Iraq war (2003)
Hi. I have spent an enormous amount of effort, starting in 2002, debating about the 2003 Iraq war. I was surprised to find that my country, Australia, was divided 50/50 over the issue of whether such a fundamental action was right or wrong. I thought that called for scientific inquiry, not just of Australians, but the whole world, including Iraqis. I only got the ability to talk to actual Iraqis when they started blogs, and was able to talk to pro- and anti- advocates.
In recent years I have mainly been discussing it with one particular person, a Russian who migrated to the UK, and he has recently said it is about time I talked to actual philosophers.
I'm not expecting people to agree with me, because I am now aware of some of my underlying assumptions that are not universal.
What would be good is if my opponents could at least acknowledge that my rationale is self-consistent, even though they disagree with assumptions x, y and z. Or if someone can see a flaw in my rationale which necessitates some unstated assumption to be fleshed out.
I'll try to briefly state my assumptions.
1. We should be using the veil of ignorance (see wikipedia) to try to construct a just world.
2. We have a responsibility to protect (see wikipedia) others.
Based on this we can derive two goals:
1. End state-slavery as quickly as possible.
2. Minimize casualties.
If it was just (1) we were after, we could simply nuke all the slave states. If it was just (2) we were after, we could have inaction. But the combination of these 2 goals requires a hell of a lot of thought to devise a cunning plan for world liberation.
In recent years I have mainly been discussing it with one particular person, a Russian who migrated to the UK, and he has recently said it is about time I talked to actual philosophers.
I'm not expecting people to agree with me, because I am now aware of some of my underlying assumptions that are not universal.
What would be good is if my opponents could at least acknowledge that my rationale is self-consistent, even though they disagree with assumptions x, y and z. Or if someone can see a flaw in my rationale which necessitates some unstated assumption to be fleshed out.
I'll try to briefly state my assumptions.
1. We should be using the veil of ignorance (see wikipedia) to try to construct a just world.
2. We have a responsibility to protect (see wikipedia) others.
Based on this we can derive two goals:
1. End state-slavery as quickly as possible.
2. Minimize casualties.
If it was just (1) we were after, we could simply nuke all the slave states. If it was just (2) we were after, we could have inaction. But the combination of these 2 goals requires a hell of a lot of thought to devise a cunning plan for world liberation.
Comments (273)
Who is this "we" and what gives you a duty or even a right to "construct" the world we all share in your image of justice? Idealism is great, however after not much uncovering you may find your "responsibility to protect others" is derived from little more than to protect oneself from public backlash or war crimes. Which I find the term an ironic hypocrisy as it implies large-scale killing of peoples is permitted "so long as you do it quickly and without too much suffering" ... seriously who on Earth comes up with this crap?
Quoting Paul Edwards
Without mutually agreed upon rules and codes of conduct (and they were by your ancestors, just they didn't have their minds and souls rotted by mind numbing television, convenience, and social media), and those rules and codes being enforced in an open and free medium with real repercussion when not followed, people enslave each other just fine. If you mean the modern first-world we live in where a wheelchair-bound man can work a dignified job and be just as successful as someone perfectly gifted in physique and health, is 'state-slavery' then *whip sound* back to work.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Lol. Again with this we business. If the majority human populace, not during the enlightened period but the ignorant periods of the past and today (which have so much in common it's eerie) had their way and controlled the armed forces this rock we live on would've been a smouldering, fiery crater devoid of all life a long time ago. Let us be thankful that's not the case. I guess.
Just keep using your top of the line iPhone manufactured by drearily underpaid workers and eat your fresh produce picked by the same while continuing to demonize and fix a noose for these imaginary slavers that seem to exist everywhere and anywhere but in the mirror.
"We" is the free world. And yes, it is a stated assumption that we want a just world, instead of dismissing this world as some sort of purgatory that we just need to accept.
Ok, there is another assumption I have that dictators are enslavers while ordinary citizens like myself are not. Would you like to see video of Saddam's goons cutting out someone's tongue? Can you not see a difference between that and using an iphone?
US involvement in WW2 and the Korean war resulted in tremendous victories for world liberation, also their support in NATO has been crucial for establishing and protecting democracies. Germany, Japan, S. Korea, a handful of countries in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans would all likely not be democracies without US intervention, the threat of it or guarantees of independence. The Korean is the last major war where the US seems to clearly be on the right side, with a clear purpose that any modern Westerner should be able to get behind. That is not to say the US has only supported liberty through war and that they did nothing good past this point but it's harder to see the other wars in the same way as WW2 and the Korean war.
I can get behind the idea that the free world should not tolerate dictatorships and tyranny, even if not all the democracies are where they need to be within the West. However, the Iraq war was a mess, the plan changed several times and the US answers to establishing a democracy seem to be flawed. Countries which could easily be made into a democracy have been, the rest, there are serious obstacles to success. What country are you hoping will be the next target and what is it you'd like to see the "free world" doing?
In my opinion, it was conducted near-perfectly, given what was known at the time. There were a lot of people who said it was impossible for Arab Muslims to have democracy, so the US really did pull a rabbit out of the hat there. If you have any specific complaint about US action, I am happy to explain why I think it was the exact right thing to do. Including the pullback in Fallujah which infuriated the US soldiers who were ordered to do that.
Iran is my preferred target. We can use the excuse that the government has an official philosophy of "Death to the US" and has a nuclear program. So we don't spook the other dictators who will follow, as we just want "one more war". I believe that the majority of the Iranian people will welcome liberation, and we don't need to do any nation-building. Just quick in an out. Basically help them with their revolutions that they try now and again and get mowed down by automatic weapons. Make the next revolution a success with the aid of US air power.
Let's turn to Iran, your preferred target. True, they were (probably still are) working on nuclear weapons and a rocket program with which to deliver them, but the US is not their target, as far as I know. A more likely target would be Israel or Saudi Arabia. Of the two, Saudi Arabia may have an edge in preferment.
The Iranian people will have to work out their own liberation -- not because nobody cares about them, but because it seems highly unlikely that the US, or any other power, can confer liberation upon them. We contributed a great deal to the Iranian people's previous suffering under the Shah. Let's not repeat the gift.
There were multiple reasons given, not just one. It was better for the US to focus on that one thing so as to not spook allied dictators.
No, this is being wise after the fact. If the US had done it any differently, and it had failed, you would instead be on here saying it was "obvious" that democracy wouldn't work with the approach taken. The societal collapse was a facet of Iraqi culture in the absence of an oppressive force. With the information available at the time, it was necessary to remove that oppressive force so that the Iraqis would genuinely believe that they were free. As a result, 300+ political parties started up, and there were long lines to join the new Iraqi security forces, despite the fact that the country was still under US occupation. It could have been very different if neither of those things had happened, and democracy failed.
This is actually part of the reason why it's so important to go into Iran. Until we actually get in there and do it, you won't believe it is technically possible. We don't have enough liberations under our belt to prove that it is possible. I would expect a result like Panama. I trust the majority of Iranians to manage their affairs. But you won't believe it until you see it.
If you think the US is responsible, partly or fully, for the predicament that the Iranians find themselves in, then that's even MORE reason for the US to fix the problem. The Iranian people yearn for freedom, but they have no way to defeat automatic weapons. The same thing that stopped the Iraqis succeeding in their 1991 uprising. The same thing that stopped the Chinese in 1989.
What is free? Free to be drunk all day and rot our insides and become a burden on our society? Free to be the vilest person one can be (within confines of the law) and viciously insult, degrade, and belittle those who may be going through more than you could imagine or perhaps even handle if the tides were to change and drive them to depression, suicide, or even acting out on others? Or just making society and public an all-around shitty place to be? Free to subvert the nuclear family or natural family unit into a haphazard partnership leaving children to grow up socially-malformed with no sense of right or wrong beyond what little lessons, morals, or values they were exposed to? Free to worship the darkest of forces (all while refusing to acknowledge they exist) that not only encourage but demand humanity be the worst they can be toward one another (tactfully and within the law). Newsflash. At this rate, the idea of what is 'just' or proper/"normal" is rapidly declining and without external guidelines may continue its downward spiral.
Quoting Paul Edwards
And what if it is? Not to just "accept" but to rise above and beyond. Which calls for leaders to "speak softly and carry a big stick" .. in hopes of guiding all toward a higher morality.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Sure, that's a sovereign leader (again, an individual, one bad apple) committing human rights abuses which should be punished swiftly and appropriately. I mean, and I understand, that act you describe was probably for a non-heinous "crime" ie. speaking out against the government/blasphemy/something of the sort, and that is shocking. However, if it wasn't, what difference is that between putting someone in the electric chair, injecting them with lethal poisons that kill them, or otherwise incarcerating them or like it was back then hanging them.
Indifference is the gateway sin, the root cause of all suffering men experience in this world. Sure, the average man, shoot maybe he's even an exemplary man who goes above and beyond his social commitments/contract, that's great. Is pushing a button that kills a person in another room that's labeled "free hugs" much different in terms of concrete real world effect from someone who presses the same button if it were properly labeled?
(for the record I'm more or less- I think- on your side as far as the arguments you claim to represent. Just, anything based on substance can be refuted wholeheartedly and convincingly so I'm just playing a sort of devil's advocate here.)
Ok, that's another assumption. People have different definitions of "freedom". Mine is "living under a rational, humanist, non-subjugating (in that order) government".
Well, it took 23 years to punish him. By rights you should be complaining we were too slow to bring him to justice, not that we shouldn't be doing it, because it's no worse than using an iphone.
And maybe there's another assumption at play here, which I can't name (maybe you can help me?) but I don't equate a dictator ordering tongues to be chopped out for exercise of freedom of speech, with a democracy choosing to use capital punishment on criminals.
I am familiar with the term, and I have read the Wikipedia article on it. I suspect that all I am doing is trying to get the 2003 Iraq war agreed to as part of Just War Theory.
From reading your posts, you seem to have a pre-conceived conclusion and are trying to collect information to strengthen your case. Which is fine because many people do that but it doesn't make for interesting discussions. All I'll leave you with is to suggest Walzer's book "Just War Theory". That's not perfect either, particulary his Combatant Equality doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's pretty good. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on War is interesting too. I'll post an overview I wrote years ago about the historic development of just war theory as well.
Since Antiquity, the manifest and physical conflict between groups organised towards that end we call war, seems to be a fact of human nature or at least a fact of human society. The causes for war are numerous and of differing nature and vary, among others, according to time, place and culture. Many subjective and objective factors lead to wars. We can differentiate between those factors situated within the individual, the group or State or its international relations and those of various economical, political, militaristic and psychological developments.
Next to this casuistic approach, wars can be differentiated by ends, motives and justifications. The ends for which wars are waged are often not identical with its intentions or motives. Where the end might well be situated in the retrieval of lost goods or lost territory – sometimes a limited area of little political or economic use – the actual reasons might well be grounded in nationalism, as the indignity suffered by the nation convinces its subjects to restore the loss of face.
Nonetheless, justification of a war has always been a necessity. A necessity, because the principle exists in many cultures and religions that the killing and maiming of fellow humans is not self-evident, but that it requires justification. The use of physical force without any form of justification remains within the realm of the insane and madmen. In general, a person applies such force with reference to higher ideals, necessity or divine dispensation. It is, however, not only this ethical dimension that requires such justification. More pragmatic considerations sometimes require that we must first convince our allies of the justice of our cause before they are willing to participate in a war. This is especially true in democracies where such justification is also necessary to mobilise civilians for the war effort. Such legitimacy is most often in accordance with the opinion of specific communities.
However, the problem of such a term as legitimacy is that its meaning is not semantically fixed. In its philosophical approach the basis on which legitimacy or illegitimacy is assumed, refers to criteria that lie outside the judging subject . The characteristics of the legitimate political system are fixed within objective, philosophical definitions. This is different when we approach legitimacy from a sociological perspective. Here the criteria by which legitimacy or illegitimacy is assumed, exists in the minds of its judging subjects. This might imply that a political system, or at least a part or an aspect – e.g. war – of it, can be considered legitimate whereas it should be considered illegitimate by more objective standards of right and wrong. What is of paramount importance to the sociological approach is that a majority of the relevant community experiences the political system or an aspect of it as right. Nevertheless, in legitimising a justification for war, convincing the subjects of the political system often requires an appeal to the characteristics of objective legitimacy. However, this is not a requirement. It is important to note that these approaches exist next to each other. One does not exclude the other and I will make use of both of them.
The Just War tradition is the designation for a diverse collection of literature on the morality of war and its conduct, which academically is often referred to as respectively Ius ad Bellum and Ius in Bello. It aims at offering criteria by which a war is considered just and by which its conduct is considered just. The tradition as a whole does not argue against war but aims at restraining the resort to war and its conduct on a moral basis. In opposition to this, it should be noted that the Christian pacifistic movement, as part of this tradition, does argue against war. It is, however, not predominant.
