This article on Iran policy by Ezra Klein is excellent. But
there’s one graf – not really related to his major point – that got me
thinking:
In some ways, the absence of weapons in Iraq have allowed
the Democrats an easy out on the subject. Rather than being forced to face up
to the consequences of our invasion and reevaluate whether America should
really be overrunning tiny countries whose armories offend us, the various
candidates have been able to pin their mistake on information, rather than
ideology. As the argument goes, if they knew there had been no weapons, they
would have never voted for war. Obama, it should be said, opposed war without
regard to the weapons. Edwards, when I questioned him on this subject, refused
to answer the hypothetical. And Hillary has been quite straightforward in
saying that she regretted the flawed intelligence, but saw no reason to
apologize -- and thus, signal retroactive disagreement with -- her vote, given
the data she was working with.
Since I never thought the presence or absence of WMDs was
particularly relevant in the first place, this wasn’t, and isn’t, the way I
think about the Iraq war. Former war-supporters say they would have voted
against the war if they knew then what they know now. But that’s the problem –
you should have voted against the war even
if you didn’t know then what you know now. The implicit suggestion here,
that if Iraq had WMDs then war would have been justified, is disconcerting.
There is a reason why the vast majority of Middle East specialists opposed the
war regardless of the WMD question, a question that always struck me as
somewhat tangential to the bigger issues being debated.
In my view, there’s
only one way the Iraq war could have been justified, and that would have been
on the basis of humanitarian intervention. Even though I ultimately disagreed
with them, I have a deep respect for the people such as Tom Friedman and Paul Berman who supported the war on those
grounds. Their position on Iraq was
consistent with their approach to past conflicts like Kosovo and Bosnia, and it
reflected what, to me, has always been a laudable strain on the left – a visceral
hatred of authoritarianism, and a moral commitment to taking decisive action
when millions of people are without hope and living under the most brutal kind
of repression. It is easier to have this position when genocide is taking
place; but much harder to take this position to its logical conclusion that
gross human right abuses – even if not amounting to genocide – necessitate intervention
as well. The lesson of Iraq, of course, is that “intervention” to fight autocracy and repression
should nearly always be done through non-military means, except perhaps in very rare
instances (not entirely decided on what those instances are).
Idealism aside,
reality matters. Even if it seemed war was the only way to end Saddam’s brutality,
those acquainted with the history of Western intervention in the Middle East should
have been well aware of how such efforts – invariably couched in high-minded but
ultimately empty rhetorical flourishes – have consistently failed. We don’t
understand the Middle East, its culture, its people, its religious persuasions,
its complex, pained history of humiliation. And, as long we have little of the necessary
expertise required on the highest levels, then we should refrain from trying to
transform the region.
But if, in a perfect world, the Iraq war could have been done
correctly, competently, and with the right humanitarian justification – without
any reference to weapons of any sort – and marshaling the cooperation and
resources of the whole world united in a desire to help the Iraqi people in their
longstanding wish to live free lives – then who knows? But such a thing was not
possible. If it only it was. This is the tragedy of it. Something here was
lost. A belief, an idealism, a hope that humanitarian action could have been
used to right wrongs, to marshal together a new international ethic, where the
world’s nations came together to support democracy not just in word but, finally,
in deed. This was the ideal. But perhaps it simply wasn’t possible. And, perhaps, we were
wrong to think it ever could be.
