War and its consequences

One of the many problems that strict consequentialism poses for the pro-invasion argument is that even the smartest of them tends to assume that ‘this is as bad as it gets’, and that the situation will tend to stabilise over time. Perhaps it will. However, equally, perhaps the situation might spiral out of control and produce consequences worse than any conceivable consequences of the continuance of Saddam’s rule.

If for example a civil war starts, it is possible that the Kurds will declare an autnomous Kurdish state. This will bring Iran, Turkey and Syria into the war (given that Kurdistan will contain large chunks of their countries) leading to a 4 way civil war with the Sunnis backed by Saudi Arabia (and Osama Bin Laden), the Shias backed by Iran and Syria, the Kurds backed by the US and Israel, and the US and the British themselves, like all the other sides, jockying for power and influence.

The risks of a proxy-war between Saudi, Iran and Israel need hardly to be stated. However, things could get even worse if this becomes a direct war, considering that Israel (and the US) have nuclear weapons and have made it perfectly clear they will use them if the circumstances are ‘right’.

Moreover, there was a certain time limitedness about Saddam’s reign: he wasn’t going to live forever. However there has been a certain shortage of imagination in even the anti-war case, with the most pessimistic voices foretelling a US presence in Iraq for the next 12 or 15 years. But why only 12 or 15? Why should the US EVER leave Iraq? What incentive does it have for that? Even if one doesn’t accept this, one is left with the Catch-22: as everyone except those who don’t want to believe it accept, it is the US presence in Iraq that is, to a large extent, causing the insurgency, but it is also the insurgency that means that the US cannot leave. This Catch-22 could mean the US presence staggers on in Iraq for 20, 30, 40 or even more years. Again, this is more of a fundamental and long term risk to the existence of Iraq as a sovereign entity than Saddam ever posed.

People forget how pragmatic Grotian Just War criteria are: just cause (always debatable), lawful authority (everyone thinks they are it), and probable success. Applying it to “humanitarian intervention” flips up 2 definition questions. How serious is serious? And does it have to be current (if not, it would justify punitive as well as preventive or reactive action)?

If the cause must be current, that gives us something akin to Webster’s criteria of self-defence (instant, overwhelming and leaving no moment for reflection nor choice of means).

Probable success, of course, sounds terribly Realpolitisch, but futile intervention is the worst of all possible options.

Despite your decision to reject Just War theory, you seem to end up in a place that looks an awful lot like it, and which condemns the Iraq war on pretty much the same grounds.

—
try and visualise Hitch (or the Hitch lite, Nick Cohen) actually enunciating the words ‘I made a mistake: I am sorry’.
—

I believe he did say precisely that about this piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4277363,00.html

When he became aware that reality did not match his opinions, he changed them.

While you can always find exceptions, the majority usually do, one way or another. If Iraq does go unarguably bad, expect the Republicans to entirely blame ‘ex-trotskyite idealists’ who temporarily blinded them to the true interests of america, or something.

soru

As long as we’re thinking along consequentialist lines: what about the effects of continuing sancitons on Iraq?

– More dead among the least powerful Iraqis.
– Futher infrastructure deterioration, making it even harder than it is now to maintain post-Sadaam stability.
– A source of Arab antipathy toward the U.S. and the West as a whole (yes, of course not as big as the occupation of Iraq, but nevertheless important to consider).

Given that an unconditional end to the sanctions was not acceptable, our options were to carry on with them or overthrow Sadaam Hussein and try to get something better going in Iraq.

I don’t think that the sanctions situation was, by itself, justification for invading Iraq. This brings up an interesting (to me) question: should we use some sort of “justification summation” to decide whether to invade (i.e. sanctions dilemma + whatever legitimate security concerns we have = just war)? Can we add two substantial (but in themselves) reasons into a justification? (This question can be separated from your critiques of the specific reasons I’ve listed here.)

For many, the answer is easy: no. For some reason, I still find the question interesting.

I would like to echo both slocum and a-ro’s responses.

“The most common let-out is to ignore the casualties suffered by the opposing side, even though most of those killed or wounded would not, as individuals, deserve this fate. This is a common feature of pro-war analyses but it is morally indefensible.”

I would also note that while slocum and a-ro limit themselves to noting that huge numbers of civilians died in those actions, that you are also asking us to count the huge number of NAZI soldiers and Japanese soldiers who were also killed. Surely liberating France and replacing the Japanese government wasn’t worth all that under you analysis. Or if it was, perhaps you had best explain how that works in your analysis. A war justification analysis that doesn’t allow for most of the US intervention in WWII isn’t going to fly. Or do you just think that Hitler declaring war gets you out of the whole problem?

Soru

apologies. Should not have included the aside about Nick Cohen. My point still stands for Hitchens though, I think.

As for the other posts:

‘ Certainly at this point in the war, the axis powers would have negotiated a peace treaty.’

Where on earth did you get this idea? In case you didn’t notice, Hitler did not want to surrender when there were tanks actually in Berlin!!

Likewise: ‘The Japanese would certainly have accepted terms long before the end of the war.’