The Just War tradition can be traced back to ancient Grecian philosophy when Plato and Aristotle offered their insights on war. During the Dark Age the sources for legitimising wars were the Old and New testament, the rules of law of the Romans, Greek philosophy and the Fathers of the Church of whom Saint Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century is most notable. In general, it is considered that Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century was the first to approach the tradition systematically. Considering that saint Thomas Aquinas bases his work mostly on the thoughts of Augustine and Gratian, who in turn based their works on non-Christian Greek and Roman scholars, brevity on my part when considering these earlier scholars should be excused.
The Reformation in the 16th century did lead to a partial secularisation. During this time, most religious philosophers maintained that war for religion was the most just cause for the use of force. In opposition to this view stood those secular philosophers who thought about justice in war in terms of natural law.
As is apparent, the tradition is mostly Christian and Western, although a similar debate exists in Islam. Modernity also shows a greater participation by non-Western countries in the development of Just War thinking through international institutions such as the U.N. and the adoption of treaties. The prevalence of Western thinking is still obvious, which is most likely due to political, economic and social dominance of the West. The tradition’s universality can therefore be questioned but remains unchallenged, if for no other reason than the fact that the tradition has shaped the lines along which most western scholars think and they should not be disregarded by a simple act of will.
1. The Greeks & Romans
In the earliest times (750-500 BC) of Grecian history violence, plunder and sudden migrations were common in the area that is now the south and middle of Greece and the west coast of Asia Minor. Thucydides, an Athenian historian, notes that the lands that were called Hellas in his time (ca. 460-400 BC) had no permanent population in olden times. Migrations were common because the differing tribes easily left their territories under the pressures of superior forces of invaders. There was no trade between the different tribes, nor was there safe travel over land or by sea.
During Thucydides´ time things had changed to some degree. By this time stock-breeding became less important as opposed to agriculture. It was this stock-breeding that allowed for easy migrations before. As agriculture grew in importance, the leaders became aristocratic landowners who had their own retinue. They developed a system of values and rules, which they applied both in battle as well as in sports. Heralds and emissaries were spared, the dead of the enemy were returned for proper burial, they respected, if possible, the right of asylum of temples and other holy places and the substitution of wars of destruction by organised and regulated battles between champions or selected groups. The conquered population would not always be killed, but were often partially or entirely enslaved.
One of the first examples in which morality is seemingly separated from war is given in Thucydides’ History and is covered by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars as the “Melian Dialogue”. In this dialogue two Athenian generals meet with the magistrates of the island Melos. Melos was a Spartan colony and, although it rested on neutrality, refused to be subject unto the Athenians. The Athenian generals put forward that if they did not conquer what they could, they would reveal their weakness and invite attack and that it was therefore necessary to conquer what they could, which was in this case Melos. The Melian magistrates considered themselves innocent against men unjust and hoped for the assistance of Sparta. They thought of the Athenians unjust as they had no just cause to attack them. However, the Athenian generals pointed out that Sparta would do no such thing since they would only think of themselves as “they hold for honourable that which pleaseth and for just that which profiteth.”
It illustrates that one of the reasons, why the whole notion of morality in war would fail according to realists, is when those that resort to war are realists. That is to say, they consider war apart from normal life, where self-interest and necessity dictate their actions, and morality and law have no place. Nevertheless, as they consider war outside the realm of morality, they do so within the language of morality. Realists are still speaking on the subject of morality. They consider the conduct of war to be free of any moral constraints but justify this on the basis that winning a war is the highest good and that all other goods, for instance the rights of non-combatants and prisoners of war, are inferior to this goal. For war to be entirely free of morality it should be separated from the whole concept of winning and losing, as this concept in itself is normative. Yet, the object of war is to win by force that which cannot be obtained or is thought not to be obtainable by other means. So, as these realists first justify their need to wage war by pointing out that it is necessary, which in itself is a moral argument, they subsequently justify their conduct by referring to this necessity. And in all this they fail to answer vital questions; what is necessary? Is it necessary to kill civilians? And if so, when is it no longer necessary to kill civilians? Is it necessary to declare war on neutrals? Etc. Etc.
Leaving Thucydides and with him archaic Hellas behind, the Greece of Antiquity as it is generally known came into being with the development of the – incorrectly named – city-states (hereafter: "poleis"). Agriculture developed even further and gradually the poleis monopolised the use of force due to which the private wars of aristocrats and plunderers were considered illegitimate and therefore criminal. The poleis signed treaties with their neighbours in order to limit violence and this often led to a situation of peace (eirèné) between the contracting poleis. However, even after the development of the poleis, military expeditions would sometimes end up as expeditions of plunder under the direction of the general, in which neither friend nor foe was out of harm's way.
The philosopher Plato stated rules for the resort to war and the conduct of war in his Politea and Nomoi. He disapproved of expansive wars, civil wars and revolutions based on power politics or material ends and he felt that wars should only be waged as a last resort. The purpose of a war should be a new peace and the conduct should not be too harsh, especially against other Greeks, and the overbearing of women and mass slavery were wrong in his eyes. Plato also made a distinction between civil strife and war and the emerging idea of non-combatants can be inferred, at least in the case of civil strife, when he states that not the whole people of a poleis – its men, women and children – are to be regarded as enemies but only the hostile minority. Of course, this does allow for the hostile minority to be part of what we now consider non-combatants. Still, it is clear that he means to introduce some form of discrimination.
With respect to the conduct of war Aristotle agreed to a large extent with Plato and on the resort to war he said: "… for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace." That the object of war should be peace can be inferred from this. Despite this, the Greeks were thought to be superior to the barbarians, that is to say; those that were not Greek, and it was therefore their duty to subjugate and enslave them for the purpose of peace.
After the conquest of the Persian Empire (334-323) by Alexander the Great and his death, his empire fell apart in kingdoms, poleis and leagues of poleis. Between these a near constant state of conflict existed. Limited wars were fought by mercenaries, who had no interest in the annihilation of their "comrades in arms" because they might well lose the battle themselves on another day. Prisoners were released for ransom and truces were mostly upheld. In general the treatment of the conquered areas was more humane as an expression of the general humanisation of the relations between peoples from different communities.
The Roman Republic in the times of 600-300 BC shows little evidence of private wars. Perhaps this is due to the lack of sources on these times or perhaps it points to the possibility that the Roman Republic monopolised the use of force at an early age. According to Livius, a Roman historian of around 59-17 BC, the Romans had clearly defined ideas on the justification of wars from the beginning of their history and a complicated ritual for their declarations of war. As a reason for and a justification of wars the Romans identified the incursio hostilis, which is a breach of Roman territory, an attack aimed at an ally, infringement of treaty provisions, support to an enemy, not extraditing hostile persons and the molest of Roman emissaries. Nevertheless, these justification were often utilised as artificial excuses for aggressive wars. Even the expressed motivation for war was often a mere pretext, as the real reason was to acquire plunder, land and fame.
It was not until the era of Marcus Tullius Cicero (hereafter: "Cicero") that Roman thought on war and peace was established. During the times of Cicero the Roman Empire was inflicted with civil war that coincided with large military operations by Caius Julius Caesar and Cnaeus Pompeius. It was within these setting that reflections on the State, society, values for public and private life and the problem of war came into existence. Of the writers of these times Cicero is the most well known.
During the time of the Roman Empire the primary care for peace and justice rested with the government, including the emperor. This care referred to both the external peace, by protecting the border with a professional army, as well as the internal peace, by instituting courts and convicting criminals. The emperor alone was authorised and justified to use force.
According to Cicero a war was justified when negotiations with the enemy had failed, after which the enemy should be warned and finally war should be formally declared. He also considered that a new and better peace should be the aim of a war and that it should not be commenced without a valid reason. Peace to Cicero and other Romans of his time was the absence of hostilities. However, justice did not mean to Cicero what it means to us. A war for imperial glory was to him a legitimate motive for war, although he was of the opinion that such wars were to be fought with lesser intensity. As a matter of fact, justice to the Romans was mostly formalistic. Cicero did differentiate between civil wars and wars against others and separated defensive wars from aggressive wars, without condemning the latter.
In a just war the capture of civilians, the destruction of land and the plunder of cities was allowed according to Cicero. In practice, the warlords waged wars largely in the spirit of the times before Cicero. However, there was a tendency to give greater consideration to the justification of war. Caius Julius Caesar demonstrated his wars in Gaul as defensive wars and justified his ruthless treatment of certain Gaelic and Germanic tribes with rather forced reasoning in which he would depict his enemies as aggressors.
2. Early Christians & Augustine
The official position of the early Christians with regard to war was one of non-participation. In accordance with the Christian command "Thou shalt not kill", which was a command to the individual, the refused to serve in the Roman armies. It has also been put forward that Christians did not serve as soldiers, because it automatically required them to participate in idolatrous ceremonies. The early Christians were also expecting the return of Christ who would bring a new world. To them, peace was the Messiah's peace of God's kingdom to come and as such unattainable on earth.
This was the official line of the early Christian church until the beginning of the fourth century AD. The most influential change was the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity as its official religion within a century after the adoption of this religion by Constantine the great in 313 AD. Christian writers mainly copied the war ethics of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero.
According to these early Christian writers war should be a means in the hands of a sovereign instituted by God, which or who alone was allowed to take life. The war should be preceded by the proper diplomatic steps and should be waged as humanely as possible and should be waged with the right intention. A better peace should be its aim and unnecessary bloodshed should be avoided.
It was Saint Augustine that first established a firm Christian doctrine. When he did so he gave little consideration to wars of defence, because he thought such wars obviously justifiable and even obligatory. Augustine´s main exposition was on just wars of aggression. He required that the supreme authority alone was allowed to declare. Only an injustice or wrong caused by the enemy was considered as a sufficient justification for war, although the direct command of God could provide justification as well. It would seem that Augustine implies a right of punishment and he certainly accepts war as a means of God to punish the just as well as the unjust. He was, however, more concerned with defending and maintaining objective justice. Augustine insisted on war to be necessary and to have as its aim the achievement of peace, despite this he did not consider the contradiction and tension between war and peace. He thus leaves objective justice for what it is and from this the importance of the criteria of right intention might be inferred as it only leaves us with the subjective justice of these intentions.
As stated above on page XXX the Roman Emperor had the sole right to resort to force. However, during the Dark Age the Roman Empire disintegrated due to the invasion of the Germanic Tribes. Every free man of these tribes was a warrior. War to the Germanic Tribes was an enterprise to obtain fame and wealth and the charge of their Kings was very different from that of the Roman Emperor. These Kings were not primarily responsible for peace and justice; on the contrary, their duty was in the first place that of warlord. In fact, war to them was the natural state of things and the annual campaign was a part of their living pattern.
Neither was the internal peace fully under the charge of the Kings. For the solution of litigation the subjects had recourse to two alternatives; they could either bring a case before the court, or they could resort to force by exercising their feud right. The feud is a condition of formal and declared hostility that can exist between two persons when one has wronged the other and is unwilling to amend that wrong. The purpose of this force is to coerce the opponent to amend the wrong. This feud right was a fundamental apart of Germanic Law.
When Charlemagne tried to live up to his Roman predecessors he once again attempted to monopolise the use of force. Especially the nobility of that time saw any restriction on their feud right as a breach of their freedom and therefore as an injustice. Here the two radically different legal systems clashed.
After the disintegration of Charlemagne´s Empire due to the struggle between his descendants, the position of the King of the Western Empire was weakened severely. The power vacuum that was created was filled by the dukes. The further this disintegration continued the less willing these local authorities were to subjugate their disputes to a higher authority. The consequence of this was that the disputes between them were again resolved through feuds, with several notable differences:
a) The nobility enforced their own jurisdiction because of which the subordinate population lost their feud rights. This right became an exclusive privilege of the ruling upper class.
b) Because of the invincibility of the strongholds the feuding parties would redirect their force against the defenceless peasantry to compel the opponent to capitulate.
c) The feud developed from a purely legal action into a political military means of coercion until it finally became war.
The main problem was whether feuds could fulfil the requirements of a just war. Primarily the problem revolved around who was to be considered as the right authority. Strictly along the lines of earlier thinkers only the Kings and Emperor were allowed to declare war. Obviously, the actual practice was very different. Although many attempts to banish feud rights failed, certain rules were created by which feuding parties were supposed to adhere. First of all, before resorting to force parties had to strive for a non-violent solution. They were not allowed to use force before the feud was formally and openly declared. A feud that met these requirements was considered in practice to be just.
