[Peace-discuss] 'The Moral Quandary' from The Nation

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   The Moral Quandary 
   by Michael Massing


   In late November, the journalism department at New York University
   hosted a forum on Iraq. The first five speakers, who included such
   liberal luminaries as historian Frances FitzGerald, cultural critic
   Todd Gitlin, former UN official Brian Urquhart and political
   scientist Michael Walzer, all expressed varying degrees of skepticism
   about the wisdom of invading Iraq. Then it was Kanan Makiya's turn.
   The son of a prominent Iraqi architect who came to this country in
   the late 1960s to attend MIT and never left, Makiya has spent the
   past fifteen years publicizing the horrors taking place in his native
   land. In Republic of Fear (1989) and Cruelty and Silence (1993) he
   chronicled the instruments of repression used by Saddam Hussein to
   brutalize his people and to suppress the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings
   after the Gulf War.

   Now Makiya warned the audience of 200 that he would be striking a
   "discordant note" with the rest of the panel. "When you look at this
   coming war from the point of view of the people who are going to pay
   the greatest price--the people of Iraq--they overwhelmingly want it,"
   Makiya declared. He discussed the steps he and other Iraqi exiles
   were taking to convince the Bush Administration to make the
   installation of a democratic government in Baghdad one of its chief
   war aims. And he urged those in attendance to support that goal. A
   war to overthrow Saddam, he said, "could have enormous transformative
   power throughout the Middle East." If there is even a "sliver of a
   chance--even 5 to 10 percent--that what I'm talking about might
   happen," Makiya said, those committed to bringing democracy and
   justice to the world have a "moral obligation" to support military
   action in Iraq. Amid applause from the audience, the other panelists
   shifted uncomfortably.

   Their discomfort is shared by many American liberals. For, on Iraq,
   the left finds itself in a quandary, torn between two fundamental
   principles. One is anti-imperialism--a deep suspicion of US military
   action abroad, especially when undertaken unilaterally. The other is
   humanitarianism--an impulse to see America use its influence to
   promote freedom and human rights around the world. In some cases,
   like Vietnam, the left has united under the anti-imperial banner; in
   others, like Bosnia, it has largely embraced the humanitarian
   standard. In Iraq, both principles seem to apply. How to weigh them?
   Only by coolly assessing the validity of the humanitarian and
   anti-intervention arguments can liberals hope to develop a position
   that is both coherent and defensible.

   The humanitarian argument has been put forward most vigorously by
   Christopher Hitchens, which is unfortunate, since he's been unable to
   separate the issue from his own messy breakup with the left. In a
   recent article in the Washington Post, for instance, Hitchens
   denounced Saddam Hussein and antiwar activists with equal zest. On
   the day Saddam falls, he taunted, "I am booked to have a reunion in
   Baghdad with several old comrades who have been through hell. We
   shall not be inviting anyone who spent this precious time urging
   democratic countries to give Saddam another chance."

   Such posturing has made it easy to dismiss Hitchens's views as mere
   self-promotion. But others have made the case for regime change more
   persuasively. One is Salman Rushdie. No friend of US foreign policy,
   Rushdie, in an op-ed piece in the Post, came out unequivocally for
   military action in Iraq. The case against Saddam, he wrote, is based
   on his decades-long "assault on the Iraqi people. He has impoverished
   them, murdered them, gassed and tortured them, sent them off to die
   by the tens of thousands in futile wars, repressed them, gagged them,
   bludgeoned them and then murdered them some more. Saddam Hussein and
   his ruthless gang of cronies from his home village of Tikrit are
   homicidal criminals, and their Iraq is a living hell." Rushdie added
   that "all the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the
   leaders and potential leaders who still survive, are asking, even
   pleading for the proposed regime change."

   Probably the strongest brief for intervention is The Threatening
   Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, by Kenneth Pollack. A longtime
   analyst at the CIA who served on President Clinton's National
   Security Council, Pollack favors intervention mainly for strategic
   reasons, viewing Saddam as so serious a threat to international
   peace and security that he must be removed. But Pollack's horror at
   Saddam's brutality pervades and shapes his argument. In his book, he
   grimly describes the techniques used by the Baathist regime to
   intimidate and terrorize the Iraqi people. Iraq, Pollack writes, has
   a dozen intelligence and security agencies employing up to 500,000
   people. Torture, killing, rape, genocide and other cruelties are
   parceled out to as many of the regime's personnel as possible so as
   to implicate them in its crimes. Tortures include gouging out the
   eyes of children to force confessions from their parents, cutting
   out the tongues of critics to silence them and dragging in a man's
   wife or daughter to be raped in front of him. While ordinary Iraqis
   must subsist on their monthly ration cards, Saddam has, since the
   end of the Gulf War, built fifty new palaces with "gold-plated
   faucets and artificial rivers, lakes, and waterfalls that employ
   pumping equipment that could have been used to address the country's
   desperate water and sanitation problems." When Saddam's efforts to
   obtain a nuclear weapon are added in, Pollack writes, it's clear
   that both the Iraqi people and the world at large would benefit from
   his ouster.