This is a use of the word ‘certainly’ i have never come across before. The Japanese, remember did not even surrender after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Instead the Cabinet adjourned
the next day with no decision on whether a surrender would occur (remember this was when the Japanese were clearly defeated and had no chance of any form of victory, so the government was effectively deciding in favour of the anninhilation of the Japanese people). It was only when the preservation of the position of Emperor was made (more or less) clear that Hirohito stepped in and ended the argument by arguing for surrender.

The key point is that Hitler and the Japanese Cabinet would have fought on to the bitter end, even if this meant the end of their countries. The Allies had no choice but to invade and take the war to the people who had started it.

The comparison with Iraq is instructive. In Iraq, invasion wasn’t the last choice, it was the first choice. Far from having no choice, the US had all the choices in the world, as we now know that Saddam’s backward tinpot regime posed no threat to anyone, least of all the Americans. Moreover in WW2 let’s not forget, the US and the UK faced a genuine worldwide threat that if it had won, who have ended the concepts of democracy and human rights as we know it. The consequences of ‘no war’ with Iraq on the other hand, were rather different.

Finally.

‘Given that an unconditional end to the sanctions was not acceptable’

Says who?

I just have a single but. I wouldn’t describe the (current) pro-war position of the neo-cons and more specifically the UK pro war left as consequentialism + special pleading. It looks to me more like a (wrongheaded) moral one.

They assert the (moral) right of a democracy to go to war against a dictator/fascist/failed state.

There’s just a thin line between morality and consequentialism, thus in deciding war opportunity and cost does play an important role.

Yet the basics of the case for war has mostly been a variant of that moral one.

Just a copy/paste of what I’ve written somewhere else about how they reason away from civilian deaths and the ongoing hostilities:

I’ve seen two strains of reasoning away from the civilian deaths.
The argument that Saddam killed and would kill many, and thus that the current civilian death count is no good argument against the war, is just that. A counter argument to make the point that a cost/benefit analysis with deaths will not resolve the issue. It is portrayed a sideshow put up by those who are too cowardly to oppose facism.

The second is that fighting fascism/dictators requires fighting all of it, and thus that includes the Iraqi “resistance/terrorists”, as they are the same evil that Saddam was. It would not be relevant what causes evil since it cannot alter the reasons given for the need to defeat it.

“‘Given that an unconditional end to the sanctions was not acceptable’

Says who?”

Yup, this is precisely the thinking on a large part of the left and is precisely why d-squared’s “Bush was wrong to push the war now because if he had waited a bit longer he could have gotten rid of Saddam with international help” line is so wrong.

If you can’t even use sanctions as a method of force, you have to live with the fact that most dictators will stay in long for their entire natural lives–and like North Korea will pass it on to their children. And as ususal the consequentialist effect of not acting gets deeply discounted.

Sebastian’s comments remind me that these discussions often become confused, simply because some advocates of war are not in John Quiggin’s sights. Once we allow that war is justified if long-term benefits outweigh costs, we are in Machiavelli’s camp. That’s OT, since morality as most of us understand it is out the window at that stage.

Sebastien,
if we don’t do something we will have to live with the fact that malaria will remain a killer for the rest of our natural lives, we will have to live with the existence of North Korea as a nuclear armed dictatorship for the rest of our natural lives, we will have to live with the biggest war since WWII continuing in the Congo for the rest of our natural lives.

Your argument would hold more water if there were any reason to believe that such beliefs were what determined US or UK foreign policy but it very obviously doesn’t. Invading Iraq might fit into such a scheme if you don’t look to closely but Darfur and Uzbekistan and funding the Taliban (in its early days) do not.

Anyway, who made it our job to save the rest of the world from dictators? The same people who made it OBLs job to restore the caliphate?

If you can’t even use sanctions as a method of force, you have to live with the fact that most dictators will stay in long for their entire natural lives—and like North Korea will pass it on to their children.

This is not true. What you are describing is called a “monarchy”. In most dictatorships, the strongman does not die a natural death, and the regime does not survive the strongman. North Korea and Haiti being notable exceptions. However Papa Doc and Baby Doc constitute a succession but no dynasty as Baby Doc was toppled in 1986, and I seriously doubt Kim Jung-Il’s children will be able to take over from their father.

Some other authoritarian ME countries have had father-son transitions, sometimes in the form of an authoritarian monarchy (Jordan, Morocco) or as the head of a one-party state (Syria).

However, I find frustrationg the cartoonish caricatures which apparently constitute some people’s entire perception of politics. Dictators are not supermen, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound or bend entire populations telepathically to their will. There are larger social dynamics at play, ethnic tensions and restricted access to wealth-generating resources being the most important. Remove the dictator without changing the underlying dynamics and you don’t change a damn thing. You get, in due course, another dictator. Ceteris paribus, I expect the behaviour of a fully democratically elected autonomous Iraqi government to slowly converge to that of one party autocracy in perhaps as little as 5 to 10 years.

‘aren’t responsible for the consequences of the (by hypothesis) unjust resistance of the other side’

Without pretending to speak for the entire anti-fascist left, I would say that the only claim is that the decision to go to war is not uniquely so responsible, in the sense that a simplistic slogan like ‘Bush lied, 100,000 died’ would imply, as if those were the only two relevant facts in the entire situation.