The theory usually let both parties put forward irrefutable arguments, which allowed them to invoke the just war theory in good faith. The articulation of a just cause was based on vague distinctions such as "fault" or "wrong" that were not further defined and the idea to intend a "better peace" is unclear too. Although a fault or wrong was a thing that existed prior to the decision to declare war and as such some objective measurement was possible, the aim of a better peace was – and still is- immeasurable and solely subject to the expectations and "rational" predictions of the future. The main weaknesses of the tradition lie therefore with the classical distinctions of right authority, just cause and right intention. Especially the purpose of a right intention turns the theory into a teleological one and as war is one of the most socially complex activities of mankind its outcome is impossible to predict beforehand. This is even more true when one considers that rationality is often absent in the heat of battle. As a consequence such precognition is even less likely to be accurate. At the same time the tradition in medieval times and from then on rests on this teleological consideration of a better peace. The classical distinctions of right authority, just cause and right intention have survived to this day.
3. Aquinas
In the second division of the second part of the Summa Theologica (hereafter: “war articles”) Aquinas wrote on war. He discussed whether war in itself is wrong and its possible justification if it were not. He continued to deal with the questions of whether clerics should fight, whether it is lawful for belligerents to lay ambushes and whether fighting on holy days is permissible. Of these, only the question whether it is lawful for belligerents to lay ambushes is of enough significance in today’s secular world. Although Aquinas’ answer to this question points to the existence of rules of conduct the substance of these rules have changed drastically over time. As a consequence the rules of conduct are considered as part of existing international law in order to distil substantive rulings and Aquinas’ answer is not dealt with. I will further endeavour to separate the theological aspects of Aquinas’ theory only insofar as this will not distort the representation of his ideas.
To the first question whether some kind of war is lawful he raises four objections. The first two objections are quoted from Scripture and as they do not represent lines of thought that can be rationally reconstructed their consideration is one better left to theologians. The third objection states that war is contrary to the virtue of peace and the fourth objection states that since the Church forbids warlike exercises in tournaments, they must be sinful.
His answer revolves around three main criteria for a just war, which are the following classical distinctions:
- right authority
- just cause
- rightful intention
Right Authority
The idea of a right authority is not original to Aquinas, but it certainly is paramount in his thinking. Aquinas is of the opinion that no private individual is allowed to summon the people together and declare war, because he has the opportunity to seek redress from a tribunal of his superior. It is the care of the common weal that is entrusted to those in authority and it is therefore their business to watch over the common weal of a community. And as it is lawful for them to use the sword in defending this common weal against internal disturbances so too is it their business to wage war in defending the common weal against external enemies.
Quoting Augustine he says: “The natural order conducive to peace among mortals demands that the power to declare and counsel war should lie in the hands of those who hold the supreme authority.” It is important to stress the requirement of supreme authority. It would seem that any authority that can turn to a higher authority for arbitration is not allowed to declare war.
Just Cause
On the subject of a just cause Aquinas writes “those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault.” He elaborates when quoting Augustine:
“A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.”
Both Aquinas’ idea of a “fault” and Augustine’s “wrong” are inadequate to define a just cause, as these terms themselves are undefined. Moreover, Augustine considers wrongs inflicted by the subject of states as punishable by war. This of course begs the question what wrongs these should be, as they certainly do not include theft. For “what it has seized unjustly” refers grammatically to the nation or state and does not refer to subjects. This invites the discussion on what is considered to be an act by a state and that of a person but goes beyond the scope of this thesis. However, what wrongs, if any, these are, are for a large part unclear.
Aquinas does rule on self-defence but not in his war articles. It is closely bound to that of the rule of double effect, which he reflects on in another part of his Summa Theologica and which will be contended with below. Self-defence comes into play when the wrong suffered by the other party consists of a direct threat or attack to one’s person. Through analogy we can consider the reclamation of territory, if it has been taken, as a form of self-defence for an authority that rules over a distinguishable area. No other wrongs are further considered by Aquinas. Interestingly enough, when considering self-defence even the unjust side can claim to wage a just war on the grounds of individual self-defence. From this follows that the just war would only operate up to the first moment of attack.
Right Intention
Finally, Aquinas reflects on the requirement of rightful intention. The belligerents must “intend the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil.” Again he quotes Augustine and illustrates that the object of war should be securing peace, punishing evil-doers and uplifting the good. Prohibited are “the passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.”
What good Aquinas speaks of is not entirely certain. When dealing with the requirement of a right authority he regards as the good, the good of the community over which the authority resides. However in his answer to the second objection he also considers the good of the enemy when he quotes Augustine to demonstrate that resistance is sometimes preferable to non-resistance. He states: “nothing is more unhappy than the happiness of sinners .” Next to these two goods a third can be distinguished, namely that of the “common good” that stands above the good of separate communities.
As he considers the good of the community and that of its enemies separately, there is no particular reason to assume a war must necessarily be fought for the “common good”. Either appears to be enough to assume a rightful intention even if it were to be to the detriment of one or the other. However, such a separation might be considered undesirable since the detrimental effect to either community could outweigh the positive effect for the other. It appears to me that if this were the result of the existence of a right intention that this cannot have been Aquinas’ meaning.
To continue, as is apparent from the answer to the second objection non-resistance is sometimes considered evil. Likewise, the horrors of war can be redeemed by a purpose of bringing peace. It appears to illustrate that when considering the “common good”, elements of the good of the different belligerents are to be considered. When declaring war these differing goods must be weighed against each other. On the other hand the good of either of the belligerents might sometimes outweigh the “common good”, as the price that must be paid is simply too grave for the goal of a better peace. None of these considerations are explicitly mentioned in Aquinas’ war articles and I would not go so far as to attribute them to him, but the arising problems are in the foreground when reading Aquinas’ war articles. It is unlikely he was unaware of them.
On the matter of double effect, that is, the problem of an act having two effects only one of which is intended, Aquinas writes:
“Accordingly the act of self-defence may have two effects, one is the saving of one’s life, the other is the slaying of the aggressor. Therefore, this act, since one’s intention is to save one’s own life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to everything to keep itself in being, as far as possible.”
It is therefore unlawful for an individual to intend to kill the aggressor, but a public authority may intend to do so for he will “refer this to the public good, as is the case of a soldier fighting against the foe”. Private animosity is still considered a sin when this moves the public authority to act. Further to the idea of double effect Aquinas writes:
“And yet, though proceeding from a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful, if it be out of proportion to the end. Wherefore if a man, in self-defence, uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful; whereas if he repel force with moderation his defence will be lawful, because according to the jurists, it is lawful to repel force by force, provided one does not exceed the limits of a blameless defence.”
He so demonstrates that the use of force for an individual must be proportionate. Although Aquinas permits that a public authority is allowed to intend to kill a man in self-defence, he does not speak of allowing disproportionate force to a public authority. Aquinas’ explicitly makes the comparison between the individual and a public authority when reflecting on the intention of killing the aggressor in the case of self-defence. He does not relate the idea of proportionality for an individual to that of a public authority at all, whereas this idea is both conceptually but also textually closely linked to that of the intention to kill. It is therefore defendable that the requirement of proportionality of force is applicable to public authorities according to Aquinas as he does not explicitly allow it as he has done for the intention to kill another.
The intention to kill in public self-defence was presumably allowed because it is thought that the judgment of a sovereign is more rational and deliberate. However, it is doubtful an authority is more efficient in distributing justice than the individual. The authority in the end does little more than give approval to individuals to carry out “justice” in its name. These individuals bear the practical responsibility but they escape all moral responsibility, which Aquinas thought to be the responsibility of the sovereign, as is apparent when he again quotes Augustine:
“He slays not who owes his service to one who commands him, even as a sword is merely the instrument to him that wields it … just as a soldier slays the foe by the authority of his sovereign…”
Although the individual is not allowed to intend to kill his opponent even under threat of losing his own life, it would appear unjust for an authority to have the intention to kill for any lesser reason. Considering that Aquinas did not reflect on other wrongs than those dealt with under the rule of self-defence, it may be inferred that these wrongs – threat or attack to persons and/or territory – are the only wrongs that will serve as justification. This is a logical conclusion from the fact that no war can be fought without the intention to kill and as it would be unjust to kill for any lesser reason than self-defence, no other causes may be considered just.
Aquinas briefly reflects on an aspect of the conduct of war when he answers whether it is lawful to lay ambushes in war. He considers that the object of laying ambushes is to deceive the enemy and this can be done in two different ways. On the one hand through telling "something false or through the breaking of a promise", which is always unlawful, and on the other hand "a man can be deceived … because we do not declare our purpose or meaning to him". The first is condemned because we have the duty to preserve the rights even of our enemy. However, these rights do not include telling another everything we are going to do to him. Here, Aquinas ignores the more positive aspects of laying ambushes as he defines "ambush" as nothing more than "concealment of plans". This all he states on the matter of the conduct in war.
It can be concluded that on the criteria of Ius ad Bellum Aquinas writes that the right authority is the supreme authority, which is able to exercise power in order to defend the common weal. It does so only in self-defence as he loses the moral right to intend to kill another if his cause is other than self-defence. Since no war can be fought without the intention to kill others, the wrongs that facilitate just causes are the protection of the population over which the authority resides and the reclamation of lost territory. He must do so with the intention to advance good or avoid evil and although the supreme authority is allowed to intend to kill others, he is still bound to use force proportionate to the wrong suffered. Even though Aquinas did not explicitly consider what good the authority should intend, it was suggested that this should be the good of both warring parties. This requires some consideration towards how the war will end, for the original injustice and the situation after the war should be compared to decide whether going to war will advance good or avoid evil. Aquinas allows for the existence of double effect insofar as the authority or person is intent on bringing about the just effect. On the criteria of Ius in Bello Aquinas is brief as he only considers the laying of ambushes in a very limited sense of the "concealment of plans". Such concealment is not permissible when it is brought about by lies or the breaking of a promise.
The authority of Aquinas’ thoughts on war are not due to any original or comprehensive exposition but because his general eminence and that of the Summa Theologica. As Joan D. Tooke notes: “the subject of war had not been included in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the accepted theological handbook for three centuries during the middle ages ...” Since the Summa Theologica replaced the Sentences Aquinas ensured that his treatment of war had a certain importance and authority.
4. Vitoria, Suarez & Grotius
The just cause of war, which Aquinas had defined as an attack on those who “deserve it on account of some fault”, was more precisely defined after his time. Defence, of which Aquinas said nothing specific in his war articles because he took its rightfulness for granted, came to be recognised as a specific cause. Recuperatio, recovering goods unjustly stolen and held or wrongly taken in a previous conflict, was another cause. A punishable injury was yet another.
It was generally accepted that in defensive war there should be not element of punishment and that it was right to recover only what was wrongly taken. No enslavement or seizure of enemy possessions was thought to be allowable. Furthermore, defence was thought to derive its authority from its intrinsic justice and it did not need a superior authority. This permissiveness reached out to friends, allies and neighbours.
Recuperatio was in some cases thought to be somewhere between defence and aggression. Recuperatio in continenti was more or less a direct reaction to an earlier conflict and as such could be regarded as an extension of defence. Thus it shared the conditions and rights of defence as opposed to recovery after some time. In general the latter was widely considered as a new act and therefore requiring right authority. Whether recuperatio after some time is considered punitive is not entirely clear. The distinction between wars of punishment and wars of recuperatio suggests that it is not punitive. Also, the practical necessity to marshal an army to recover goods or land might require time, as such it would be a strange thing to consider such action as aggression for the mere fact that no army would have been near to react to the initial conflict in the first place.
The third type of war; the punishment of an injury was directed at the moral guilt of the enemy as punishment of this guilt. Most thinkers limited the right to punish to just wars of aggression, that is those wars waged by a right authority, with a just cause and rightful intention. The capture and enslavement of persons and the confiscation of goods and property could be part of this punishment. Nevertheless, it is thought that the true justification of any defensive or aggressive war was not punishment but the maintenance of justice and the care of the common weal. Even those violations that were subjectively just of those goods would initiate an aggressive war.
New criteria came into fruition as well. Increasingly, thinkers regarded war as a last resort for maintaining or restoring justice and therefore all other means of settlement had to be tried and failed. Furthermore, the chances for success were progressively more discussed. Since the victory of the just could not be guaranteed the authority was recommended to surmise the likelihood of victory.
After Aquinas Vitoria (1480-1546) was the first to make a considerable contribution to the just war tradition. Armed defence of property, life and honour were justifiable without question, but an offensive war should fulfil the following conditions :
- it should be declared;
- by the right authority;
- having a just cause;
- as a last resort;
- having a rightful intention, and;
- the evils let loose by the war should be proportionate to the good one hopes to attain.
