The war against Iraq is over, and it is time
to pause to reflect about a few points that seem
to have been lost in the shuffle, as well as a
few new issues that are already emerging in the
aftermath.
First and foremost, I have heard plenty of people
ridiculing the antiwar movement reckoning that,
after all, there were very few casualties (on
the American side, that is), and that everything
went smoothly. This irritatingly misses the point
of the antiwar sentiment. Just because things
went according to US plans, that doesn’t
make it right from an ethical perspective, unless
one is ready to accept the Machiavellian position
that the end justifies the means. Even then, one
can still ask if the end is a good one to begin
with.
And here is where another common misunderstanding
of the peace movement comes about. In that movement
nobody ever defended Saddam Hussein. Nobody in
his right mind thinks that having an Hussein-like
regime anywhere in the world is a good idea. But
remember that removing dictators, or even aiding
democracy, has never been a real goal of American
foreign policy, despite the rhetoric. The US has
put plenty of dictators in power when it was convenient
for it to do so, even at the cost of overthrowing
democratically elected governments (the case of
Chile, the murder of its elected president, Salvador
Allende, and the ensuing pro-American dictatorship
of Augusto Pinochet come to mind).
No, the only real goal of US foreign policy has
always been the goal of any nation’s foreign
policy: “national interest.” The trouble
is, national interest in this case was defended
with the idea that it was justified for the US
to wage a war of preemptive action against an
hostile government prepared to use weapons of
mass destruction. Besides the obvious question
of why not applying the same logic to countries
that really have been threatening the United States,
and that really do have weapons of mass destruction
(Korea comes to mind), the fact is that -- so
far -- no weapons of mass destruction have been
found in Iraq, not even after American troops
have taken complete control of the country. Now,
this is an empirical matter, and it may turn out
that such weapons do in fact exist, but even Bush
doesn’t seem so sure anymore (was he ever?).
Very recently he said that it is possible that
the Iraqis destroyed the weapons during the war!
Why on earth would they do that? Indeed, why did
they not use such weapons against the invading
American and British armies? What is it good for
to have weapons of mass destruction if you don’t
use them as a last resort to defend yourself?
What did Saddam Hussein have to lose by holding
back?
Other interesting things are emerging during
the aftermath. The anti-American sentiment is
already running high among Iraqis, which -- quite
understandably -- are asking themselves why don’t
the “liberators” go away now that their
job of liberating them has been done (perhaps
because that wasn’t what the liberators set
out to do?). In fact, the US is now complaining
that Iran is allegedly attempting to “interfere”
with the “internal politics” of Iraq,
something that the US cannot and will not allow!
I wonder if anybody in the Bush administration
even gets the irony of such position. I guess
a full scale invasion of another country doesn’t
count as “interference” with that country’s
internal politics.
What was wrong with the war on Iraq (and with
the possibility of others against Iran, Syria,
and Korea, to mention but a few of the other countries
that have been casually threatened by one or the
other of Bush’s officials during the past
few weeks) is not that we should condone or protect
the dictatorships or repressive regimes of those
countries. It is that no other country has the
right to act as a self-appointed policeman, circumventing
the due process of international law as established
by the United Nations. Yes, of course the UN is
slow, bureaucratic, and often impotent. But that
impotence is largely the fault of the United States,
which keeps using the UN whenever convenient,
and undermining its authority or cutting its funding
whenever the rest of the world doesn’t want
to follow what the American government decides
to do. Not always been able to get one’s
way is the obvious price of democracy, but the
self-declared best democracy in the world doesn’t
want to pay that price.
Let me try to clarify the problem with an analogy.
We have all seen movies in which the police can’t
do anything to stop a criminal because of the
due process of law and its many loopholes and
slowdowns. In those movies, there usually is a
hero who finally takes things in his (it’s
normally a male) hands and simply gets the job
done, and we all cheer. But in real life, we don’t
want vigilantes to roam our cities, we prefer
the slow and inefficient machine of public justice,
and in fact we insist in putting strict limits
to that as well. Why? Because once you bypass
laws, the only rule is that of might makes right.
Today perhaps this may appear acceptable because
it happens to be a democratic country that is
able to play bully. But what if (when?) the cards
on the table will change? Who is going to protect
the world from a vigilante out of control? That
is why the war on Iraq was and remains wrong.
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