In other words, deaths due to insurgents or terrorist are morally comparable, from the point of view of western policy-makers, to deaths caused by sanctions, or Saddam’s wars of conquest, not to those killed by western troops or air strikes.

If western bombs even conceivably had directly killed 6 figures worth of non-combatants in Iraq, as they certainly did in Vietnam, the morality of the war would not be in doubt.

soru

In other words, deaths due to insurgents or terrorist are morally comparable, from the point of view of western policy-makers, to deaths caused by sanctions, or Saddam’s wars of conquest, not to those killed by western troops or air strikes.

This is just the kind of reasoning I fail to understand and evidently John Quiggin has the same problem. Where does this kind of moral reasoning come from? It doesn’t look as if it has religious origins. It can’t be derived from a consequentialist argument, in which a dead body is a dead body. Who dreamed up this “moral comparability” thinking and more to the point, what are the premises on which it is based?

If western bombs even conceivably had directly killed 6 figures worth of non-combatants in Iraq, as they certainly did in Vietnam, the morality of the war would not be in doubt.

If the Viet Cong had just accepted Ngo Dinh Diem or his successors as their leader, as America desired, there would have been very few deaths. What distinction is being drawn here? The commies were thugs, the Baathists are thugs. Are they not “morally comparable” in whatever sense that applies for you?

Perhaps we have overlearned from Hitler? Ah ha ha ha…what a lovely way of putting it.

Or perhaps we have underlearned from Mussolini. If the pro-invasion grouping will insist on looking for analogies for our current state of affairs in the 1930s, might I suggest that Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia would be a better analogy than Munich?

To quote from the Wikipedia :

‘The Abyssinia Crisis was a pre-WW2 diplomatic crisis originating in the conflict between Italy and Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia). Its effects were to undermine the credibility of the League of Nations and to encourage Italy to ally with Germany.

Both Italy and Abyssinia were members of the League of Nations, which had rules forbidding aggression. After their border clash at Walwal in 1934, Abyssinia appealed to the League for arbitration, but the response was dull and sluggish.

In actuality, many nations were working independently of the League in order to keep Italy as an ally. Shortly after the initial appeal, Pierre Laval of France met with Benito Mussolini in Rome and they created the Franco-Italian Agreement. This treaty gave Italy parts of French Somaliland (now Djibouti), redefined the official status of Italians in French-held Tunisia, and essentially gave the Italians a free hand in dealing with Abyssinia. In exchange for this, France hoped for Italian support against German aggression.

There was little international protest to Mussolini when he then sent large numbers of troops to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, two colonies of Italy that bordered Abyssinia on the North and Southeast respectively.

Britain did attempt to alleviate the situation at one point, sending Anthony Eden to broker peace. It was a failed mission though, as Mussolini was bent on conquest. Following that, Britain then declared an arms embargo on both Italy and Abyssinia. Many believe that is was direct result of Italy’s decree that supplying Abyssinia would be perceived as an act of unfriendliness. Britain also cleared its warships from the Mediterranean, further allowing Italy unhindered access.

Shortly after the League exonerated both parties in the Walwal incident, Italy attacked, resulting in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. The League responded by condemning the attack and imposing economic sanctions on Italy. However the sanctions excluded vital materials such as oil, and were not carried out by all members of the League. The United Kingdom and France did not take any serious action against Italy (such as blocking Italian access to the Suez Canal).

Even actions such as the use of chemical weapons and the massacre of civilians did little to change the League’s passive approach to the situation….’ this leading to the Hoare Lavale pact which attempted to hand Abyssinia to the Italians.

This caused outrage, and was instrumental in destroying the League of Nations. Hitler watched and from then on war was inevitable. (Note: the British people actually came out on the streets to protest Mussolini’s belligerence and contempt for international law, but then as now, the views of the British people were irrelevant. Perhaps they were being ’emotional’ and ‘sentimental’).

So, what we have here is a European country invading a North African/Middle Eastern country in defiance of international law, and in defiance of the relevant international body’s insistence that no country should attack unless attacked first. The British people of course then (as now) supported these international bodies, but the ruling elite did not (and do not) and wished to destroy them, which they succeeded in doing. As Haillie Selassie pointed out at the time the choice is always between international law and lawlessness. There is no third choice.

And what were Mussolini’s motives?

You will be astounded to hear that even though history talks about colonialism, oil and natural resources, Mussolini did not talk about that at the time. Instead he argued that this was a ‘human rights’ based invasion, to destroy the ‘barbaric’ practice of slavery which he argued (probably correctly) was endemic in Ethiopian society. He also argued that:

‘Our cause in Ethiopia is a just one. In a few days it will be laid before the League’s counsel. It will be laid before the whole world—proof that the Ethiopians are… sunk in the practice of slavery’

He also claimed that he did not want war: instead the Ethiopians had to be punished for violating international law. In other words, he was supporting the League of Nations.

‘Reporter: “And that will mean of course…”

Mussolini: “War. It would not be my choice, but the League of Nations.’