Vitoria thought that war was only justifiable in the absence of a court of a superior to which contending parties would be obliged to refer their dispute. In an offensive war the enemy would not be justified to defend himself as he should recognise the justice of the aggressor. Nevertheless, the guilt of the enemy was not essential for a war to be just. Recuperatio of wrongly held goods could be initiated against an enemy that acted in good faith. If defence was offered as an immediate reaction to an injustice suffered the requirement of a right authority was not needed. However, Vitoria did not allow private persons or lower authorities to recover goods after a certain time had passed. Vitoria was the first that allowed that a war may be subjectively just on both sides; it did not change his thoughts on objective justice. Only an objective injustice was a sufficient cause for war.
Suarez largely agreed with Vitoria on Ius ad Bellum but he has been criticised for the fact that he allowed a sovereign to be justified when his doubts appeared most probable . The consequence is that this might easily mean that both sides are both objectively and subjectively justified in waging war. This of course renders the concept of a just war redundant.
Both Suarez’ and Vitoria’s separation of objective justice from the subjective is laudable but, unfortunately, impractical. It would imply that objective standards are paramount. Sadly, such objective justice can for the most part not be assessed until the war is over. Only after the war can we weigh the deaths and damages of it against the original injustice. Since objective justice is further influenced by a rightful intention, which exists subjectively, and as any assessment of objective justice is made by humans, it must be presumed that a true objective judgment of the situation is impossible. Furthermore, eliminating all subjective factors such as motive and intention from our considerations of justice renders a strange situation. For then only the crime of mass murder could justify war, for no other reason could objectively justify a war in which a State will indiscriminately kill numerous soldiers.
After the rise of the large nation States any visible imperial authority had weakened and the reformed States had renounced the Pope’s authority. The concept of State sovereignty was developing and as such a need arose for international law in its modern sense. The main purpose of Grotius’ work was to create rules that all State rulers could accept and follow in order to prevent anarchy, war and unnecessary bloodshed.
Since Grotius (1583-1645) believed that God could command homicide or theft it shows that the intrinsic goodness of an act is its conformity with the will of God. This emphasises that justice cannot be merely concerned with the outward form of an act but requires more than outwardly objective standards of right and wrong. He was thus equally concerned with moral quality as with formal appearance. A rightful intention therefore only existed when it was in accordance with God’s will, which could be known through reason.
In approaching war Grotius’ main concern was to limit warfare. He made a distinction between private and public war of which the former was only occasionally permissible in the event of immediate threat. A public war was war waged by a sovereign power, which in his eyes was the nation. No matter the justice of its cause it should not be waged unless it was likely to be of more benefit than harm to the nation. Grotius was the first to recognise that there is justice and injustice on both sides in a war. Elsewhere Grotius stated that a war could be subjectively just, because the subjects of an unjust state were sufficiently innocent, on both sides but not objectively.
Grotius allowed self-defensive conduct but condemned vindictive behaviour, towards this end he also allowed that death might be dealt to ward off an ominous threat, which is an explicit allowance for a pre-emptive strike. He furthermore allowed the taking of life to recover stolen property. He stated that the side with a just cause had no intrinsic right to kill innocent subjects except in self-defence. If the just side were to kill innocents carelessly, needlessly or purposefully those innocents had the right to defend themselves. However, he stressed that this did not make the war just on both sides, but that individual justice would transcend collective justice.
“Then only is the time for war, when we have right on our side, and, what is of the greatest consequence, strength also” : says Grotius as he warns us not to wage war too rashly. Grotius was the first to explicitly stress the necessity to require a reasonable chance of success. Even before considering the chances of success all attempts should be made to arbitrate between disputes and if one side were to agree to arbitration it would be wrong to fight.
Although Vitoria and Suarez defended that objective justice was necessary to wage war they considered it wholly separated from subjective elements. Grotius’ thought certain actions to have intrinsic justice because they were in accordance with natural law and thus with the will of God. This allowed for a consideration of moral quality of an action quite apart from its formal appearance. Likewise, an action could be sufficiently unjust that the immoral quality of it allowed for it to be reacted to by war. It should be noted that the only accepted injustices that could form a just cause were the assault on persons and the taking of property or territory. This in contrast to Vitoria and Suarez, who, if one were consistent, would only allow war in the event of mass murder. On the other criteria of Ius ad Bellum no important divergences existed.
As we regard the thoughts of these secularist writers we can distil the six criteria of the modern Ius ad Bellum. There exists a seventh criterion that requires an authority to declare a war, which was suggested by Vitoria first and agreed upon by Suarez. Although a declaration can be considered as good form, such a procedural requirement can in my opinion never serve as an indication of justice.
On the subject of Ius in Bello all three writers considered that there existed certain barriers but were unclear as to their substance. The most important of these was Grotius saying that a nation had no the intrinsic right to kill innocents, who the guilty were, remains unanswered and as he allowed that soldiers could be innocent it is not a clear discrimination. Similar to earlier times Ius in bello was largely defined by actual practice.
Despite the redefinition by Vitoria, Suarez and Grotius of the Just War theory, it had little effect on the way war was waged in their time and there after. Right was considered might in their time. The whole idea of a just cause was left behind and the State and therefore its sovereign decided whether he saw reason to go to war. As such the actions that were justifiable increased as they were adjusted to the reality of the power politics between States when they would go to war for reasons of State. The whole notion of a Just War became obsolete in the 17th century. A formal declaration was then in accordance with Ius gentium. The most illustrative of the absence of Just War thinking was the expansionistic politics of European countries in other parts of the world.
For instance, Spain was required to convert the non-European world in the name of Pope Alexander VI in the Inter Caetera. Towards this end Spain drafted a complicated document, the Requerimiento, in which the Indians were ordered to convert to Christianity, to subjugate themselves unto the Pope and peacefully allow trade and preaching under penalty of forfeiting their goods and rights to the Crown of Spain. In the following period this document was read to the Indians in Latin or Spanish, which languages they obviously did not understand, and after waiting for a reply the attack was begun. This was thus purely a formality.
5. Contemporary Theory
In general there existed a positivist denial of the doctrine of war on the basis of natural law after Grotius and as such war was considered to be beyond legal control. The fault of an aggressive state was mainly looked upon as a moral fault, not a legal one and was in some minds too subjectively determined. The source of international law did not lie with universal principles such as Grotius thought, but within treaties and actual practice.
The wars of the twentieth century led to a reaction against positivism, as a thing was no longer regarded as being justified merely because it existed. Most importantly the Tokyo and Nuremburg trials introduced the notion of responsibility as the idea of an illegal war was reintroduced and the guilty individuals were punished. However, the present trend of international terrorism goes beyond imposing responsibility on individuals acting for their States. As Bowett states, with wholly different problems in mind:
“The new techniques of subversive activities and ideological propaganda, for example, call for a specific regulation…(and)…afford to individuals an unprecedented power of endangering a state´s security.”
The twentieth century has known a revival of the idea of a just war. Today aggressive war is legally no longer allowed and self-defence is the only violence permissible in international law. In practice some forms of aggressive war exist that can be considered just, namely humanitarian interventions and possibly aid to secessionist movements and counter insurgencies, depending on one’s qualification of the facts.
Of the contemporary thinkers on the subject of the just war theory Michael Walzer is regarded as one of its foremost writers, even lthough he considers the theory apart from the traditional six criteria. Walzer briefly expounds thinking on aggression and revises this by means of historical illustrations thereafter. The legalist paradigm as he calls it represents current (1977) thought on aggression and can be summed up as follows.
1) There exists an international society of independent states
2) This international society has a law that establishes the rights of its members - above all, the rights of territorial integrity and political sovereignty
3) Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one state against the political sovereignty or territorial integrity of another constitutes aggression and is a criminal act
4) Aggression justifies two kinds of violent response: a war of self-defence by the victim and a war of law enforcement by the victim and any other member of international society
5) Nothing but aggression can justify war
6) Once the aggressor state has been militarily repulsed, it can also be punished
Walzer puts forward five revisions to this paradigm. The first is to allow a state the use of force before the existence of an imminent threat or actual use of force against its political or territorial integrity and is a revision of the third rule of the legalist paradigm. Walzer suggests that:
“…states may use military force in the face of threats of war whenever the failure to do so would seriously risk their territorial integrity or political independence. Under such circumstances it can fairly be said that they have been forced to fight and that they are the victims of aggression.”
He admits that such a word as “seriously” requires a normative interpretation and as such its meaning is not fixed, but stresses that although the rule is permissive it implies restrictions. Such restrictions are indeed implied by words such as “seriously”, “threats” and in a globalising world even a word such as “independence”. His implied restrictions are therefore normative considerations of these words and against the background of the Israeli six day war they are even correct, but as a general rule they are inadequate.
In terms of the Just War criteria this means that next to self-defence and the possibility of a pre-emptive strike, including wars in defence of others, and wars of recovery – both immediately arising from a conflict or after some time – a third just cause can be distinguished. Considering that the threat of war is no longer imminent it would be a contortion of the idea of pre-emptive strike to categorise it as such. Preferably such wars should be called anticipatory. The discussion on whether an anticipatory war is allowed is not concluded. The legal basis is at best shaky, but the moral case is not so clear cut.
The second, third and fourth revision by Walzer are connected to the problems of secession, counter-intervention and humanitarian intervention. He contends with if and when a foreign power may intervene in another’s territory. It is closely connected to the right of self-determination which “is the right of a people “to become free by their own efforts” if they can, and non-intervention. Non-intervention is the principle guaranteeing that their success will not be impeded or their failure prevented by the intrusions of an alien power.” In other words, people must help themselves to their own freedom, and with such freedom comes the principle of non-intervention.
In the case of secessionist movements Walzer requires of them that they demonstrate their representative character after which it would be allowed to assist them in their bid to self-determination. The reason for this is obvious for if a community is not capable of self-determination it should not be assisted in a struggle that cannot exist on its own accord for it would lack any authority. This of course has to do with the problem of identifying an authority in the first place. An ally to whom we may offer aid should have in principle all the characteristics of an authority, because an authority is a demonstration of the representative character of its relevant community. Although at first glance it appears as if another just cause is generated for a State it really is a just cause for the developing relevant community to enforce its right to self-determination. A State that assists such a community is allowed to do so in defence of a friend or ally. The difference then is that a State is allowed to aid an existing relevant community that has no legitimate authority as of yet.
From this flows that when a third State assists either the secessionist movement or the state within which boundaries the movement tries to enforce their right of self-determination yet another State may possibly attain the right to assist the other party. For even when the secessionist movement did not demonstrate its representative character the struggle becomes an external conflict simply due to the fact that an outside third has chosen a side in an internal struggle. This allows outside third States to ally themselves to either side as these sides become clearly identifiable as different authorities not because their representative character but arising from the de facto situation.
Walzer further qualifies the principle of non-intervention for cases where the appeal to self-help is not very attractive. In the case of humanitarian intervention he says “when a government turns savagely upon its own people, we must doubt the very existence of a political community to which the idea of self-determination might apply.” Thus, humanitarian intervention is justified when it is directed against actions that disregard the moral convictions of ordinary people. Walzer's argument has been criticised as a potentially indiscriminate mandate for intervention because of the difficulty of distinguishing between tolerable and intolerable abuses.
As stated before, an ally or friend in terms of international politics requires that parties have all the characteristics of an authority to express their representational character. When a third State comes to the aid of a repressed community it cannot be defined as defence of a friend or an ally in its original meaning as it cannot ally itself to an authority. The moral cause to aid the community is obviously just. At a certain point individual rights simply transcend the rights of states, it is, however, a cause separated from any other previously existing just causes. When deciding whether there is a duty to intervene it is not too difficult to recognise human rights violations nor is it complicated to establish the helplessness of the attacked. It is very complex however to decide whether the violations are severe enough to breach a State’s sovereignty.
Walzer’s fifth and final revision of the legalist paradigm is the abolition of the paradigm’s sixth rule that once the aggressor state has been militarily repulsed, it can also be punished. He considers the domestic situation of capture and punishment of aggressor not applicable to the international society. Following the recent institution of international tribunals in which not States as whole, but human actors are held responsible and are prosecuted this view should be underlined. Since the object of the war on terror is to stop terrorist organisations and as such no punishment is aimed at States, this aspect of the legalist paradigm is unnecessary to consider in detail.
