When Dorothy's house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East, she inherited the ruby slippers and incurred the wrath of her more evil sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. That didn't stop the Munchkins from celebrating.
The Iraqis and American pacifists have no Lollypop Guild and won't be presenting any awards to GW Bush any time soon. In fact, now is the time that 1000 skeptics are blooming. Jack Balkin correctly notes that in the long view of things, it's far too early to tell. We have a long yellow brick road ahead. But it is not too early to celebrate.
The longer we wait for things to go wrong, the more certain we are to be rewarded. Everything goes wrong given sufficient time. Nevertheless we can do our moral calculus fairly immediately. The objective of any war is to win. We won. Unlike Dorothy, this tornado was of our own creation and we landed our house smack dab on the target. Granted, we took out a fair section of Munchkinland in the process, but we are making good on fixing it. We have rid the world of a tyrant.
The question which concerns me now that we have the ruby slippers of empire on our feet, is whether or not it is reasonable for skeptics to judge our 'success' on whether or not an evil sister materializes. We very may well get punished for crushing the Ba'ath regime, but why should we judge the success or failure of the war based for an ever expanding evaluation period? Is it fair to judge Bush against a failure to find WMD? Yes. Is it fair to judge Bush against a failure to establish a new republic in Iraq? Yes. But it is not fair to judge Bush against a rising tide of terrorism in the region which finds encouragement for its raison d'etre in our wars against Iraq.
I think it is fair to say that there may very well be flying monkeys in our path. But we did not create them nor there agenda and skeptics should not paint our successful defeat of the Ba'ath party by borrowing dark colors from a pessimistic future.
Michael,
I'm not sure we can so quickly perform our "moral calculus" and pass a positive judgment on our war victory. You seem to isolate the war as a valid goal in itself, as if it should constitute some automonous moral system by which we gauge our success. War is simply a means to an end, or in the case of Bush & Co., the means to ever-shifting ends. I wish I could celebrate our tornado - it did strike with relative precision and speed and rid the world of a tyrant - but first I'd like to see blueprints of the divine plan that set that tornado into motion.
You are right about others passing judgment on us. Our ability to control extreme politics should not be blood on our hands in any immediate casual sense. But, then again, once we set war into motion we quickly inflated the idea of liberation. So when the ideal is not met, whose balloon are we popping but our own?
Posted by: Brendan Karch at April 24, 2003 06:40 PMI am willing to believe that toppling a dictator is, in and of itself, a valuable goal. I have proposed only half-seriously that some goal of the United Nations be to bless such coups on a regular basis. This I called the Least Favored Nation idea.
As a matter of fact, I was against this war as recently as January 21st. My reasons, I think were very much like what I percieve yours to be Bill: a complete lack of faith in GWBush's capacity to think his way out of a trick bag. After some time considering the fate of Iraqis suffering under Saddam (even without seriously factoring in sanctions) I felt that my criticism of Bush's geopolitical vision paled in significance to the opportunity we had to save millions more and avenge the deaths of tens of thousands.
A good deal of this attitude is new for me and has developed as a consequence of reading, and being completely overwhelmed by Martin Amis' recent book on the terrors of Stalinism, Koba The Dread. I literally spent many evenings last summer crying myself to sleep thinking about the millions he executed, starved, tortured and enslaved. I cannot yet estimate the effect that my waking up to this tragedy will yet have, but I can begin. For example, it has recontextualized the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements here in the US. Knowing that the entire terroristic history of lynching in post-Reconstruction America has taken less than 5,000 lives is a fair bit of leaven for me. This, Saddam did every year.
I simply think Americans are too safe and too powerful to do nothing when we all know very well that the prospects for liberty under dictators are so slim. For all the meddling we do in markets, we have a great responsibility to freedom as well. There are very real limits to diplomacy, and very real benefits to physical might. It is a light we can't leave under a bushel.
Against the War
http://www.mdcbowen.org/blog2003/01/21.html#a159
Least Favored Nation
http://www.mdcbowen.org/blog2003/03/13.html#a388
Count me in please.
Posted by: postal code at July 24, 2003 06:02 AMSo quiet lately. Any more comment please.
Posted by: whois at August 22, 2003 06:26 PM
You raise some interesting questions, mbowen. I think that the reasons for this war are, to say the least, obscure, not only to opponents of the war (like me) but to proponents as well, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. And I don't think we've got a social science adequate to the task of sussing out the "real" reasons, whatever they might be.
As a practical matter, things have been loosened up in the Middle East. There's a new potential for change. I don't think the nature of that change is written in stone in any way shape or form. Whatever the laws of history are, they don't dictate how such situations will fall out. So, the question is: of the many ways the Bush adminstration can administer its military victory, which will it choose? My impression is that these guys are governed by relatively short-term considerations and so are unduly impressed by a relatively easy military victory. I also think they have a rather naive faith in the vitues of "democracy," whatever they may understand by that term. So I'm prejudiced against the wisdom and good faith of their stewardship over the military victory. But I am puzzeled over how long it is reasonable to hold them accountable for that stewardship. A year? Five years? Ten years? That seems a bit dubious, and 20 years is absurd.
I note that the CEO of a small software company once told me that it's all he can do to think three years into the future. I thought he was a pretty sharp guy. I figure that future of Iraq is subject to forces at least as complicated as those impinging on that (small) software company. Is it reasonable to hold this administration accoutable to a three-year horizon (assuming they secure re-election)? What is the standard against which they should be judged in three years?
Posted by: bill benzon at April 24, 2003 03:11 PM