And finally

‘No nation can accuse [Italy] of desiring warfare’

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/mot/html/ethiopia.htm

Does anybody have any idea why this analogy has not occured to the pro-invasion-as long-as-they-don’t-have-to-do-any-actual-fighting-group? The analogies seem obvious to me. Perhaps they just need a little reminder?

_Who dreamed up this “moral comparability” thinking and more to the point, what are the premises on which it is based?_

Don’t really know, it just seems intuitively obvious to me that personally killing and eating one person is worse than failing to donate sufficient money to Oxfam to save two lives. Similarly, I fail to see how removing a tyrant like saddam, to the acclaim of the majority of the directly affected populace, is inherently evil in the way invading Belgium would be, though it certainly could be unwise.

As an actual personal morality, consequentialism sucks, for well known reasons. However, as far as I know it’s the only plausible way to even address a dispute between two people, one of whom thinks ‘war is wrong’ and one who thinks ‘tyranny is wrong’.

Within the framework of one-country hegemony (i.e most of the 19C and post 1945), tyranny does seem to kill more people than war. So I would be pretty suspicious of any moral framework that didn’t even attempt to address that issue.

soru

‘Similarly, I fail to see how removing a tyrant like saddam, to the acclaim of the majority of the directly affected populace…’

Ipso facto, I suppose Russia’s liberation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and, for that matter, East Germany after WW2: ‘to the acclaim of the majority of the directly affected populace’ could hardly be ‘inherently evil’.

That is not the same thing as negotiating an end to hostilities that left the Nazi and Imperial Japanese governments in place and in control of their countries. Note that this less than total, unconditional surrender was not unusual—at the end of WWI, for example, Germany had to accept terms it did not like at Versailles, but it was not an unconditional surrender. The allies did not take Berlin, Germany was not occupied, the Kaiser did not die in a bunker.

On the other hand, it has been argued by many that the conditions Germany acquiesced to following the first world war directly resulted in the economic instability that allowed Hitler to arise and be a primary cause of a second world war. Who would have reasonably forseen that outcome two decades before it occurred?

That is a noteworthy flaw in this sort of consequentialist reasoning — the consequences have branching effects that can only be accurately assessed in hindsight.

Put another way, having just endured the horror of the first world war, nobody wanted to expend the kind of effort necessary to nip a key progenitor of the second world war in the bud. Thus, all kinds of creative “But Hitler just wants…” excuses and pacifist rhetoric abounded until it the human cost had already become too high to bear. Well, we know now what the consequences of that were; but few people are ready to apply the lesson in the present, and instead, we have that same kind of rhetoric all over again.

Which is not to say that such rhetoric is automatically wrong. But only a course of action that follows that rhetoric, and then examines the results after the fact, can tell us whether it was correct, and the price of being wrong could be high, so high as to make civilian war deaths pale by comparison. If that’s the threshold a consequentialist anti-war position is willing to accept, then so be it, but it would be nice to see such a thing accounted for in the analysis.

I’m afraid you guys grossly misunderstand the roots of German militarism in the 1930s. It wasn’t something the West was trying and wanted to prevent, just the opposite: Nazi Germany was built up and cultivated with the idea to pit it against the Soviets. Munich agreement was a part of the same strategy, of course. British and French elites loved Hitler, he was their creation; it’s only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact they realized that they got carried away too far with this.

Yeah, and overall: this idea that a national government would ever start a war for purely humanitarian reasons is simply absurd.

Luc,

If I understand you correctly you believe Geras & Co regard building free societies as the goal of their morality. That goal is so good in itself that it is morally dubious, cowardly perhaps, to count the cost in blood and treasure which will be incurred to achieve that goal. So really they aren’t speaking the same language as John Quiggin, for whom humanitarian intervention means, first and foremost, prolonging people’s lives and promoting their welfare in a more worldly sense.

I am putting it a bit starkly perhaps so as to be sure I get your meaning. If that is what you mean I think you are right, there is a failure of communication between the pro- and anti-war sides which goes beyond a difference of opinion about calculating costs and benefits. For the pro-war side there is a missionary aspect to this which an anti-war economist will not easily relate to.

Mind you, although they often seem to feel that way, they don’t come out with it; so we really don’t know what they’re at.

_Ipso facto, I suppose Russia’s liberation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and, for that matter, East Germany after WW2: ‘to the acclaim of the majority of the directly affected populace’ could hardly be ‘inherently evil’._

Can you clarify what you mean by that? I really can’t tell if you are being sarcastic, obscure or profound.

Certainly, if the USA ends up militarily occupying Iraq in 2038, crushing the Baghdad spring with hovertanks, then that would not be so good.

soru

‘Can you clarify what you mean by that? I really can’t tell if you are being sarcastic, obscure or profound.’

I think part of the problem with the pro-war case (one of the many problems) is that when reference is made to the United States being in Iraq in 2038 it is posited as some form of bizarre science fiction scenario, as your reference to hovertanks implies. However nothing to me seems more likely than that the US will still be in Iraq in 2038 (which isn’t to say it will necessarily happen).

The pro-war/invasion crew seem never to really have thought through the ultimate Catch-22 of this war.

1: The US cannot ‘win’ this war, as everybody agrees. No occupying power has ever, long term, held onto occupied territory. In the end, even Rome fell.