After this brief survey of the Just War Tradition we can conclude the following six criteria regarding Ius ad Bellum:
1) right authority; meaning the supreme authority, which cannot turn to a higher authority
2) just cause; of which are identifiable, self-defence, defence of a friend or ally, wars of recovery both immediate and after some time, self-determination and finally humanitarian intervention; no punitive wars are allowed
3) right intention; an authority should have as its aim the common good of all involved although the particular good of its own community may outweigh such considerations; the intention to kill is lawful for a public authority
4) last resort; all other means to solve the conflict must have been tried and failed
5) reasonable chance of success; before waging a war an authority must surmise whether a war will be successful for otherwise he will waste the lives of its citizens
6) proportionality; the evils let loose by war should be proportionate to the evil avoided or the better peace attained
As is apparent, little is said explicitly on the criteria for Ius in Bello and although the principles for these criteria existed through history their actual substance differed greatly. It is however clear that the thoughts on Ius in Bello revolved around two concepts, that of proportionality and discrimination.
I like this, thumbs up. Yes, not a simple right/wrong equation.
Unless we are for psychopathic dictatorships, it's really a tactical question, not a moral one.
Yes, goal was moral, execution of plan incompetent. That said, nobody in Iraq is pining for the days of Saddam. The Iraqi government appears to be incompetent and corrupt, but it's not invading it's neighbors, not terrorizing Iraqis to the degree of Saddam, not seeking WMD.
If Saddam had remained in power we'd now be seeing a nuclear arms race between Iraq and Iran, leading to a wider arms race across the region.
Invasion, near perfect. Occupation, a mess.
Thankyou sir!
Yes, thankyou for expressing that in your own words. It is enlightening.
As example. A forum user may wail against the war in a thousand posts, but the moment a mod deletes one of their posts they go hysterical. All perspective and context lost. They can rationalize Saddam all day long, but would launch rockets against the mod if they could. So long as it's somebody else's freedom being discussed it's all theory, once it's MY freedom being affected, reality returns.
No, the occupation was done perfectly too, given the information available at the time. It was necessary to disband the old security forces, and hope that that was enough to make the Iraqi people believe, really believe (because it was true) that the new security forces were totally different from the past ones, and were there to protect their rights, not violate them, so it was OK for good people to sign up to the new security forces.
And it WORKED. There were long lines of volunteers for the new security forces, despite the fact that the country was occupied by a non-Muslim force. Some even called those volunteers traitors. But enough Iraqis treated the west as a friend, that enabled us to stand up new security forces that were required to swear allegiance to democracy, not some dictator. And above all, it was a SUCCESS. Iraq now has a very vibrant democracy. Something that many people said was impossible. We have no way of knowing what would have happened if we had used a different approach. It might have led to failure, the inability to stand up democracy in an Arab Muslim country, spelling doom for the project of worldwide democracy.
Yes, well said.
Yes, exactly right.
Basically they're not putting themselves into the shoes of an Iraqi. Let's see if we can get agreement with your/my position in this thread.
Also note that Sistani was under pressure to declare a jihad on the invading force. There would have been a very messy bloodbath if he had done that. Not at all what we wanted. Fortunately, a combination of the security vacuum plus Al Sadr being allowed to trash Sistani's favorite mosque was enough to get Sistani to call on the Iraqis to do the exact opposite of a jihad - and sign up to the new security forces under US control. It was strategically brilliant. It's a pity we can't rerun history so that you could see the terrible alternative of a Shiite jihad in action.
I'll need something specific to be able to contest the claim, and it's far from obvious. Ending the Iraqi holocaust (including institutional rape) is probably the most just war in the history of the world, and if Just War Theory fails to spell that out then the theory needs to be adjusted.
In the 1980s when I was a teenager I had a conclusion that if only the USSR wasn't standing in the way, we would be able to wage war against Eastern Europe's dictators and install democracies and see if the people REALLY wanted communism.
After Eastern Europe I was after the rest of the world.
So both in 1990 and 2003 I naturally supported the wars. The 1990 war had about 90% approval in Australia, and I was not surprised. The 2003 war had 50% opposed which shocked me to the bone.
I have spent my time since 2003 investigating all the reasons people offered for opposing the Iraq war, and have exhausted my independent research and now wish to speak to professional philosophers instead of operating in a vacuum.
Or have my case defeated in the free marketplace of ideas, as the case may be. Note that the Russian I referred to earlier used to be anti-war, but after months of debate I converted him, and he wrote a blog post explaining how he got from A to B, which is very enlightening.
Well it's interesting to me.
Wow, that is very long! I've started reading it.
Good luck with that. :-)
The missing information, imho, was that we didn't fully grasp how traumatized the Iraqi people were. Once Saddam's knife was off their neck, a great deal of bottled up rage came poring out. And it couldn't be directed at Saddam, so they rebelled against us.
Bush thought the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. He thought he was invading Belgium in WWII.
"they" didn't do just one thing. They were split 50/50 on whether Iraq was "liberated" or "humiliated". No-one at all predicted such a split. The predictions were either they would obviously be grateful (I thought this) or that they would unite and fight to the last man against foreign invaders.
The fact that they WEREN'T like Belgium is part of the reason we needed the war. To properly respond to 9/11, we need to convert all of the Middle East into clones of Belgium. And again, we needed a security vacuum to see what values the Iraqis had internalized. Did they share Islamic values? What are Islamic values? How was Saddam able to commit atrocities and still be a Muslim destined to enter Heaven? Wasn't there anything in the Koran that said if you commit atrocities you go to Hell? Maybe we need to update the Koran in response to 9/11. The invasion of Iraq would be used to inform future action in response to 9/11. It was basically a large social experiment. Also an experiment to see if a light force could be used in a war of liberation as opposed to a war of conquest.
It was all highly successful. We converted an enemy into a (completely unforced) friend.
Right. My point too. No one predicted it. Someone in charge should have.
We Americans are technically brilliant, and culturally clueless. So, invasion went great, occupation a mess.
Even if someone did predict it, they would have had their opinion drowned out by people predicting that the Iraqis would act near-uniformly one way or another. The opposing theories needed to be tested by practice. We have the same problem with Iran. No-one knows for sure how the Iranians will react to a liberating force. We have the Iraq example of 50/50 split and we have the Afghan result of about 87% supporting the war of liberation, but we simply don't have enough invasions under our belt to predict this with any accuracy. Hence every venture is an experiment.
What specifically did you want done differently if a 50/50 split could have been predicted? The most obvious thing was to not disband the old security forces. But it is unclear exactly what sort of mess that may have caused if the Iraqis rejected the security forces as being the same unreformed forces that committed human rights abuses against them. We needed a fresh start, and to arm the good 50% against the bad 50%. That is what was done. And we got heaps of great experimental data. The barrier to war has been lowered because we now know we can do it with a small force. And if in future we reuse the old security forces, we can be in and out in 3.5 weeks. There is no longer any need to do nation-building. ie in Iran we can just leave all of that to the Iranians. In Iraq it was important to close off the theory that it was impossible for Arab Muslims to handle democracy. We don't have that open theory with Iran. Or North Korea.
I don't think the topic would be as controversial if everyone thought that the US was invading Iraq on behalf of the Iraqi people, for the purpose of their liberation. The major reason given was the WMDs which weren't actually there, that objective was flawed from the start. If the war reason given was "Hussein you're evil and we are going to depose you for the good of the Iraqi people" then I think the war would be viewed differently. The oil is probably the largest cause for scepticism, combined with the history of imperialism with the British and French.
The other issue is that even though it's been years since the Iraq war, Iraq is still a mess and with that knowledge, it's difficult to call the war a success from the standpoint of helping the Iraqi people. If Iraq was now a peaceful, solid democracy that the people supported then more people would support the invasion.
Mostly the big difference in your view and the view of many others is how well Iraq is doing right now. Between the IS, Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish militia groups, the corruption and incompetence within the Iraqi democracy and wide-scale protests, Iraq seems like a wartorn, unstable country with an ineffectual government. Based on that view, the Iraq war seems worse than if our view is that Iraq is a "vibrant democracy". The future of Iraq seems uncertain and I think even if people see the US as merely spreading democracy to Iraq and nothing else, how could they see those attempts as well-executed? It's not an easy task but I don't know if people can accept that it had to be this difficult and chaotic, not yet even knowing how things will turn out.
Of course, Iran is a menace and whatever power Iran acquires will certainly be used to be an even greater menace but Iran is not a small country. The issue isn't whether the US could easily defeat Iran but whether war against belligerent non-democracies is a sustainable strategy. What about North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia and others? Will the US just invade them all?
Once a decision had been made that Saddam needed to be removed for other reasons, the US did indeed take the exact action of merely liberating the Iraqi people, and not even forcing a bus timetable on them. And it doesn't make any difference if Bush personally just hated countries that start with the letter "I". The rest of the non-Bush world should have supported the action, which was exactly a liberation, no more, no less. They went in, set up democratic institutions, and left. They would have taken any WMD they found with them though.
There is no longer institutionalized rape, or institutionalized tongue-chopping. The Iraqi holocaust is over. Isn't that enough? The rest is down to the quality of the Iraqi people. If the Iraqis aren't the same as the Swiss, so be it.
That depends on how this debate goes. Iraq was the most justified invasion. If I can't convince you of Iraq, I probably can't convince you on any other country. I don't believe we can take on China, it is too big and has nuclear weapons. I don't want a nuclear war to liberate them. North Korea I'm not sure about. We may have left it too late. It's a pity that Iraq wasn't easier. With Saudi Arabia I don't expect to turn on allied dictators until we've finished dealing with enemy dictators. But after 9/11 (with 15 Saudi hijackers), yes, Saudi Arabia needs to be reformed. We can now point to Iraq's democracy and say "you have 3 months to look like that or the bloodbath will start". Before we didn't have any reference point. Iraq gave us that. It was a vital step in responding to 9/11. Iraq was the country with the most chance of success. No history of Islamic radicalization. These are Arab Muslims we can probably live with. Saudi Arabia needs to be the same.
Yes. Likely there wouldn't have been ANY invasion. The US simply would not had gone into war. And note that then the US President was hinting Saddam having ties with Al Qaeda, which many, many people then deliriously believed in.
Quoting Judaka
As US bases being attacked by Iran with artillery missiles in an retaliatory strike and the Iraqi Parliament having already made a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US forces, I would say this train wreck of a disaster is nowhere being over.
Quoting Paul Edwards
is your idea of
Quoting Paul Edwards
then your interest is clearly not in freedom, but in forcing unbelievers to convert to your ideology, and killing however many people is required to impress them that this is efficacious. It's literally the oldest story in the book: convert or die. Just because you want something and don't care how many people die in order for you to get it, it doesn't make it just.
This is flatly false.
Iraq in reality became this sandbox for politically appointed and usually inept Republicans (chosen because of political ties and not experience) with Paul Bremer micromanaging everything in Iraq at the crucial stage. The "de-baathification" of Iraqi legal system went to quite extreme lengths by Americans rewriting traffic laws etc. You have to look at what the CPA actually did.
Would it have been somebody else than Paul Bremer and with a clear focus using the lessons learned from the Balkans, it might have been better. Had there been the troops that, again based on learned experience from the Balkans (or anywhere else for that matter), were needed at start it might have been better. But of course not it wasn't! Rumsfeld had these hallucinations of a cheap, quick war and the commanding US general coming out with realistic troop levels (levels which were met only years after) was sacked. And while the intervention into Yugoslavia and the following rebuilding was done by a Democrat administration and Republicans didn't do nation building... it was obvious that the Republicans ended up with their non-nation building nation building with Bremer and Coalition Provisional Authority.
My ideology is freedom as I define it. ie living under a rational, humanist, non-subjugating government. And democracy is the *only* system of government that is unforced, which is what I supported setting up in Iraq.
Which is killing people until they accept your politics. Fascism, essentially.
As I said, you're not here for debate but for confirmation of your own believes. Boring.
No, my policy for Iraq (and other countries) at this stage in world history is to install democracy and let the winners of democratic elections kill people who take up arms against the democratic government. Nothing more, nothing less. And that is something everyone should be able to get behind.
It is Saddam who was killing people who didn't accept his politics. But that didn't faze you for some reason.
Our politics. And to do so by killing as many people as it takes.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Even philosophically this is illogical: Let's have foreigners come to your country and install democracy. Sounds like an application that you can have someone come and install for you.
(Perhaps we should gather a huge UN force and send it into the US to install social cohesion into the US. Seems to be in need of installing.)
:rofl:
Hitler, which I guess makes Hitler a hero... since he removed Hitler. (With apologies to Jimmy Carr.)
You'll never explain the Iraq invasion,. It was a family feud for the Bushes against Israels most capable opponents supported by a pathetic British PM who wanted to bolster his importance. There is no explanation for human perfidy and foul play, If we put such people in charge then we get what we deserve.
Tony seems to be having great success bringing peace to the Middle East. ;)
I rather liked Trumps idea of a wall, We could all contribute and extend it around the whole place.