   Do most Iraqis agree with this assessment? Given Saddam's
   totalitarian control, it's impossible to say. Some newspaper accounts
   have reported more popular opposition to the prospect of a US
   invasion than Kanan Makiya asserted at the NYU forum. But Peter
   Bouckaert, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, recently spent
   three weeks in Iraqi Kurdistan, and virtually everyone he met
   supported military action. "People see this as the best chance in
   their lifetime to have a change of government," Bouckaert says.
   "They're desperate to get rid of Saddam." He added: "A lot of us in
   the progressive left have a certain reticence about going to war. So
   it was a shock for me to go to Kurdistan and see so many people in
   favor of such a course."

   Some critics of intervention argue that Saddam, by having extended
   women's rights, free education and other social benefits, has a base
   of Sunni supporters who lend his regime some legitimacy. Perhaps so,
   but, judging from a visit I made to Iraq in the summer of 1991, I
   wonder how large that base might be. Arriving two months after the
   end of the Gulf War, I had the rare advantage of being able to travel
   around Baghdad without a government "minder." Although Saddam's
   secret police were as prevalent as ever, local residents were so
   disgusted with his excesses that they found ways to communicate their
   anger. It was not just the executions and mass imprisonments that
   they despised but the two disastrous and meaningless wars they'd been
   forced to fight over the previous decade, bloodbaths that had left
   hundreds of thousands dead and maimed and that had turned their
   country into an international pariah.

   It's sometimes said that Saddam is just one of many tyrants around
   the world. Both North Korea and Saudi Arabia, our great ally, have
   equally odious regimes. Why single out Saddam? Well, Saddam
   clearly qualifies as a butcher, and the impossibility of unseating
   all the world's dictators seems an unconvincing reason not to
   seize the chance to depose one of them. When viewed from the
   perspective of a Kanan Makiya, the case for regime change in Iraq
   does indeed seem strong.

   But what about when that case is viewed from the standpoint of the
   rest of the world? In evaluating the justness of any military
   venture, it's critical to weigh the anticipated benefits against the
   expected costs. In the case of invading Iraq, those costs seem
   extremely high. A US-led intervention, while liberating the Iraqi
   people, might well make everyone else less safe.

   To begin, there's the continuing threat from Al Qaeda. The mounting
   series of attacks on "soft" targets from Tunisia to Bali to Mombasa
   show how lethal the danger from militant Islam remains. Even so
   staunch an advocate of war as Kenneth Pollack believes that the
   United States should not confront Saddam until it has contained Al
   Qaeda. "Even if Iraq is only a few years from acquiring a nuclear
   weapon," he writes in The Threatening Storm, "the fact is that
   al-Qa'eda is attacking us right now and has demonstrated a capability
   that Saddam never has--the ability to reach into the US homeland and
   kill three thousand American civilians." Immediately after September
   11, he adds, "we rightly devoted all of the United States'
   diplomatic, intelligence, and military attention to eradicating the
   threat from al-Qa'eda, and as long as that remains the case we should
   not indulge in a distraction as great as toppling Saddam."

   Already, the preparations for war are distracting Washington from the
   task of rebuilding Afghanistan. Every week brings fresh reports of
   bombings, coup plots and assassination attempts. Afghan officials
   from President Hamid Karzai on down have pleaded with the United
   States to expand the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan beyond
   Kabul--a critical step, they argue, to maintain order. But the
   Pentagon has refused, in part because it wants to keep its forces
   free for an assault on Baghdad. If the Karzai government does
   collapse, Afghanistan would no doubt slide back into anarchy, and the
   country would once again be open for business to the terrorists.