2: Therefore only people who can ‘win’ this war is the Iraqi people themselves. Therefore the only way for the US to get out is for the Iraqis themselves to take over security.

3: But it is precisely the continued occupation of the Americans that precludes this ever happening (the comparisons here with Vietnam are eerie). As long as the US are in Iraq, they will be seen as an occupying force (as indeed they are). Therefore, the ‘best and brightest’ will not join the security forces, as they do not want to be (or at least to be seen as) Quislings. Moreover, because the security forces are seen as Quislings, they are therefore considered fair game for the insurgency. Insurgent attacks on the Iraqi security forces also discourage Iraqis to join. This is why the Iraqi security forces tend (how can I put this politely?) not to be either the sharpest tools in the box, nor the most honest.

4: The insurgents don’t just kill the Iraqi security forces (although they do that as well), they infiltrate them. Therefore the security forces are riddled with insurgent spies. Therefore the Americans cannot trust them, and so they are never given the combat experience (or the firepower) they need to actually take over the security operations they are allegedly being trained for. This breeds resentment, which means more of the security forces are willing to spy for the insurgents and so it goes on.

5: While these problems are seen and understand, what is not understood is that there is literally no way out of this dilemma. The US can’t leave: as the pro-invasion group never fail to remind us, this means that Iraq will probably become a pro-Iranian Islamic state, or collapse into civil war (they might be right in both cases). But they can’t stay either, because the longer they stay, the longer they have to stay, if you see what i mean.

6: The only possible way out is either the Americans are physically kicked out (as happened in Vietnam) or else Iraq will simply disintegrate. There is no other option. That fantasy you have of an independent,democratic and secular state? Ain’t never going to happen.

7: Or to put it in a much simpler form: the Americans cause the insurgency. But the Americans are the only ones who can fight the insurgency. Therefore, the Americans must stay (permanently, if necessary) to fight the insurgency they created .

I see no particular reason why this situation should ever be resolved.

The British entered Ireland nearly 1,000 years ago and are still there.

The Americans might not last quite as long in Iraq, but make no mistake, the boys are not coming home soon.

brendan: Your points could be persuasive, but as presented, much of what you claim seems to me a mix of worst-case scenario and outright speculation. That’s fine IF presented as being one of several possible hypotheticals, and that’s equally fine if presented in the accompaniment of clear evidence, but as presented now I can’t find much use in it.

Kevin, when you refer to “promoting their welfare in a more worldly sense”, do you mean to suggest that the freedoms of a modern liberal democracy are other-wordly?

The slogan “live free or die” suggests a degree of enthusiasm which cannot easily be explained in purely worldly terms. Luc’s point, as I understand it, is that the pro-war left has a conception of the Good which cannot really be reconciled with John Quiggin’s.

abb1: That is a fair criticism, but it actually increases the parallels to the present. Saddam was a similar creation of other powers who hoped to find a use in him. Later, it became clear that the machine had aquired a ghost of its own and had ideas beyond the creators’ original aspirations.

Don’t really know, it just seems intuitively obvious to me that personally killing and eating one person is worse than failing to donate sufficient money to Oxfam to save two lives.

I don’t think so, Mr Soru. Chianti?

_is there a pro-fascist left?_

Seems pretty self-evident that there are three ‘lefts’ right now, anti-fascist, anti-war and anti-imperialist, all of whom are defined by what they think is the greatest avoidable evil.

soru

Thomas,

The big problem for anyone trying to judge the morality of war (lets say the Iraq war just to be concrete) is how to weigh up all the diverse consequences. I wouldn’t say that only quantifiable things like life expectancy matter. Of course freedom matters (and I’m sure it matters to JQ as well). But you have to form a view at the outset as to whether a free society is likely to emerge within a reasonable time-frame and how free it is likely to be. My own opposition to the war, once it became clear that the WMD story was a con, was based on the judgement that the outcome was likely to be either: (1) a less tyrannical, but still authoritarian, state; or (2) a collapse into civil war. (I think it’s still in the balance.) It seems to me that the US is not entitled to take that kind of risk with another country’s destiny.

I don’t want to go into whether that is or isn’t too gloomy a view. I just mean it as an illustration of what a consequentialist argument is likely to look like in practice. As to the fact that some may derive enjoyment from war and the other points you raise, it’s late here so I won’t even think about that.

Sebastian,

If the consequentialist point of view can’t even handle the easy case of defensive war, why do you think it is such a great method?

John Quiggin: since willingness to fight defensive wars discourages aggression, it gains support from a rule-consequentialist viewpoint.

Is there a problem? Surely not. Of course it is possible to argue that even defensive war is unjust. Pacifism is a respectable stance, morally, though not a very practical one.

I don’t see a “reasonable time” qualification in the consequentalist reasoning that JQ offers, and I can’t see why we would expect one. Rather, consequentialist justifications are from the perspective of eternity, which is a mighty long time.

I also don’t see any restrictions on risks taken with another country. Talk of entitlement presupposes that we’ve run the consequentalist analysis, and so begs the question, or else isn’t based in consequentalism, and thus is inconsistent with our project here. I think that consequentalism must hold that we can take risks with other countries, but that we’re morally culpable if they don’t turn out, in the long run.