Thank the Lord you're not in charge. Such hubris and condescension is rare outside of the White House.
Isn't this the policy of all countries already?
Maybe a dome..?
Two modern examples come to mind:
Vietnamese invasion and ouster of the Khmer rouge in Cambodia. Even if it took time before the Red Khmers gave up (and Pol Pot died). The Vietnamese did leave Cambodia after ten years.
Then there's Tanzania, which got enough when Idi Amin's Uganda had the fabulous idea of attacking it. Not only Tanzania repelled the Ugandan attack, but fully mobilized it's forces and launched an assault which made Amin and his army flee from Uganda even with air support from Ghaddafi. Of course Uganda has been restless afterwards, but not as many have died as during Amin. And it surely has not the fault of Tanzania.
What was wrong with the toppling of Panama by the US? The fact that Iraq wasn't as straightforward as Panama is part of the reason why we needed to set up democracy in Iraq as part of the response to 9/11. We need to understand why Iraq isn't identical to Panama and (eventually) do something to (culturally) change Iraq so that it is no different from say Denmark. It should be a normal willing NATO ally preferably. Once Iraq is done it will be a template for the rest of the Middle East, again, as a response to 9/11. 9/11 requires us to fix every individual on the planet, not just the governments.
While it doesn't matter how many people Saddam killed?
And how many more people need to die in car accidents in the US before you start campaigning for private car travel to be banned there?
And we can start with the people on this forum (as a response to 9/11).
Millions upon millions of people supported the Iraq invasion, including me. Why don't you simply ASK (not TELL) them (or ask me!) what their motive was? Even if you assume that Bush is some sort of alien space bat who hates countries that begin with the letter "I", what difference does that make? Millions upon millions of people (including me) got THEIR policy implemented.
Whereas if YOUR policy (or the policy of the Australian Labor Party) had been implemented, millions of Iraqis would still be enslaved.
No, the official policy of dictatorships is that the dictator will kill anyone who takes up arms against him. Surely you can see the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy? Or does that call for another assumption?
What's illogical about that? It was done with great success in Panama. If Australia had a military coup and the US came to Australia to dislodge the dictator, Australia would be a great success story too. If you think Iraq wasn't a success story (with 300+ political parties and higher voter turnout than the US), that just means we need to be there to respond to 9/11 (the response to 9/11 requires the whole world to be converted into clones of Denmark/Taiwan/Australia).
Precisely. You can eliminate many objections by defining your terms and making more assumptions explicit. For example, you would want to rule out Russia, with elected leadership, making war against Australia on ideological grounds.
We can debate whether Just War Theory needs to be updated or not. Or do you have a dogmatic belief that it is perfect in its current form and there is no possibility of it being changed?
That would actually be an interesting discussion. Again, Iraq had the strongest possible case. There was a holocaust in progress (institutionalized rape and tongue chopping) and the invaders intended to simply set up a democracy and leave, which is exactly what they did.
Yes, that is what I am here for. Thankyou.
If Australia had a cruel dictator that was raping my daughter, I would rather take my chances with the Russian democracy. Note that in recent Russian history, Russia withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe and the Baltics without being defeated in battle. That should count for something.
Yes, for one single year the American occupation force was micromanaging everything which is what an occupation force is required to do. But then they transitioned to Iraqi self-rule, and the Iraqis were free to change anything at all they wanted, including those traffic laws. The Iraqis were not required to do a single thing by the US. Nor were they required to pay back the cost of the liberation. It was a gift from God. It was the purest form a war can be. Replace a holocaust with a democracy. Not a step wrong (policy-wise, anyway - there were individual Americans who broke the law and if caught were charged and jailed).
This is actually a good sign, not a train wreck. The Iraqi politicians know they are free to say whatever they want about the US. And the Iraqi people are free to say whatever they want too.
Under Saddam they couldn't do that. They would have their tongue cut out. It was Saddam that was a train wreck.
Because democracy has to come from the society itself. The own domestic elite of a country have to be for democracy. The struggle for power has to happen at the election booth and the result has to be accepted by all. Foreign military might won't do it.
Iraq was a far cry of this. Once Obama pulled the troops back, what was the consequence? A despotic Shia Prime Minister that fired all the Sunnis in the government and in the end the already destroyed Al Qaeda came back after morphing into the Islamic State.
Iraq is a perfect example how nuts it is to assume that outsiders can just waltz in a turn things around in an region which has large inherent problems. (Especially Iraq being this idea of Westerners in the first place).
Quoting Paul Edwards
A country formed because Colombia wasn't going to sign the deal with the US due to the terms the Americans were giving them for the Panama Canal, so more convenient was to have some Panamians stage a revolt for 100 000$. Nicely agreed in an American hotel, even if Panamians celebrate their independence from Spain on November 28, 1821 now days.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Simply because Australian know and cherish democracy and the Australian elite is totally willing to go with democracy. Every defeated country that bounced back after a lost war and occupation, be it Germany or Japan, had ample amount of social cohesion, belief and love in their country and honesty to understand that the previous totalitarian path lead to ruin and things should be changed.
That is an interesting take. I'm not sure how you measure "domestic elite" and why you ascribe such importance to them.
But for starters, the Iraqi people do not speak with one voice. When you say it has to "come from the society itself", many Iraqis are already with the program. About 50% of them considered the US invasion to be a liberation. Isn't that a good enough stance?
Of course that leaves another 50% that we need to deal with, but that's a job that needs to be done sooner or later. After 9/11 it was a job that needed to be done sooner.
I assume that Iraqi politicians are considered part of the "domestic elite". At the last election they were dismayed by the result of the vote and asked for a recount. The recount showed the same result. They accepted the result. Isn't that good enough?
Actually no. The Germans, the Austrians and the Japanese were OK with the Allied occupation.
And yes, it really is a train wreck. Just think of the long term policy of the US: First the US had The Baghdad pact, then it had Twin Pillars as the Iraqi monarchy fell. Then it had Dual Containment after the Iranian revolution. Still, at it's height of it's power in the Middle East, the US created against Saddam Hussein a huge alliance including Gulf States, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and so on. And why didn't they march back then in 1991 to Baghdad and free the Iraqi people then?
Let's listen to a man called Dick Cheney in 1994 giving the reasons just why invading Iraq is a terrible idea. Please listen to it, Paul:
But then Cheney didn't listen to Cheney and the US attacked and occupied Iraq. First time in long time the US started a war: last time it was against Spain, I guess. So the end result: Iranian backed Hezbollah fighters (considered terrorist by the US) are now armed with American Abrams tanks. Great job!
And now the American withdrawal from the Middle East looks like this:
Now I don't want to bash Americans, because they have done a lot good and especially in Europe are very welcome. But the US Middle East policy is just utter insanity of a otherwise totally sound minded nation, which can form alliances that work.
Every society or nation has a power elite. The top administrators, the top politicians, the very rich people, the cultural elite and those in the media. This isn't at all a fixed group of people and is very difficult to define just who actually is in this group.
What they do and how they settle the competition for power is crucial for how the society works. If they as a collective believe that democracy is good and obtainable in their country, then democracy can cherish.
Quoting Paul Edwards
If you ask any person, do they want democracy and peace in their country, hardly anybody will say no. Yet just as I made the joke about the UN occupying the US to bring social cohesion to the society, things aren't so simple to do in real life.
I listened to it, but I didn't need to. In 1991 the Cold War hadn't been won. Securing Europe was FAR more important than Iraq. We didn't want to do anything to spook the USSR. We wanted the USSR on our side and to not fear anything from us. Western security was and is more *important* than the more *beautiful* goal of liberating Iraq.
Regarding the Kurds throwing fruit at the Americans - I totally agree that Trump is an idiot. He should have stayed in Syria to protect the Kurds - Free Syria. He said he was only there to "secure the oil" (whatever that means). He is a total asshole for doing that. But Bush is not Trump. And the millions of Americans who supported the liberation of Iraq are not Trump either.
Panama? Grenada? Haiti? Kosovo?
I'll come back to you on the question of the "elite" as I want to see what my Russian friend's take on that is.
In my view this was the biggest reason why US foreign policy during the Cold War was quite understandable and logical. But now, it's "We can do anything!"
It is difficult to know what the US would have done without 9/11. Note that at the time (2001) I was still trying to secure Europe. The Baltics were not in NATO yet. I didn't want to spook Russia with an aggressive foreign policy, even though seeing the Taliban hitting Afghan women with sticks made me furious.
So we don't know when (if ever) the gloves would have been taken off.
9/11 provided the impetus to fix the world. You can see the beans being spilled here.
I was also expecting Iraqis (99%) to be sensible and we could liberate a lot more countries. The fact that only 50% of Iraqis were sensible was why we needed to stay and do nation-building, to the point where we could hand the job over to the sensible 50%.
I'm still waiting for my Russian friend, but I have a comment. Are you saying that this nebulous group of "power elite" in Iraq speak with one voice? How did you ascertain that? I get my 50/50 split from statistically valid opinion polls conducted by the BBC etc. I've never heard of anyone surveying the "power elite".
Also, regardless of that, what is preventing an occupying force like the US from shaking things up and changing who the "power elite" are? Or perhaps bribing them? We need a formula for installing democracy by force of arms so that we can get on with the job now that we've had feedback from Afghanistan and Iraq.
I should also point out that the US doesn't "own" democracy. And it is the Iraqi people's politics that were being forced on the Iraqi leadership, not US politics. I believe we have far more right to help the Iraqi people assert THEIR politics than Saddam had to assert HIS politics on the Iraqi people.
Of course not. But there are norms and customs, "way of the land". And things what is tolerated in politics and what is not. These either soft or hard institutions that define how people behave. So when I say that there is a collective understanding I mean this. Not that the elite can agree on certain issues and speak with one voice.
If in a prosperous stable country a general proposes a military coup to his peers, the generals likely would think about how they can break the news to the wife that her husband has lost his marbles. In a country rife with povetry and social and political problems and instability, the purposal wouldn't be so outrageous. So when you think about democracy, just think how easy or possible would it be of armed people just walking into an Legislative institution and demand power. Would it be outrageous behavior or things that just happen? It has happened more closer than you at first think.
Spanish Coup attempt in 1981:
Quoting Paul Edwards
And how can the UN by force of arms install social cohesion and ease the racial tensions in your country?
Seriously, if a person points a gun at your head, you will be focused on the situation that a person is pointing a gun at your head, not as much on what the person is saying. He might say that he is just wanting to improve your situation, yet that is secondary and the feeling is quite different if the conversation would be had in a normal situation.
Anyway, if you want policy advice, I would say the best option is simply "To lead by own example and help those who voluntarily want your help." And if there are those who behave wrong, build a large alliance. You can get strange bedfellows working together, so try that first.
US and Chinese military personnel in a rare joint exercize:
The "way of the land" in 2003 was that Saddam was ordering the rape of women and chopping out the tongues of people who spoke against him. I thought that 99% of Iraqis would have seen that as abhorrent too, and welcome a liberation. But only 50% did. How can you talk about "way of the land" when the Iraqi people were split 50/50 over a very fundamental issue of whether an external liberation is good or not?
There was no "collective understanding" among the Iraqi people themselves. They were split 50/50. How do you know the elite weren't split 50/50 too?
Australia is already a secular capitalist liberal democracy, which is the "best technology" we know of. That's why I'm not gunning for an invasion of Taiwan or Denmark either. They are "mission accomplished".
It was Saddam who was pointing a gun at the head of the Iraqi people. It is the US et al who instead got the Iraqi people's guns pointed at the head of their leadership.
Am I missing something?
Yes.
How can you think that 99% of the Iraqi people thought that Saddam Hussein as abhorrent and be surprised that only 50%(which percentage I think would be likely more) saw him as that?
If he REALLY would be despised by 99% of the population, then he surely would have fallen instantly, because the Iraqi Army and the security apparatus (and their families) were far more than 1% of the population. Every dictator has his support. Once there isn't any, then everybody in the regime will run for the doors, likely the dictators in the front.
You genuinely have to inform yourself of the situation in a country. Listing the massacres, the violence etc. is typically made for a moral justification to denounce the dictator. Yet it doesn't ask what complex issues are behind this. Far too easily we just divide people to "the Warlords", to the "henchmen of the dictator" and to the "poor innocent people" of country X. We (hopefully) don't make such naive divisions of our own fellow citizens, so why then would we think that foreigners are different from us?
I thought the first part of the above quote, exactly because of the second part of the above quote. If Australia had a cruel dictator, I think 99% of Australians would be against him too. I projected Australia onto Iraq. And again, if Iraq is different from Australia, that's exactly why we need to get in there and shake it up. After 9/11, the US needs every country to be a clone of Australia.
