Iraq would have been a disaster even if it had been based on noble intentions

Posted by Joshua Holland at 9:17 PM on May 15, 2006.

It’s tragic that we live in a country where we even have to debate whether we should go to war for anything short of absolute necessity. But we do; it’s the reality of our political culture.

The question's been debated in the comments of this post, after a reader asked if “self interested war [is] necessarily wrong?”

Let's assume the primary strategic purpose of the War in Iraq was to [further] America's economic self interest. Let's also assume that when the decision to go to War was made, it was reasonable to project that life for the average Iraqi would be better after the American led invasion than under Hussein. Under these assumptions, why is it necessarily wrong, ie immoral, to invade?

After 9/11, this has become a fairly common question, and it needs to be answered firmly or we run the risk of ushering in a particularly bloody era of almost permanent warfare.

I responded that we could go further and, for the sake of argument, say that those assumptions were, in fact, true. Because Iraq would have been a disaster even if it had been based on noble intentions and everything had gone perfectly:

The U.S. is a hegemonic power. Our actions create precedents that other countries can follow in the future. We shape international law, which is an important but very, very weak thing.

We've changed the standard from "war as a last resort" to war when it's in our self interest, as long as we assume that it'll make "life better" for the target population. That rolls back international law and international norms to before World War II, before Nuremburg made wars of aggression illegal.

Similarly, American administrations create precedents for their successors in the future. George Bush has changed the standard by which presidents can claim the right to go to war in the same way I described above. And while I'm stipulating that those assumptions were made in good faith in this instance -- for the sake of this argument -- even within that framework, there's no gauarante that future presidents (or other countries) would act in good faith when they claim that their invasion is not only for their own interest, but also to make the target population's lives better. All they have to do is claim it.

Iraq didn’t meet the criteria by which sovereignty -- the right of governments to manage their domestic affairs -- is trumped by the need to protect civilians from an abusive regime -- the right of humanitarian intervention. The assumption that a war is just because we assume “life for the average Iraqi would be better” lowers the bar dramatically.

The commenter came back with a common interventionist argument:

If you believe that sovereignty is in someway derived from the people, I do not understand how a pre-War regime like Hussein's could really be [a] "sovereign" government. It was sovereign in the sense that it maintained law and order, but its power was derived from the application of force, the confiscation of private property for the use by the state and to provide patronage to the state's supporters. I don't believe that the regime was a particularly good representative of the "sovereign" wishes of the Iraqi people.

Sovereignty has never been conditional on good governance or the will of the people. The concept predates what we think of as modern democracy. It was codified at the birth of the modern nation-state, in 1648. Back then there was no consent of the governed; the word “sovereignty” has the same root as “sovereign” -- the king (and kings claimed their privilege based on God’s will).

The concept of sovereignty exists only to decrease the frequency of war. Before it became a norm in 1648, Europe was locked in a series of bloody back-and-forth wars, many of which were ostensibly religious wars. Catholic countries were attacking Protestant countries and vice-versa.

The idea of Sovereignty gave the king exclusive control over domestic affairs in the hope that those religious wars would cease. Countries would still wage war over various international disputes -- these weren’t starry-eyed idealists -- but not over another country’s domestic choices.

So it remained for almost four hundred years. It’s the bedrock of not only international law -- which is difficult to enforce -- but also of international customs and norms. It’s fundamental to the rules of the game.

Now, here’s where the right of humanitarian intervention comes in. After Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust, and a whole bunch of lesser despots committed various horrific crimes, the concept of human rights gained prominence and people started to say: “wait a minute, you mean that rulers who slaughter their own citizens can hide behind the principle of sovereignty?”

The answer was no. And the idea that the world has a responsibility to protect innocents gained traction.

But it’s a balancing act, because if you throw the concept of sovereignty out the window, you’ll end up with powerful states just knocking over countries whose leaders are objectionable -- in their own judgment -- will-nilly. What’s to stop, for example, a return of the kind of religious wars that used to be so common? Or wars in the name of democracy? Or socialism?

So, people started to think about how to balance these things out (new foreign policy ideas developed rapidly after the end of the Cold War). A consensus emerged that state sovereignty remained the bedrock of the international system, but there was also a “responsibility to protect,” -- to intervene -- as long as certain conditions were met. And those conditions made good sense. Here’s a PDF of a landmark report, commissioned by the Canadian government (and five years in the making), that laid out what that balance should look like. It’s influenced foreign policy thinking hugely, and we were on the brink of establishing a more progressive set of norms when, depending on your POV, either 9/11 happened, or the Bush administration happened, or both.

Which brings me back to the attempts to claim -- retroactively -- that Iraq was some kind of humanitarian intervention. You know the argument: ‘you squishy liberals are always going on about humanitarian intervention, but when a Republican president knocks off a horrible dictator like Saddam, you start squawking about how it’s an illegal war.’

But that's wrong not because of ideology, but because of chronology. Simply put, humanitarian intervention is justified only to protect civilian populations from slaughter and other egregious human rights violations. It’s not a punishment for past atrocities.

The Iraqi regime was guilty of wholesale slaughter and other exceptional crimes against humanity between 1983 and 1988 and following the Gulf War in 1991. When Saddam was gassing Kurdish civilians in the 1980s, there would have been an almost unimpeachable case for humanitarian intervention. Throughout that period, however, the U.S. was supporting the Iraqi government.

During the years before the invasion, Saddam’s brutality, while indefensible, also wasn’t particularly worse than that of other dictators, some of whom the West supports today. As a matter of policy, we can agree that every tool available to us short of all-out war should be used to deal with nasty dictators.

If the world decides that it will no longer tolerate those kinds of abuses, I'd be fully on board. But it requires institution building and imagination, not one country or a coalition of the willing acting as unaccountable global cops. Our unilateral attack on Iraq was one among many actions that have weakened, rather than strengthened the kind of institutions the worldd needs (the Internatinal Criminal Court that Bush has tried to dismantle is an excellent example).

That’s why the disaster for the Iraqi people may have started with a series of knuckleheaded decisions -- not putting enough troops in to restore order, firing (but not disarming) the army and all the key bureaucrats -- but the Iraq war became a disaster for the world much earlier. It happened at the point that the decision was made to attack a country uninvolved in 9/11, rather than responding to the attacks by working with a world that clearly wanted to help us roll back international terror networks.

9/11 was a “Grotian moment,” an event of such import that it triggers a fundamental re-think of the international system and can lead to a paradigm shift (it’s named for Hugo Grotius, the 17th century legal philosopher known as the “father of international law”). When we invaded Iraq, we defined a system where just about any international crime is justified in the name of fighting terror.

That’s not a hypothetical; Russia, China, Israel and Saudi Arabia have all invoked the U.S. “War on Terror” to fend off criticism of heavy-handed tactics against Muslims they called terrorists. The war against Iraq will be cited as a precedent for decades to come. And that's why I have so little patience for "liberal interventionists" and their ill-informed support for unilateralist foreign policy.

** This is a cursory discussion in a blog post. If you want to explore these issues in far greater depth, I highly recommend Human Security and the New Diplomacy, edited by Rob McRae and Don Hubert. It has a really good preface by former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, a prominent advocate of the movement towards a more "inclusive" concept of security.

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Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.