But in the end where does this line of reasoning go? At one end of the consequetialist spectrum we had Chomosky and others arguing that Melosevic’s increased attacks on civilians in Kosovo was a foreseeable consquence of NATO inervention and that the prospect of 3 milion deaths from stavation etc in Afganistan was a possible consquence of intervtion there.

Most people would consder this to be nonsense but its an indication that people can make whatever argument they want from such principles. Since this sort of argument will always rest on counter factuals it will never be conclusive.

It seems to me the “pro-war left” (basically consisting of a faction of the British Christian Democratic Labour Party nothing more really) has simultaneously overthought and underthought the Iraq War.

Underthought, in that they are completely unable to understand the conflict outside of their own rather closed romantic/philosophical circle of argumentation. And unable to see how larger geopolitical and political economic forces and consequences are at work – in the MIddle EAst and beyond – that can’t neatly be separated out from their crusade. Underthought in that the policies they advocate are only possible through alliance with America’s right wing foreign policy establishment, which has a whole set of priorities that only slightly overlap with how and why the war they want to fight is being fought.

Overthought in that all of their energy is spent on arguments such as the above, going round in circles, arguing points that are never going to be settled, arguments that are nonetheless at best tangential to the reasons the war is fought. And strangely enough, slowly proving why the vast majority of this world’s people are religious – because morality is very hard to “prove” without reference to some kind of higher power, even for very, very smart people.

John– Two questions: What’s the source of the rights you refer to? When you refer to the “real problem”, are you referring to the problem with your theory, with consequentialism more generally, or with (some particular) justifications for (a particular) war?

Kevin (and John Q.)

“A war to stop genocide would clearly be justified. In that case, the people who miscalculated would be the ones who thought they could get away with genocide.”

In a theoretical forum, this seems straightforward and non-contentious. However, stopping genocide once it has commenced (or even when it is on the cusp) is far more problematic (ie, bloody) in the real world.

” The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda,” by Alan Kuperman, illustrates the logistical impediments to timely intervention in Rwanda that would have, in Kuperman’s view, prevented the rescue of the majority of the victims of the genocide even if western military intervention had occurred immediately upon commencement of the killing.

What makes Kuperman’s prognosis the most sobering are two circumstances; first, the logistical impediments were, for the most part, unavoidable, and second, the west was dealing with a fourth rate military opponent, and still, several hundreds of thousands would have died even if we had the conviction to go in immediately.

To provide full context, Kuperman does discuss at length the possibility that the Rwandan genocide could have been prevented, or minimized, had the UN committed adequate peacekeeping forces prior to the commencing of killing. That doesn’t affect Kuperman’s underlying premise, that it is a faulty assumption that genocide can be stopped in its tracks by modern western militaries once the killing has started.

Of course every circumstance is different (and history has shown that the free world has often failed to intervene to stop genocides, period), however I think it needs to be pointed out that many, many lives can and will be lost to future genocides, even if we have the political and physical fortitude to immediately intervene, and that these lives can only be saved by pre-emptive military intervention (be it peacekeeping where possible, or war).

Of course, measuring the net result in lives saved versus lives lost from pre-emptive action is impossible, there being no way to calculate a hypothetical loss of life from a hypothetical genocide that was pre-empted.

In my view, and perhaps only confined to the question of intervening in genocide (hell, let’s add most civil wars, since there isn’t any practical difference between them and genocide), the assertion that ” war is a negative sum game,” relies primarily on that inability to calculate a potential net saving of lives from avoiding the hypothetical scenario that intervention was intended to prevent.

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Underthought in that the policies they advocate are only possible through alliance with America’s right wing foreign policy establishment, which has a whole set of priorities that only slightly overlap with how and why the war they want to fight is being fought.
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That was certainly true in 2003, but really american policy and preferences are hardly even a secondary factor in the war at present, the situation is shaped by the reality on the ground, not in washington. Go back two years in HP and you will see posts making that exact point.

Absent something like a major Plame indictment crisis completely paralysing the US government, the Iraqis will get to decide their own future, and that’s the most that could be said for any intervention.

soru

I think elements of the insurgency are seeking to trigger civil war with their brutal murders. I fear they will succeed. We have a truce with Sadr and other Shiite radicals have remained passive in response to us, but they have considerable power. Basra is a theocracy with hundreds murdered.

So all sides can explode.

Larger philosophical questions aside, the Rumsfeld DOD decided to ignore previous plans which called for a massive invasion taking full control with great focus on reconstruction before the invasion. 2 years ago they ignored calls from Senator Clinton and others (including many conservatives) claiming there was no use for such troops despite obvious uses such as unguarded ammo dumps and borders.

We have seen a very fierce campaign on the right to silence all questions. Critics are typically lumped into the category of democrat terrorist lovers. Most of the public doesn’t even know that majot military figures like Generals Scharzkopf and Zinni had major concerns.

We have seen a concerted movement to block any analysis and reform. Contrary to claims in many cases the press supports this.