Note that I saw an Iraqi opinion poll where Saddam was only viewed favorably by 5% of the population. That shows that 5% with automatic weapons are able to suppress 95%. I believed, and still believe, that with automatic weapons and a properly organized security force, it is possible to subjugate 99% of the population.
I think you're overstating the complexity. It is just automatic weapons. The Iraqis actually tried rising up in 1991 and got slaughtered by automatic weapons. The Chinese got slaughtered in 1989 too. Both sides of WW1 were slaughtered by charging automatic weapons too. Automatic weapons really really work, and they're not complex.
You can't see a difference between a dictatorship and a democracy? We don't have "henchmen of the dictator" in Australia because we have a democracy. They do exist under a dictator. It's not a matter of being naive. The government of Saddam was very different from the government of Australia. But I expected the people to be the same. In one respect the Iraqis were the same as Australians. Both of our countries were split 50/50 on whether the act of liberation was right or wrong. I actually expected the Iraqis to be far better than Australians on that issue, and in turn convert Australia to have 99% support for world liberation. I was wrong about that unfortunately. But I still think I am right for empowering the 50% of Iraqis who wanted to be liberated.
The Iraqi war was wrong by many measures. It was based on lies, so there was no right intent and the war and sanctions killed more people than Saddam ever did. So it didn't result in a greater good. You're totally blind to what sovereignty means and apparently don't accept dissent from your values to the point you'll start wars for it. In other words, you don't even have half a theory and are willing to murder people over disagreements. Well done. You think reading a wiki makes you informed, you're just wasting everybody's time.
YOU should have had the right intent. YOU should have been agitating for a war of liberation for the right reasons. There are tactical reasons why WMD (which was a guess, not a lie) was touted as the main reason for BUSH to go to war. But that is irrelevant. There were millions of people who wanted to see Iraq liberated, and THEIR reasons were noble, and THAT made it a just war.
There were no sanctions on food and medicine. If there were any deaths due to that, they were on Saddam for not handing power over to a democracy. Regardless, even if I concede that sanctions were wrong (and indeed, to some extent they WERE wrong - I don't want to see Iran sanctioned either, I want to see it LIBERATED), the war itself was RIGHT.
It did result in a greater good. Many greater goods. For starters there is no longer institutionalized rape and tongue chopping. Iraq is no longer a country of slaves. And there was good for the US too - the US had an enemy convert into a friend. That is a prerequisite for world peace as opposed to world non-combat.
Saddam didn't accept dissent from his values that it is OK to order women to be raped. I don't accept Saddam's dissent that I consider that to be abhorrent. So yes, we need to go to war to sort out whether rape is right or wrong. I'm just surprised you would back Saddam in that war and seek to keep him in power.
Quite frankly I didn't get the opinion that institutionalized rape and tongue-chopping is bad from a wiki, but apparently we need a wiki on it for some people. It was just something innate. I have spent decades trying to find out why others don't have the same attitude to state-slavery that I have. It's almost like the world is full of sociopaths.
If we're proposing to be the world's surgeon, should we be careful to first do no harm?
"Just the first paragraph alone shows how you don't understand sovereignty"
Yes, this is another assumption. That women have the right to not be raped, regardless of which sovereign borders they were unfortunate enough to have been born into.
This needs to feed into "Just War Theory" and maybe you can read up on "Responsibility to Protect". It's even in Wikipedia.
"If we're proposing to be the world's surgeon, should we be careful to first do no harm?"
Sometimes when the police are responding to a rape call, they kill pedestrians. Does that mean we should disband the police, because they sometimes do harm?
If we accidentally get some things wrong, so be it. That should not be used as an excuse for inaction when there is institutionalized rape, meaning millions of women don't even have the basic right to not be raped. Or even worse - men don't have the right to keep their tongues in their mouth.
Yes, that's it.
Some people will stand back and ceaselessly complain about well intended efforts to liberate enslaved people in other countries. But the very minute a bunch of drug pushing gang bangers take over part of their own neighborhood, they will call the police.
Another problem is that critics usually don't bother to compare the war and it's outcomes to what the reality would have been if there had been no war.
A million people died when Saddam invaded Iran. Many more when he invaded Kuwait. Not to mention all the Iraqis who had been killed by Saddam for decades. If there had been no war, some form of the above would have continued.
Ah, but the critics complain, Saddam was contained! What the Bush Admin realistically grasped was that such containment could only be maintained for so long. Neither the American public, nor the Saudi or Kuwaiti publics, were prepared to support such containment forever. Sooner or later the containment would have died, and then Saddam would have been on the loose again.
Instead, thanks to Bush, Saddam is dead. No more invasions of other countries. No WMD arms race with Iran. No more psychopathic assaults upon the Iraqi people. Not perfection, just improvement.
I am not against hostile diplomacy with rogue nations or despots who harm their own people. Pressure should be applied to non-democratic nations to see them meeting some standards with regards to human rights and freedom. I urge against conflating the ideology of aggression towards dictators like Hussein and the Iraq invasion, the latter is more complex than that. However, let's say the US is going to declare war on Iran stating that they're tired of seeing Iranians being mistreated by their government and it's time to have a democracy there. That Iran has been destabilising the region, they're a danger to themselves and others. Why would anyone be against that given that we are for democracy and Iran truly is destabilising the region and a threat to others?
I see the alternative as being an economic and cultural approach, let the nations of the middle-east drift towards Western ideals and culture and use diplomatic and economic penalties for nations that try to block this. Let the women there see how things are in the West and let feminism happen organically throughout the country, have the people demand better governance, more freedom and so on. Very few countries are immune to this kind of approach and most of them are due to Russia or China supporting them, North Korea is an example of that. Simply invading the country and deposing the government for however well it works in theory, has not worked in practice. The West's interventionism has simply had an appalling track record over the last 100 years and people are less enthusiastic about it as a result.
It's because people are also for world peace, war should be the last resort and given how ineffectual the West has been at solving issues in the middle east with force, you have to anticipate the worst-case scenarios for a post-war Iran. We can't expect a simple transition to a strong democratic government, cease with the WMDs, "thank you America" and that's the end of it.
WMDs are an example of the line being crossed, Iran can never be allowed them and if war is the only recourse then I'm for it. However, I think that a "liberation war" is not a great option if Iraq is our example, I hope if it happens again that some lessons have been learned from Iraq, that it might be done without anywhere near the level of destabilisation that occurred there, which should be unacceptable by anyone's standards. So I am not saying that we need to always follow the cultural/economic/diplomatic approach but I think that's had a lot more success than actual invasions.
Ok, I have another unstated assumption here. I consider war to be a tool, to be used whenever it is strategic to do so. I don't see it as an inherently bad thing that should be used as a last resort. I see allowing human rights abuses such as the rape of women to be the last resort.
Now that we know that democracy can be installed by force of arms anywhere, even with Arab Muslims, which many insisted was impossible, Iran will be a cakewalk. It's very simple. You just don't disband the old security forces. It's basically just a decapitation strike. They get the same result they would get if they had a successful revolution (instead of being mowed down by automatic weapons).
Let me make this very clear. If Australia ever has a military coup, I don't want the US to impose sanctions and dilly-dally about it for 23 years. I want an IMMEDIATE liberation. Just do a military defeat of the dictator's forces and then arm the good people (ie the ones who supported immediate liberation), and we'll take care of the rest. I don't care how many bad Australians die. And if the bad guys manage to kill some good guys with terrorism, I won't blame the US for it. Nor do I want problems in Australia to deny the next country a chance for liberation. If Australians turn out to be low quality people, with only 50% supporting liberation (unlike the 87% of Afghans), that is Australia's native fault, and you should give the next country the benefit of the doubt and assume they will be more like Afghanistan than Australia. Thankyou.
The accidental murder of an innocent bystander was the Greek version of the original sin. I read that somewhere.
But it's a moot point. The US didn't invade Iraq to save raped women. They did it because it looked like a good way to squash al Qaeda.
The US doesn't speak with one voice. Decent Americans, and in fact, decent people the world over, supported the liberation war (which is all it actually was), for noble reasons including ending the Iraqi holocaust which included institutionalized rape.
And more to the point, YOU should have been one of those decent people.
And it is completely unconscionable to stand in the way of the police when they are responding to a rape call. Or a tongue-chopping call.
I would welcome Saint George to come skewer all the demons and make the world perfect, although I don't think the perfection would last very long. I think we explore the depths if depravity for fun and profit and for many, George would just be a minor setback.
But for a few seconds it would be great. Anyway, the USA is no Saint.
I assume their motive was to interfere in other people's business for the sake of having their own way, reagardless of the cost in human lives and the cultural devastation. Then there was support for Israel, revenge for Bush;s father's failure and other factors. No doubt some people were fooled by the lies told to support the cause, as was the purpose of the lies. , , ,
History is not your side. It is now perfectly clear what happened.
---"Even if you assume that Bush is some sort of alien space bat who hates countries that begin with the letter "I", what difference does that make? Millions upon millions of people (including me) got THEIR policy implemented"
No difference. If they wanted the war they got it. He was the right man for the job for those who think unmnecessary wars are a good idea, as folks over there the US generally seem to believe.
I will never live down the shame of the British PM endorsing this war. I would apologise unreservedly to Iraqi';s everywhere for my country's involvement. But please note that Tony Blair hardly dares show his face in Britain anymore. We did learn the lesson. .
-
"If it was just (1) we were after, we could simply nuke all the slave states."
That isn't going to help you achieve goal no 2, is it?
" If it was just (2) we were after, we could have inaction"
That isn't going to help you with goal no 1, is it?
"But the combination of these 2 goals requires a hell of a lot of thought to devise a cunning plan for world liberation."
Might I suggest a good start would be to get rid of goals 1 and 2? But then what would be the point of any of this?
Is this your philosophy: whataboutery? It has more than a whiff of propaganda and less of a feel of an actual philosophical position. Defend your own arguments; don't just point and yell LOOK OVER THERE when challenged.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Yeah, I remember all those consultations with the Iraqi people. No, wait, that didn't happen.
After further thought, I think this is where the fundamental problem is. It shouldn't matter if the intent is wrong. What matters is whether the action itself is right or wrong. If you ignore all the bluster, all they were actually doing was carrying out a war of liberation. They weren't trying to annex territory or anything. All they did was replace a dictatorship with a democracy and then leave.
The philosophical position should be to not stand in the way of a correct *action*. You should *support* correct actions, even if others are allegedly misguided.
No, it's not whataboutery. It's the fact that Saddam was a criminal who ordered the rape and mutilation of innocent Iraqis, and by any sane philosophical position should have been brought to justice. The appropriate tool to bring him to justice was a war of liberation, which is exactly what Bush did and what you should have supported.
You should not have supported the alternative of allowing a criminal to continue committing crimes, and trying to stop the police from arresting him.
It's a very simple concept.
Yes, it is perfectly clear. The US et al waged a war of liberation. They successfully managed to convert a dictatorship into a democracy, something that racists/religious bigots said was impossible.
They took nothing, they asked for nothing, and they left. It was as pure as a war of liberation can be.
BTW, I'm Australian, and only 50% (to my shock and horror) of Australians supported the liberation of Iraq. The other 50% are apparently closet sociopaths who aren't even moved by the thought of men having their tongues cut out for exercising their freedom of speech. Or girls being abducted and raped by Uday. Australia is now a scary country to live in.
By analogy, you're now proposing that murdering someone and killing someone accidently are the same thing, because intent doesn't matter.
Or, if I'm a serial killer and I happen to kill a family planning to commit a terrorist act, that I committed a laudable act. This is of course ridiculous. Intent matters.
The sooner you accept you've barely scratched the surface on this subject and therefore have no reason to take a position one way or the other the better for everyone involved in this thread.
Oh, the attractiveness of being judge, jury and executioner of others, as long as the same doesn't apply to them, is very simple, I agree.
Again, though, this isn't philosophy. It's just right-wing propaganda.
And that description is best suited to Saddam. Which you happily ignore, and even go so far as standing in the way of those who would put an end to his criminality.
It's equally simple to divide the world into pro-our-war-crimes or pro-his-war-crimes. Again, propaganda, not philosophy.
No, that is not my position.
If I knew a family was about to commit a terrorist act, and I saw a serial killer enter their house, indeed, I would not stand in the way. If there were no repercussions for killing the family, I would kill them myself. Especially if the terrorist act was something like 9/11 with people jumping from skyscrapers. When I saw video of people jumping from skyscrapers, I just hoped they knew that they would be avenged, and set about planning vengeance myself. Cleaning up the Middle East is part of that plan.
Thanks for creating a philosophical argument.