   The Bush Administration's preoccupation with Iraq is similarly
   distracting it from the ongoing violence in the Middle East. War
   advocates maintain that ousting a tyrant like Saddam should not be
   held hostage to the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, but
   only the most blinkered observer could fail to see how Washington's
   neglect of that issue is inflaming anti-American sentiment in the
   Arab world. As the Washington Post recently reported, more than sixty
   Israeli settlements have taken root on the West Bank over the past
   two years--to resounding silence from the Bush Administration.
   Writing in the Financial Times, Douglas Hurd, the former British
   foreign secretary, noted that a quick Anglo-American military victory
   in Iraq would result in "a sullen and humiliated Arab nation" that
   could lead to acts of violence against Israel and Western interests.
   Calling on the West to change its priorities, Hurd urged that the
   coming weeks be used "to galvanize the peace process and separate the
   terrorists from the majority of Arabs who still want peace. While the
   opportunity is still there we need to show that we in the west are
   concerned with justice for Palestine and security for Israel."

   A US assault on Iraq could further incite Muslim extremists.
   Columnists like Jim Hoagland and Charles Krauthammer like to mock
   those who invoke the Arab "street." And it's true that most
   predictions of popular uprisings in the Arab world have proved
   wrong. But the main worry here is not a grassroots rebellion but a
   swelling of the terrorists' ranks. An American push toward Baghdad
   would provide an excellent recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. What's
   more, as Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International,
   recently pointed out, Washington has been so consumed with its
   military campaign against terrorism (and now with Iraq) that it has
   neglected the ideological front in that war, especially the effort
   to foster political reform in the Arab world. The United States, he
   wrote, "must put this ideological struggle at the heart of the war
   on terror."

   Then there's the matter of casualties. It's remarkable how few of the
   proponents of war address this. Jonathan Chait, in a long article in
   The New Republic about why liberals should support a war to oust
   Saddam, devoted all of three sentences to the subject. We seem to
   have entered the era of the "zipless" war, in which cities get
   stormed and missiles get fired with nary a hint of blood. To his
   credit, Pollack does discuss the issue. If Iraq is invaded, he
   writes, the number of American dead could range from 500 to 1,000 if
   things go well and as many as 10,000 if they don't. The Iraqi toll
   would likely be much higher. During the four-day ground attack of the
   Gulf War, Pollack notes, between 10,000 and 30,000 Iraqis died, and
   an invasion now could claim similar numbers--especially if Saddam's
   Republican Guard puts up a fight in the streets of Baghdad. The
   carnage would increase further if Saddam, feeling cornered, decided
   to deploy his biological and chemical weapons (if, in fact, he turns
   out to have them).

   Once the fighting stops, of course, the United States would face the
   monumental task of rebuilding Iraq. To do it right, Pollack
   maintains, America would have to station up to 100,000 troops in the
   country for five to ten years, at a cost of up to $20 billion, and
   spend another $5 billion to $10 billion in aid. Is the Bush
   Administration willing to make such a commitment? It certainly hasn't
   said so in its many public statements on the issue. And its behavior
   in post-Taliban Afghanistan inspires little confidence. The
   Administration has been so stingy with reconstruction aid that
   President Karzai has literally had to come begging to Washington.

   "If we're going to invade, the President has a responsibility to make
   his case--to explain how long it will take, and what resources we'll
   have to put in," says Mark Danner, who has written extensively about
   Haiti and Bosnia. "He's not doing that. We have to read about postwar
   plans in the New York Times. It's remarkable." Danner, who in early
   October joined such other liberals as Derek Bok, Aryeh Neier and
   Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in signing an ad in the Times opposing the
   war, says, "The most forceful argument for going to war is helping
   the Iraqi people. But that's not the reason for this war. I don't
   remember anybody in the Administration talking about the Iraqi people
   before August. Rather, it's about America's larger strategic goals in
   the region. They're going to get rid of this guy, then get out.
   During the 2000 campaign, George Bush was totally against
   nation-building. And I don't see any sign of change in that."

   Indeed, Kanan Makiya's vision for a post-Saddam Iraq seems
   excessively rosy. In his talk at NYU, Makiya noted that the
   democratic forces within the opposition Iraqi National Congress have
   received the most support from the more hawkish members of the Bush
   Administration: Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. This drew skepticism
   from fellow panelist Mansour Farhang. A former Iranian diplomat and
   staunch opponent of the current regime in Teheran, Farhang said the
   people of both Iraq and Iran would rejoice at seeing a new,
   democratic government in Baghdad. But, he quickly added, he doubted
   that America would actually install one. The Iraqi opposition,
   working in exile, "has had a thirty-year opportunity to create
   cohesive democratic organizations, and it has not done so. And now
   they're learning about democracy from Rumsfeld and Cheney?"