For example the public believes that electricity is better than it was before the invasion. However according to the claims of our own officials Iraq now has 5 megawatts of production compared to 4.4, but currently 2 meg are typically down. Before 1991 there were 9 megawatts.

There has been resistance from American officials to bringing in German and French spare parts necessary to repair older facilities and few contracts have gone to Iraqis. Most of these only after terrorism made it dangerous for American firms. One the other hand IRAQI MONEY (we’ve spent little of the money allocated) has gone in huge and often unsupervised sums to American firms who have produced facilities that both sides agree Iraqis wiklll have difficulty mantaining. There are also hints of massive corruption.

Similarly while we know that 3,000 schools and hundreds of clinics have been built, we have no figures on what is operational. We know perhaps a quarter of Iraqi doctors have been terrorized out of practice. We also know that corruption is great, tht many officials will have better use for money than salary or supplies.

Last I heard the DOD was still refusing to give Congress the demaned checklist of accomplishments and failures.

For the record I believe that being there we must try to succeed and pay the possibly heavy costs. I also think the fierceist criticism must fall on the millions of rightists who have done all they could to shut out troublesome facts and silence those calling for reform. They have done far more damage than leftsi critics and have quite possibly turned a risky venture into tragedy.

prisonplanet?

There is really no point in continuing the discussion if you take that lunatic conspiracy site as in any way meaningful. Can hardly settle nuances of priciple with someone whose canon of accepted fact is that radically different.

soru

Going back a long bit, a wrote: “This isn’t war, it’s a police action.” This just defines away the problem, usually an unhlpful tactic. The number of casualties is never known in advance, and almost always underestimated (exception: D-Day, bu tnot the battle of Normandy as a whole). For Sun Tzu, no pacifist, the ideal victory was bloodless. There have been wars, and certainly parts of wars, that met this ideal: Garnet Wolseley’s suppression of the Red River Rebellion in Canada in 1870; the British Government’s threat at the end of the Crimean War to attack Kronstadt and St Petersburg with an armada of 200 steam gunboats – the Admiralty put them on show at Spithead and invited the Russians, who got the point and agreed to negotiate a peace.
The difference between police action and war is surely one of intention. If you are prepared to use a full range of methods of organised violence, you are in a war.

SORU

as I have joyfully pointed out now, and you have persistently failed to accept, the data comes from NBC news, ok? Goodness anyone would think you didn’t want to believe it or something! Heaven forbid.

Just to point things out in words of less than one syllable:

This is a link from Prison Planet:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/180705fbimonitored.htm

Except it isn’t. It’s actually from the Washington Post. Gettit?

Ipso facto the information I quoted was not FROM Prison Planet it was FROM Tom Brokaw on NBC news even though the URL was ‘Prison Planet’. If you really can’t get your head round these complexities, might i suggest the internet is not for you?

If you really can’t bear to read Prison Planet here’s the same data on the Register.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/09/fallujah_biometric_id/

Why are you wasting my time with this nonsense?

The rest is simply a test of your gullibility. It’s true that I am sure that the US would swear blind that they are not shooting innocent civilians for not having an ID card, heavens no.

Equally, the US denied having used napalm and cluster bombs (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1519047,00.html, see also http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article226119.ece) both weapons of mass destruction. The US also lied about WMDs as the Downing Street Memo made clear.

I trust these sources are trustworthy enough for you, or would you really prefer it if I only referenced Downing Street or the Pentagon?

The fact is, if I believe 1 lie, it’s your fault for telling me, if I believe 3, 4, 10 lies it’s my fault for being so gullible. Those who choose (and it is a choice) to believe whatever nonsense the Pentagon happens to be spouting are being wilfully gullible. Downing Street and the Pentagon have demonstrated on numerous occasions over the last few years that, at least on the subject of Iraq, they are not reliable sources.

Now, if you have evidence that the US is not using retina scans in Fallujah, that they are not insisting on an ID card system, and that marines do not have the option of using lethal force if adult males are caught without such ID cards, then I will be pleased to hear it, and I will withdraw these accusations.

Otherwise….

The US military uses retinal scans on a regular basis? Really? That seems a bit expensive, bulky and time consuming.

Are you confusing intial reports with verified facts? They are rather different things you know. For instance I could probably quote 40 or 50 initial reports of weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Surely you wouldn’t take that as proof-positive that WMD were found. Or would you?

Soru

I give up. Life’s too short. You still can’t get it straight in your head that I was quoting NBC can you? Thought not.

And the moral of the story is: don’t feed the trolls.

Sebastian,

I remember those initial reports of ‘WMD’s and they were staggeringly unpersuasive, except, to repeat, to those who wanted to believe them.

Perhaps the US isn’t using retinal scans (at least not any more). As there are no independent journalists allowed in there it’s hard to know, isn’t it?

Kevin and John,

I think I understand better now. To summarize: the decision to enter war may yield a positive expectation against an enemy with whom negotiation fails and so passes the consequentialist test. However, once an outcome is reached, then it would have obviously been in both sides interests to reach the same outcome w/o having to fight about it. And it is this latter sense in which war is a negative sum game.

