From Where I SitApr 12 '03 Write an essay on this topic.
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Over the past few months, I have watched with fascination as, across the Arab states, Europe, and certain pockets in the United States, George W. Bush and his cronies became more reviled than Saddam and his. I have to confess I find myself mystified by the position that some have taken over the past few months, that we shouldn't wage war against the Iraqi regime because war can be truly awful, with many innocent victims and hideous suffering. Surely this position is inherently contradictory, as it seems to discount the hideous suffering and hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the Baath regime. Surely one result of the war will be that these people will no longer suffer in this hideous fashion. If we must reduce this to a crude moral calculus, perhaps hundreds or a few thousand innocent civilians will die in order to bring to a halt the number of Saddam's victims at many hundreds of thousands. I have to think that these same protesters would be opposed to innocent Rwandans being slaughtered, innocent Palestinians being bombed and bulldozed in their homes, or Amina Lawal being stoned to death for the crime of adultery. How are the human rights crimes that have been committed against Iraqis over the past few decades any less important? Was there any other way to stop these human rights crimes than regime change? Was there any other way to effect regime change than war? (No, I believe, and no.) Something in Julie Burchill’s March 29th Guardian column was particularly resonant: I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count? Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. …………What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. Uday Hussein apparently had a thing for virgins, very young virgins. He would invite classes of schoolchildren to visit him and pick out his favorite girls. Their schoolteachers were hardly in a position to protest; they'd likely be killed. Uday would then take the girls aside and rape them, either with date rape drugs or without. That's just torture lite, though. Sometimes the regime's victims would be fed into a machine designed to shred plastic. The lucky ones were fed head first. An op-ed piece in the April 11 New York Times by a chief news executive at CNN details some of the horrible stories he learned about firsthand, but couldn't report on because publicizing them would have lead to the deaths of innocent Iraqis. The executive says that Uday Hussein told him in 1995 that he planned to assassinate both his two brothers-in-law who had defected to Jordan, as well as King Hussein of Jordan himself. The story was never broadcast in order to protect the life of the only other participant in the meeting, an Iraqi translator. The executive did warn King Hussein, who “dismissed the threat as a madman’s rant.” A few months later, the brothers-in-law were lured back to Baghdad and killed. He heard another story from the colleague of a Foreign Ministry officer whose brother had been executed by the regime. As a test of loyalty, this man was then forced to write a letter of congratulations on the execution of his brother to Saddam Hussein. One 31-year old Kuwaiti woman did speak to CNN in 1990; as a result of this and other crimes, the Iraqi secret police captured her and beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. On the eve of the Gulf War, they smashed her skull and dismembered her body. “A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.” I could go on, but my point is not to bludgeon with a catalogue of grotesqueries. It is merely to wonder, and attempt to understand, how people with differing positions arrive at them. Even if all of us were fully armed with the truth, we would probably still reach different conclusions. Why is that? Why do some people's hearts bleed for Rwandans, Palestinians, Amina Lawal, etc., but not for tortured and murdered Iraqi Shiites and Kurds? I suspect the real reason is that these people don't, under any circumstances, want to find themselves on the same side of an argument (or a war) with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, or any number of right wing Republicans. I would say that's sad, regrettable, and loathsomely cynical, but I'd be understating it. If you believe that murder, torture, rape and the most hideous human rights violations are wrong, then they are equally wrong regardless of who the victims are and who is standing up to defend them. In the March 23rd New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff wrote a short article entitled "I am Iraq”. Ignatieff has a long pedigree as a scholar of philosophy, politics, and the humanities. His article was particularly relevant for me; I had decided what I believed about the war, but was dismayed to be keeping company with such grotesque flag-waving demagogues and stentorian enemies of the truth as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Ignatieff writes, Back in the 60's, when I marched against the war in Vietnam, I learned that it is a mistake to judge a cause by the company it makes you keep. I stood arm in arm with pacifists, who made me wonder whether they would have fought Hitler........This time, over Iraq, I don't like the company I am keeping, but I think they're right on the issue. I much prefer the company on the other side, but I believe they're mistaken. Because he is much smarter than I am, and has spent many more years thinking about the nature of morality, Ignatieff is also able to write the following: My friends also imply that the company I am keeping on this war is a definition of what kind of person I am. So where we all stand has become a litmus test of our moral identities. But this shouldn't be the case. Opposing the war doesn't make you an antiglobalist, an anti-Semite or an anti-American, any more than supporting the war makes you a Cheney conservative or an apologist for American imperialism. In fact, the debate over war is not so much a clash of competing moral identities as a battle within each of us to balance competing moral arguments. Sometimes it is easier to see this in the positions of the other side than in your own. ........ During Vietnam, I marched with people who thought America was the incarnation of imperial wickedness, and I marched against people who thought America was the last best hope of mankind. Just as in Vietnam, the debate over Iraq has become a referendum on American power, and what you think about Saddam seems to matter much less than what you think about America. Such positions, now as then, seem hopelessly ideological and, at the same time, narcissistic. The fact is that America is neither the redeemer nation nor the evil empire. Ideology cannot help us here. For the record, the human rights issue isn’t even what brought me to support this war. But I don’t see how we can talk about the evils of Dick Cheney and Halliburton, imperialism, oil profits, pre-emptive strikes, civilian casualties, and the civil rights infringements of John Ashcroft’s war on terror, yet fail to acknowledge that freeing 25 million people from oppression and the continuous threat of torture and death is a wonderful and beautiful thing. Yes, maybe even something worth fighting for.  |
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