Here's my problem with George Packer, author of the hot new book on Iraq, The Assassin's Gate, in his own words:
"I came down on the pro-war side, by a whisker. I understood the risks and costs; I didn't understand how large they would be — how much larger than necessary because of the arrogance and incompetence of U.S. leaders."
Risks and costs? How about the right and wrong? Deciding to go to war is not just an intellectual exercise. It's a moral judgment.
The way I see it, you can make policy decisions either pragmatically--will it work? will it achieve a stated goal?-- or you can ask this question: Is it the right thing to do? The first way is the realpolitik of Kissinger and the neocons. The question Bush most likely asked himself about invading Iraq, despite his pious denials, was whether it would help him get reelected.
Asking the moral question doesn't relieve the policy maker of exercising his intellect and thinking through a problem logically. Deciding against bloodshed and carnage leaves other options for dealing with a problem--in the case of Iraq, Saddam Hussein-- which require careful thought and planning. In many respects, the warmongers, by ignoring the moral side of policy planning, have taken the easy way out.
The Packer op-ed piece has been nagging at me for several days. Thank goodness I came across this deconstruction of his logic by Jonathan Schwarz. Setting up a simple syllogism, Schwarz says that Packer has convinced himself that
"America attacking Iraq without having been attacked is not, by definition, immoral."
Rather than this perfectly reasonable, and historical, possibility:
"The alternative here would be to believe that America is like any other country; that when a country attacks another without being attacked it is almost always immoral; and that therefore, because America has fought a lot of wars in which we weren't attacked, we've fought a lot of immoral wars."
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What I've written reminds me, unfortunately, that I voted for a pro-war Democrat in the last election as an alternative to Bush. It was the triumph of pragmatism over moral idealism. And it didn't do any good.
But not again. And other progressives seem to be of like mind, especially regarding the potential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Her unapologetic pro-war stance has "raised the hackles" of some progressive groups, like Code Pink:
"Yet this weekend, as she raised big bucks from a gaggle of Hollywood wealth and celebrity at three different parties, she was dogged by the women of CodePink furious with her for her pro-war record. The anti-war movement is gaining momentum: 59% of Americans consider the war a mistake, while the death of the American soldier number 2,000 is on our doorstep."
David Sirota has written about how political pragmatism has compromised the progressive stance against the war in Iraq. He calls it the Partisan War Syndrome, defined as
"... the misconception even in supposedly 'progressive' circles that substance is irrelevant when it comes to both electoral success and, far more damaging, to actually building a serious, long-lasting political movement. This is the syndrome resulting from the shellshock of the partisan wars that marked the Clinton presidency. It is an affliction that hollowed out much of the Democratic base’s economic and national security convictions in favor of an orthodoxy that says partisan concerns and cults of personality should be the only priorities because they are supposedly the only factors that win elections. It is a disease that subverts substance for 'image' and has marked the last decade of Democrats’ repeated failures at the ballot box."
So next time, in 2008, I may be forced to write in the name of a candidate whose policies I can really back.
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