My other point is slightly distinguished from soru’s. It is not who is doing the killing that matters, but who is being killed. And here a consequentialist is free to argue that although the means are irrelevant, when we evaluate the outcome, we are still free to use moral judgements about whose lives we value more. You may disagree w/ his assessment, but the consequentialist is not contradicting himself by doing so. And using the properly biased weighting scheme, I expect you could justify the war in Iraq.

I would think the problem with ends justifying the means arguments would be pretty obvious to Trotsky. It is a dialectical problem. The means transforms the ends, and — in good old dialectical fashion – embeds new means in accordance with those transferred ends. So, for instance, the end of saving American soldiers lives in Iraq (which who can disagree with?) requires technological means to make the death count climb among the enemy, which has the effect of killing greater numbers of civilians, which has the effect of generating insurgents willing to use lo tech means to continue the war, which has the effect of creating ever harsher reprisals by the American soldiers, and so on.

This can be laid out in a very nice dialectical fashion. In fact, the distinction between Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s dialectical materialism is arguably all about this point. Das Kapital is an immense demonstration that there are no pure means, and there are no pure methods of segregating means from ends.

What is interesting in Brendan and Soru’s above excahgne is that Soru never really challenges Brendan’s intellectual premise, but only argues about details of whether or not retinal scans are occuring. Whether or not they are is tangential to the larger point Brendan is trying to make.

That isn’t tinfoil stuff by the way. I don’t have the sources but the US was using them in Fallujah – or at least considering using them – after the assault last winter. I don’t have any idea about the rules of engagement though

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that Soru never really challenges Brendan’s intellectual premise, but only argues about details of whether or not retinal scans are occuring
—

Can you clarify what you think that premise is?

All I could see was a bunch of paranoid ranting about mystic talismanic Trotskyites, nothing recognisable as a description of my views, or of those of anyone else I know.

Does anyone really think that stuff has sufficient connection to reality for it to be meaningful to argue against it?

Also to Kevin D: Pol Pot didn’t break any of your rules. The Vietnamese who deposed him did. Is that a mistake in framing them, or intentional?

soru

I think it probably can be called a ‘success’ for one reason only: the Brits are acting merely as a peace-keeping force there, they are not trying to install any puppet government or interfere with any internal struggles or the economy or religion.

You can also read elsewhere that Muslim fundamentalism is rampant in those British-occupied areas, women are being attacked for smiling n’ stuff like that.

So, how does it justify the war, then? Why would you want to make a mess and kill people to replace Saddam&Co with al-Sadr&Co?

Pol Pot didn’t break any of your rules. The Vietnamese who deposed him did. Is that a mistake in framing them, or intentional?

Soru,

He certainly didn’t accept that non-citizens had rights, so he broke rule 4 (inhumanity). Of course he didn’t treat citizens any better, but that’s not a mitigating factor – quite the contrary. Also, I think leaders are guilty of inhumanity if they ignore genocide in another country when they are in a position to do something about it. So in deposing Pol Pot the Vietnamese did the right thing, though they behaved badly afterwards; and pretty well everyone is at fault right now in ignoring Darfur. But it’s true enough that Pol Pot’s infamy was not in the sphere of international relations, which is our topic, so I really shouldn’t have lumped him in with Hitler and Stalin.

I purposely keep the rules vague, because what I had in mind was the fact, which “abb1” and others have noted, that although there is a lot of talk about morality in international politics, when you look at the historical record you don’t see many uplifting examples. So I wondered how a historian ought to decide who was a good king and who was a bad king – other that for satirical purposes as in 1066 and All That with its “103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.”

erratum: for “other that” read “other than”.

I’m not feeding tbe trolls again, but read my exchange, read what I said and then read that Soru claims I am claiming that ‘All the stuff you said about shooting anyone who fails the scan is either your own fantasy, or, more likely, you repeating prisonplanet’s.’

I mean is it me, or can these people just not read?

I got into another argument with another pro-war loon earlier on, who also mangled my words, seemingly unware that anyone can check what I actually said by just scrolling up.

If anyone cares, or still has the will to live, here’s the money shot:

‘US forces in Iraq are attempting to tame Fallujah with biometric ID, according to an NBC news report broadcast last week. The returning population of up to 250,000, reporter Richard Engel said on Tom Brokaw’s last Nightly News, is to be allowed back in gradually, a few thousand at a time. “They’ll be finger printed, given a retina scan and then an ID card, which will only allow them to travel around their homes or to nearby aid centers, which are now being built. The Marines will be authorized to use deadly force against those breaking the rules .’
Since one of the rules will be they must carry an ID card (read what I wrote) therefore (and follow my complex logic here) marines will be permitted to use lethal force if ID is not carried.

From the Register a ‘non-tinfoil hat’ site.

I honestly think that the army of lies regimented to support the WMD hypothesis has led the pro-war grouping to the conclusion that no one will actually be able to spot that they are lying.

‘That’s all I have to say’.

Oh if only.

‘Slocu’:

You said: “In 1943-44, the dictatorships (of Mussolini and of Petain) were not killing large numbers of their own citizens […]”.

Excuse me, but have you ever heard of the final solution? The mass deportation of French and Italian Jews to the gas chambers, by their own governments? Said governments going even further that what the nazis demanded and expected?