[Peace-discuss] Unanswerable

[C. G. Estabrook]

TUESDAY, MAR 22, 2011 10:01 ET
GLENN GREENWALD
The manipulative pro-war argument in Libya

Advocating for the U.S.'s military action in Libya, The New Republic's John 
Judis lays out the argument which many of his fellow war advocates are making: 
that those who oppose the intervention are guilty of indifference to the plight 
of the rebels and to Gadaffi's tyranny:

So I ask myself, would these opponents of U.S. intervention (as part of U.N. 
Security Council approved action), have preferred:

(1) That gangs of mercenaries, financed by the country’s oil wealth, conduct a 
bloodbath against Muammar Qaddafi’s many opponents?

(2) That Qaddafi himself, wounded, enraged, embittered, and still in power, 
retain control of an important source of the world’s oil supply, particularly 
for Europe, and be able to spend the wealth he derives from it to sow discord in 
the region?

(3) And that the movement toward democratization in the Arab world -- which has 
spread from Tunisia to Bahrain, and now includes such unlikely locales as Syria 
-- be dealt an enormous setback through the survival of one of region's most 
notorious autocrats?

If you answer "Who cares?" to each of these, I have no counter-arguments to 
offer, but if you worry about two or three of these prospects, then I think you 
have to reconsider whether Barack Obama did the right thing in lending American 
support to this intervention.

Note how, in Judis' moral world, there are only two possibilities: one can 
either support the American military action in Libya or be guilty of a "who 
cares?" attitude toward Gadaffi's butchery. At least as far as this specific 
line of pro-war argumentation goes, this is just 2003 all over again. Back then, 
those opposed to the war in Iraq were deemed pro-Saddam: indifferent to the 
repression and brutalities suffered by the Iraqi people at his hands and willing 
to protect his power. Now, those opposed to U.S. involvement in the civil war in 
Libya are deemed indifferent to the repression and brutalities suffered by the 
Libyan people from Gadaffi and willing to protect his power. This rationale is 
as flawed logically as it is morally.

Why didn't this same moral calculus justify the attack on Iraq? Saddam Hussein 
really was a murderous, repressive monster: at least Gadaffi's equal when it 
came to psychotic blood-spilling. Those who favored regime change there made 
exactly the same arguments as Judis (and many others) make now for Libya: it's 
humane and noble to topple a brutal dictator; using force is the only way to 
protect parts of the population from slaughter (in Iraq, the Kurds and Shiites; 
in Libya, the rebels); it's not in America's interests to allow a deranged 
despot (or his deranged sons) to control a vital oil-rich nation; and removing 
the tyrant will aid the spread of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Why 
does that reasoning justify war in Libya but not Iraq?

In Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt argues that "liberal interventionists" and 
neocons share most of the same premises about America's foreign policy and its 
role in the world, with the sole exception being that the former seek to act 
through international institutions to legitimize their military actions while 
the latter don't. Strongly bolstering Walt's view is this morning's pro-war New 
York Times Editorial, which ends this way:

Libya is a specific case: Muammar el-Qaddafi is erratic, widely reviled, armed 
with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism. If he is allowed to 
crush the opposition, it would chill pro-democracy movements across the Arab world.

Wasn't all of that at least as true of Saddam Hussein? Wasn't that exactly the 
"humanitarian" case made to justify that invasion? And wasn't that exactly the 
basis for the accusation against Iraq war opponents that they were indifferent 
to Saddam's tyranny -- i.e., if you oppose the war to remove Saddam, it means 
you are ensuring that he and his sons will stay in power, which in turn means 
you are indifferent to his rape rooms and mass graves and are willing to stand 
by while the Iraqi people suffer under his despotism? How can the 
"indifference-to-suffering" accusation be fair when made against opponents of 
the Libya war but not when made against Iraq war opponents?

But my real question for Judis (and those who voice the same accusations against 
Libya intervention opponents) is this: do you support military intervention to 
protect protesters in Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies from 
suppression, or to stop the still-horrendous suffering in the Sudan, or to 
prevent the worsening humanitarian crisis in the Ivory Coast? Did you advocate 
military intervention to protect protesters in Iran and Egypt, or to stop the 
Israeli slaughter of hundreds of trapped innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon 
or its brutal and growing occupation of the West Bank?

