happen, then you have a moral obligation to do it.’
Mansour Farhang condemned this vision as ‘romantic’, though he himself had hinted minutes earlier that ‘weapons of mass destruction are symptoms, not the cause of the present crisis.’ Farhang, who portrayed the dominant Iranian perspective on regime change, expressed little faith in the possibility of a democratic Iraq emerging from the INC–US bond.
In exile, working within free democratic societies, ‘the Iraqi opposition has had a thirty-year opportunity to create cohesive democratic organisations, and they have not done it,’ Farhang emphasised. ‘All these people are not suddenly going to be transformed, with the rest of the population following. And now they learn about democracy from Rumsfeld and Cheney? Any governing system fostering that kind of activity in a foreign country must have a totally different attitude toward its own underprivileged than the US does.’
Where’s the evidence?
Michael Walzer indicated that even a morally pleasing prospect, such as Iraqi democracy, could not justify a strike against Iraq. Evidence, not morality, allows the US to effectively rethink its role in preventative terms rather than reactive ones. He posed the question of whether a pre-emptive war can be just. Yes, he answered.
‘But from the absence of evidence suggesting not only the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction but also their imminent use, pre-emption is not an accurate description of what the president was threatening. Pre-emption and imminence go together, but nobody expects an Iraqi attack right away so there is nothing to pre-empt.’
US hawks often point to the Israeli attack on Iraqi nuclear installations at Osirik in 1981 as a precedent for their preferred policy in Iraq. Walzer shared the view that this attack was just, but believed the argument does not apply in 2002. ‘The now or never example of 1981 would, in fact, seem to justify doing everything we can right now to make the inspections work.’
But the inspections process depends in turn on the effectiveness of the UN. The UN is crucial in the successful navigation of the Iraqi crisis, and vice versa. If inspections fail and the UN does not enforce its will in consequence, the role of the institution could be severely weakened.
‘I feel it is vitally important to have a multilateral base for action, that is, a Security Council authority, and if possible for the subsequent operation to be a multinational operation as well,’ Sir Brian Urquhart said. ‘Unilateral action, even if it is a military success, could have extremely dangerous effects, not just in the Middle East, but in the world at large.’
If the administration’s warmongering rhetoric is any indication, Urquhart’s vision may well be on the losing side of history. Psychological warfare is, of course, a long-lasting foreign policy tool, yet the National Security Strategy codifies slapdash rhetoric into a chilling vision of the future.
America first
‘The National Security Strategy makes clear that the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the US has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union,’ said Frances Fitzgerald. Behind the policy, there lies ‘an assumption among some that we live in a Hobbesian world in which national interests never coincide. But an international social contract also exists, gaining legitimacy from a network of treaties and agreements. Tear these up and you have to worry about a self-fulfilling prophecy. The world will become more Hobbesian and far more dangerous. The administration has told us nothing of the costs and risks of an attack on Iraq to American troops, to the war on terrorism, to our friends and allies in the region. So we are left to wonder whether they’ve considered them enough themselves.’
Lurking behind the administration’s rhetoric lies an ‘America-first’ ideology that has Europeans in particular searching for ways to deter the US. Like all foreign policies, it tries to frame war as a moral and just enterprise. For months, the administration seemed to proceed backwards, trying to create justifications for a war it had already decided to wage. Officials fudged issues and made misleading statements, yet they established parameters for the ‘just war’ dialogue that the public widely accepted. Debates over American policy now invariably turn to discussion of the pretexts for war and the mechanisms for waging it. By losing sight of alternatives to the dominant discourse, dissent has begun to serve precisely the cause it opposes, abdicating the pursuit of a global ethics.
Kanan Makiya’s passionate vision requires us to enter the imaginary realm of international morality. Can we imagine a solution to the Iraq crisis that is both moral and practical for the citizens of the US and Iraq? Why, we may ask, wouldn’t the current US administration support such a solution if it did exist?
Quite apart from the old-left organisers, non-traditional protestors now hitting the streets – religious groups, senior citizens and nuclear families chanting ‘No Blood For Oil’ – don’t entrust this moral task to the Bush group. Sceptical about the stated motive of disarming Saddam, they agree that the driving forces of this crisis are oil and the will to power.
Makiya, unfortunately, refused to address these factors. He seemed far too willing to accept Cheney’s and Wolfowitz’s endorsements of an independent Iraqi democracy. When an audience member asked if their aim might not be to weaken Iraq and control it, he glibly replied that he refused to judge political leaders on the basis of their personalities or motivations. The audience squirmed: but the speakers offered no objections.
The debate: a balance sheet
Most rational individuals believe the world would be a better place without Saddam Hussein. But last week’s panelists agreed than an outright war to remove him is unjust and dangerous. At this point, they said, only the threat of force is just and necessary. Focusing on the problem of weapons inspections, consensus eventually settled upon a surprisingly anti-climactic argument from which only Makiya dissented: the use of force is just if Saddam overtly defies the UN. A war to disarm him must then be fought, preferably under UN auspices.
Are these new ideas? As Gitlin pointed out, force is already in use – and has been for twelve years – in the maintenance of no-fly zones, sanctions and inspections. Resolution 1441 intensified but did not fundamentally alter the substance of the ‘just war’ debate.
Nor does the panelists’ vision offer an answer to the problem of an anti-American backlash in the Middle East that they themselves posed. Fitzgerald warned that Anglo–American bilateral action would create a dangerous perception of the West versus Islam. It seems unlikely that such ideas in the Middle East would fade away if America and Britain invaded Iraq at the head of a nominal UN coalition.
Where does this leave us? What are the students in Washington Square (and we are two of them) to conclude when three hours of brilliant dialogue among distinguished thinkers produces a conclusion comfortably in line with the administration’s current approach? How can we transport the speakers’ broad rhetoric outside the narrow range of actions they proposed?
If we are to debate the role of morality in foreign policy, then we must imagine a morality that extends beyond national borders and beyond immediate policies. Makiya’s reminder of the Iraqis’ volition and sacrifice should give us pause. The hard left denounces war in Iraq to spare innocent Iraqi lives, as it also opposed the Taliban’s overthrow a year ago. Peace activists argue that American policy, since it is based on selfish motives, cannot be just. Yet the Afghans overwhelmingly celebrated the Taliban’s flight, and few Iraqis would mourn the death of Saddam. In Afghanistan, a moral outcome – albeit temporary – emerged as an unintended consequence of the war on terrorism, an unabashed America-first policy. By refusing to entertain this possibility, the left has relinquished its true role of defending the oppressed.
On the right, the stated motive on Iraq – protecting American citizens from weapons of mass destruction – has a plausible veneer of morality but an uncertain factual basis. A series of improvised arguments have emerged, from Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaida to Bush’s mushroom-cloud-as-smoking-gun imagery. But the moral case for Iraqi liberation has been given a scant hearing. Perhaps Bush will soon begin to deploy the argument more consistently as a policy tool.
How will the democratic public inside America, and those in societies around the world, respond? Will they be offered, and in turn support, a coherent critique of Washington’s ruling clique? Or will they forever find themselves hoping for peace while justifying war?