   The history of US policy toward Iraq reinforces such doubts. Samantha
   Power, in researching her book "A Problem From Hell": America and the
   Age of Genocide, spent three years studying documents about the
   Anfal, Saddam's murderous campaign against the Kurds. Saddam's rule
   has been so abusive, she says, that Iraq has "sacrificed its right to
   sovereignty. If any of us lived in a country like that, we'd be
   praying for global rescue. We'd be looking up in the sky and hoping
   to see planes."

   In the course of researching the Anfal, however, Power also saw
   declassified documents about the US response--or lack of it. At the
   time, Washington was tacitly backing Saddam in his war with Iran, and
   it did not want to endanger its ties to him. As one secret State
   Department report stated, "Human rights and chemical weapons use
   aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run
   parallel with those of Iraq." Some of the people responsible for
   making Iraq policy back then are in the current Administration, Power
   notes, and that makes her question the sincerity of their intentions
   toward the Iraqi people.

   Moreover, Saddam, despite his brutal record, is not now carrying out
   the type of mass slaughter he did against the Kurds in the late
   1980s. Iraq today is not like Rwanda in 1994, when Hutus were
   massacring Tutsis, nor Bosnia in the early and mid-1990s, when Serbs
   were killing Muslims. So, however cruel Saddam's regime might be, it
   is not perpetrating the type of atrocities that could normally
   justify a humanitarian intervention. For this reason, Human Rights
   Watch has not called for intervention in Iraq, as it did in the cases
   of Rwanda and Bosnia. (Peter Bouckaert, despite his encounters in
   Iraqi Kurdistan, remains opposed to military action.)

   Finally, there's the fundamental fact that we have not been attacked
   by Iraq--a major distinction with Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. If Saddam
   did obtain a nuclear weapon, of course, it would represent a major
   peril, but most experts agree that the threat is not imminent,
   undermining the Administration's case for a pre-emptive strike.
   "Pre-emption and imminence go together," Michael Walzer observed at
   the NYU forum. "Nobody expects an Iraqi attack right away, so there
   is nothing to pre-empt." Nor, he said, could a war against Iraq be
   considered just, according to the strict criteria for making such a
   judgment. What is justifiable, Walzer said, is "using the threat of
   force to enforce the inspections system."

   But what happens if that threat fails? Strikingly, at the NYU forum,
   FitzGerald, Gitlin, Urquhart and Walzer all agreed that if the United
   Nations finds Iraq in noncompliance with Resolution 1441, it would
   have no choice but to act. "If there's a clear violation of the UN,
   we would have to go to war," FitzGerald said, summing up the panel's
   view. Certainly a war conducted under the aegis of the UN would be
   preferable to one waged unilaterally by the United States; a
   UN-authorized assault, by embodying the collective will of the
   international community, could blunt the anger that might erupt if
   the world's lone superpower went it alone.

   Yet here, it seems, the left faces a trap. By insisting that any
   action against Iraq be undertaken multilaterally, it seems bound
   to endorse the decisions of the UN--even if they include a
   declaration of war. Yet, as was clear during the deliberations
   over Iraq, the Security Council has become more and more
   subservient to the will of the United States. What's more, the
   forces unleashed by an invasion--even if backed by the UN--could
   still be catastrophic. If the Security Council sanctions a war,
   does that automatically make it just?

   There must be another way. One nonviolent alternative, proposed
   recently in these pages by Andrew Mack (a former aide to UN Secretary
   General Kofi Annan), would seek to bolster the internal Iraqi
   opposition by lifting most of the sanctions on Iraq and opening up
   the country to foreign investment and other forms of international
   engagement [see "Containing Saddam," December 16]. A more hardheaded
   policy of "containment-plus," proposed by Morton Halperin and others,
   would combine an expansion of the no-fly zones in Iraq to cover the
   entire country, more intensive surveillance and inspections, and the
   use of precision airstrikes against targets not destroyed voluntarily
   on the ground. If evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program did emerge, a
   raid like the one Israel carried out in 1981--this time with UN
   backing--could effectively dispose of it.

   The great drawback of such an approach, of course, is that it would
   do little to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people. Sadly, one
   might simply have to live with that. In the end, the moral case for
   intervening in Iraq is very strong, but not strong enough.


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