If not, doesn't that necessarily mean -- using this same reasoning -- that 
you're indifferent to the suffering of all of those people, willing to stand 
idly by while innocents are slaughtered, to leave in place brutal tyrants who 
terrorize their own population or those in neighboring countries? Or, in those 
instances where you oppose military intervention despite widespread suffering, 
do you grant yourself the prerogative of weighing other factors: such as the 
finitude of resources, doubt about whether U.S. military action will hurt rather 
than help the situation, cynicism about the true motives of the U.S. government 
in intervening, how intervention will affect other priorities, the civilian 
deaths that will inevitably occur at our hands, the precedents that such 
intervention will set for future crises, and the moral justification of invading 
foreign countries? For those places where you know there is widespread violence 
and suffering yet do not advocate for U.S. military action to stop it, is it 
fair to assume that you are simply indifferent to the suffering you refuse to 
act to prevent, or do you recognize there might be other reasons why you oppose 
the intervention?

In the very same Editorial where it advocates for the Libya intervention on the 
grounds of stopping government violence and tyranny, The New York Times 
acknowledges about its pro-intervention view: "not in Bahrain or Yemen, even 
though we condemn the violence against protesters in both countries." Are those 
who merely "condemn" the violence by those two U.S. allies but who do not want 
to intervene to stop it guilty of indifference to the killings there? What 
rationale is there for intervening in Libya but not in those places? In a very 
well-argued column, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson today provides the 
only plausible answer:

Anyone looking for principle and logic in the attack on Moammar Gaddafi's 
tyrannical regime will be disappointed. . . . Why is Libya so different? 
Basically, because the dictators of Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia -- also 
Jordan and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, for that matter -- are friendly, 
cooperative and useful. Gaddafi is not. . . .

Gaddafi is crazy and evil; obviously, he wasn’t going to listen to our advice 
about democracy. The world would be fortunate to be rid of him. But war in Libya 
is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same 
standard we set for defiant ones. If not, then please spare us all the homilies 
about universal rights and freedoms. We'll know this isn’t about justice, it's 
about power.

I understand -- and absolutely believe -- that many people who support the 
intervention in Libya are doing so for good and noble reasons: disgust at 
standing by and watching Gadaffi murder hundreds or thousands of rebels. I also 
believe that some people who supported the attack on Iraq did so out of disgust 
for Saddam Hussein and a desire to see him removed from power. It's commendable 
to oppose that type of despotism, and I understand -- and share -- the impulse.

But what I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that 
the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out 
of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny 
and violence against one's own citizens. This is the same government that 
enthusiastically supports and props up regimes around the world that do exactly 
that, and that have done exactly that for decades.

By all accounts, one of the prime administration advocates for this war was 
Hillary Clinton; she's the same person who, just two years ago, said this about 
the torture-loving Egyptian dictator: "I really consider President and Mrs. 
Mubarak to be friends of my family." They're the same people overseeing multiple 
wars that routinely result in all sorts of atrocities. They are winking and 
nodding to their Yemeni, Bahrani and Saudi friends who are doing very similar 
things to what Gadaffi is doing, albeit (for now) on a smaller scale. They just 
all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim 
nation because they just can't stand idly by and tolerate internal repression 
and violence against civilians? Please.

For the reasons I identified the other day, there are major differences between 
the military actions in Iraq and Libya. But what is true of both -- as is true 
for most wars -- is that each will spawn suffering for some people even if they 
alleviate it for others. Dropping lots of American bombs on a country tends to 
kill a lot of innocent people. For that reason, indifference to suffering is 
often what war proponents -- not war opponents -- are guilty of. But whatever 
else is true, the notion that opposing a war is evidence of indifference to 
tyranny and suffering is equally simple-minded, propagandistic, manipulative and 
intellectually bankrupt in both the Iraq and Libya contexts. And, in particular, 
those who opposed or still oppose intervention in Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, 
the Sudan, against Israel, in the Ivory Coast -- and/or any other similar places 
where there is widespread human-caused suffering -- have no business advancing 
that argument.

http://www.salon.com/news/libya/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/03/22/libya