I'm not pro-US-war crimes. Nor is the American government or the American people. If an American commits a war crime, or any crime for that matter, they are charged and jailed (and I support that). Under Saddam's regime, it was a criminal in charge of the government. The US et al thankfully rectified that horror.
What the Iraq war taught us is that lots of folks are simply never going to get this. Until the goons knock on their door.
And yet why do I get the impression that your answer to the statement that the Iraq war was most definitely a war crime will be that no one was charged...?
The Iraq was most definitely NOT a war crime. If you believe there is a law that protects Saddam's "right" to rape and mutilate, you have a duty to ignore that "law" and then do your best to CHANGE that "law".
I am curious at what mental blocks exist that prevent people from understanding that criminals need to be brought to justice, and whether there is a combination of words that can persuade them of this. Or whether it really does require goons knocking on their door before they return to reality.
I've been trying to reconcile this with the intent of the Iraq war. If Bush's intent was to see lots of dead Arab Muslims, that would have been wrong. But since the *actual order* given to his troops was "liberate Iraq", then it was the right thing to do.
And certainly no-one should have been standing in the way of the order "liberate Iraq".
I'm not sure if this correctly addresses the analogy. Maybe someone else can help isolate and resolve the philosophical argument here.
No. There are Muslims on both sides of the war. 87% of Afghans supported non-Muslim US over their local Muslim dictator. These people are staunch allies.
On 9/11 America was attacked by:
1. Religious bigots
2. Racists
And those exist in every country and every religion. Responding to 9/11 ultimately involves cleaning up America itself. But first things first. Let's get the enemy governments defeated.
Ok good.
You have a very peculiar idea of what constitutes a war crime. Usually you have to consider the actions of the culprit, not just the target. Lying to your people in order to justify killing tens of thousands of innocent people in turn to break a country we were at peace with's resolve (the states aim of S&A) on the grounds that, in Paul Wolfowitz's words, "it is swimming in a sea of oil" is not improved by the country's dictator being a criminal. Few people mourn Saddam; we can all agree the world is better off without him. But moral people do not use one person's evil to justify their own. Right-wing propagandists do.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to send my young children to stranger's houses unsupervised in sparkly clothes to consume items of unknown origin. All on a night associated with heavy (oc)cult activity. Seems legit. I mean it's no crawling around in the woods with the subconscious hope of running into a fully grown man dressed in a bunny costume who beckons you to follow him somewhere but whatever. Aren't our holidays great?
Surely this is the basis for a meeting of the minds?
Instead of sitting back and expecting Bush to articulate a perfect reason for liberating Iraq, why weren't you actively stating the case for liberating Iraq yourself? Then, when Bush came along, you could have said "well that's nuts, but it fits into my objective anyway, so go right ahead".
The war crime in my opinion is to stand in the way of the police as they try to bring the criminal Saddam to justice. And as I said, you should have been part of the police yourself.
Because I'm not a psychopath.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Right, my options are: become an Iraqi citizen, train as a police officer, and single-handedly arrest the dictator of my new country, or support war crimes against said country. Utterly ridiculous.
This is actually a formula for doing nothing, because you can never be certain of anything. If you see a woman being raped in your neighborhood, maybe it is just an optical illusion, so there's no need to call the police. And anyhow, the police will come by car, polluting the air with CO2 which will cause global warming which will lead to the destruction of the earth. Nah, just ignore her screams.
I have a belief that our secular capitalist liberal democracies are better than cruel dictatorships, so seek to spread the "best technology" we know of. x% of any target country agrees, and they are our allies. x = 87 in Afghanistan, 50 in Iraq, and who knows in Iran. We need to get about 20 liberations under our belt before we can get a decent average and standard deviation. And even then, it's only my allies I really care about, whatever percentage that is.
No, all anyone is asking you to do is be a citizen who supports the police (or a posse) who is in the process of arresting a criminal. You don't personally need to go to Iraq, there are sufficient volunteers willing to do that already. All anyone is asking you to do is say "thanks America", like I did here.
Note that as previously mentioned, I did manage to get a Russian to flip position, and he explained his mental process here. Basically if you cease to be a nationalist, then new, ideological dividing lines open up. It is truly fascinating. But so far I haven't been able to repeat it.
I politely decline on grounds of nauseating distaste for fascism.
It is Saddam who was the fascist. He was brought to justice by anti-fascists. If you claim to be an anti-fascist you should have joined the campaign. Instead, you did your best to leave a fascist in charge of an entire country.
There can be multiple fascists and, indeed, multiple fascists at any one time. The fact that you recognise America as the police of the sovereign nation of Iraq is an implicit acknowledgement of its kind of fascism.
Even if you wish to incorrectly label America as fascist, why didn't you play off one fascist against another to get the end result, which is the non-fascist Iraqi people electing a non-fascist Iraqi government?
And you seem to be policing America, despite America being a sovereign nation. I don't have a problem with you policing America when it does something wrong (which it does sometimes do, such as recognizing Kosovo independence). But I expect you to sing America's praises when it does something beautiful like replace a cruel fascist dictator with a non-cruel non-fascist democracy.
There wasn’t a real war in Iraq in year 2003.
Iraq (people, army and natural resources) was simply sold to the World’s Elite. But it had to be prepared first for about 2 decades (economical sanctions against the Iraqi people and 10-year war with Iran) before its delivery.
The seller was presented as being the cruellest tyrant in human history who was even threatening the entire world, starting from USA. Obviously, the world couldn’t hear of such ridiculous character if the world’s media, everywhere, is not well controlled by the buyers.
In year 2003, we all heard that the American army had to invade Iraq to save its people from their TYRANT. The main mission of the American troops, at that time, was to capture this tyrant, so that he could be judged and condemned to death for being a cruel killer who had no mercy at all towards his powerless victims.
Then a miracle happened. A few days before the arrival of the well-armed Americans who were asking for his head, this tyrant, the anti-America number 1, became a true loving Christian. He decided to ‘Love His Enemies’. Yes, he didn’t take the American civilians (he had in Iraq) as hostages and let them reside in his various buildings which were supposed to be targeted by their army (as any newbie terrorist does). It happened that his heart became very sensitive, all of a sudden. So, he did his best to let them all return home back 'sane and safe'. His heart couldn’t see the heads of these innocent Americans be blown by their own bombs and missiles. After all, these hi-tech missiles were sent to blow his head and of the Iraqi people only.
Don’t you see? Even in our days, a clear miracle did happen :)
But, it may not be so to those who knows that all stories which were made and spread worldwide about Iraq (to justify its invasion and destruction) since before year 2003 till our days, are just fairy tales made especially for the smart adults :) This great talent in creating such stories is very important in 'the Art of Politics'.
That's the consequence of ignoring intent.
I have admitted that I am unsure what terminology underpins my position here.
On the one hand I couldn't care less if Bush ordered the liberation of Iraq because he hates presidents whose name begins with "S", or any other daft reason.
Perhaps there is a "secondary intent" or something. Basically he issued an order of "liberate Iraq and confiscate any WMD you find". It wasn't pure liberation, as there was intent to "steal" someone else's WMD. But the initial thing to do, prior to confiscating WMD, was simply to liberate the country. Bush intended for his generals to follow his orders and liberate Iraq. I wanted the same thing. It is something I believe everyone should get behind.
I'm not sure that a stupid "initial intent" is relevant unless/until it morphs into some other action, like invading Australia because Scott Morrison's name starts with an "S" too.
I can also get behind the idea of encouraging people to have a sensible "initial intent" on top of any "secondary intent".
It is you who excused Saddam's murders and tried to prevent the police from arresting the murderer. Maybe it's you who doesn't like Iraqis.
This is the third straw man you've raised and the first one I'm reacting to. You should respond to what I say not to things you make up.
Sorry, I don't see any straw man. If you opposed the liberation of Iraq, it meant that you wanted to see a criminal like Saddam remain in power to continue his crimes against humanity. That is the consequences of your action. Look up "consequentialism".
Just like I think the police should adhere to rules regardless of the victim or perpetrator, so is it here. It's a pathetic argument to make that I'm therefore in favour of murderers continuing to murder innocents.
As I said before in this thread, if you believe there is a "rule" that protects Saddam's "right" to rape women and mutilate men, then you should:
1. Ignore that rule for now.
2. Do your best to get that rule changed.
I believe this to be a sound philosophical position. But I'm here to open myself up to the free marketplace of ideas.
The prohibition on you personally to not attack me is not a rule to protect me so I can murder people.
Instead of replying to me, why don't you have a good hard think on why that is and come back to me tomorrow why you think that is the way it is.
The threat seems too distant to many folks for them to take it seriously. If Saddam had taken over Saudi Arabia and then cut off the oil, that probably would have snapped some out of their delusions. Or, if Trump were to win again, and then become a dictator. Something like that. Maybe not goons knocking on their door, but something that makes it more personal and immediate to them.
Some combination of words? Probably not.
Even without the threat that Saddam posed, there was the fact that he was raping and mutilating Iraqis. I don't know how anyone can look at video of Saddam's goons chopping out someone's tongue and not be spurred into action. At the very least the anti-war should be saying "Well I disapprove of the war, but I am ELATED that Saddam is no longer able to rape and mutilate and torture and murder the Iraqi people - I jumped for joy when Saddam's statue fell and the Iraqi people were free".
It may just be simple racism. They may think that Arabs are just a bunch of animals who do cruel things to each other and that's just the nature of the beast. That's why there were no shortage of people who said that the Arabs couldn't handle democracy and it was a fool's errand to bring them democracy.
Can you also answer Benkei's message? He wants me to wait until tomorrow before I explain that if he is raping someone I will kill him regardless of any rules preventing me from doing so. If I can get away with it, anyway. If I can't get away with it because his name is Uday and I'm an Iraqi citizen I will instead wait for a US liberation and support that.
Because, as I've explained, I'm not a psychopath. You might get off on hundreds of thousands of innocent people dying to enable America to control Iraqi oil, but I cannot.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Are you seriously equating criticising a country for war crimes with invading a country illegally, bombing seven shades of shit out of it, bombing hospitals, weddings, funerals and schools, and torturing prisoners? There are very few intelligent right-wingers, I suppose.
They took nothing, they asked for nothing, and they left. It was as pure as a war of liberation can be.
Tosh.. I don't know how anyone could deceive themselves so thoroughly and so refuse to face the facts. .
But no point in arguing. I'll let you get on with your arrogant assault on the rest of the world..
I happen to think we should invade the USA to impose regime change, and you seem to think it would be fine to do this. So my army has support on the ground.
If the Iraq invasion had been an honest enterprise there would have been no need to lie and cheat and invent fake reasons for it. Obviously.
If Saddam took over the house next to yours and you started hearing screaming coming from inside...
You'd call the police, knowing in advance that men with guns would come and shooting may occur.
Mental blocks. Inability to use common sense. Prioritizing fantasy moral superiority poses over the welfare of victims. Partisan politics.
Not worth the bother. Like I said, imho, words and reason are insufficient for this task.
I think such an overthrow of an Australian dictatorship would be relatively simple and painless. What made the middle-eastern wars so difficult was the networks of insurgents and non-state actors who did not rely on an identifiable central structure that could simply be attacked by the US. If a country like Australia set up a dictatorship in Canberra then the US could just swoop in and take them out and there are no militia groups, no foreign parties like Al-Queda attacking stationed troops. The Australian dictatorship would capitulate, the Australian army would cease hostilities and the war would be over very quickly.
That's why the US found it so easy to install democracies in West Germany and Japan but then found Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan a seemingly endlessly struggle. Iran would not be different, there would be a near-endless post-war guerilla offensive by non-state actors and the end result would almost certainly be worse for Iranians than what they have right now. Just like we saw in Vietnam and Iraq, decades-long wars which the US seems doomed to lose, if not just due to attrition and public opinion.
Honestly, even North Korea would be so much easier than Iran to invade, because the N. Korean army might just cease hostilities after the central government capitulates and who's going to continue the fight? All the US can do to Iran is turn an advanced economy into rubble, there's no option of an easy invasion and occupation.
You can't 'invade' a democratic nation open to all- rather, that'd be stupid. Unnecessary.
To be fair, historically, the largest genocides of unique peoples have always been perpetrated by, themselves. As can be shown in the region of the world we're talking about. Sunni vs. Shiite, I believe.
People such as yourself were that reason. Twenty years later, Saddam gone, his psychopathic sons dead, Iraq free, torture chambers gone, no WMD arms race with Iran, no more Iraqi invasion of it's neighbors, threat to the world's oil supply removed, US troops almost home, and you STILL don't get it.
Had you had your way, Saddam and his sons would still be attaching jumper cables to the genitals of anyone who got in their way. The entire Middle East would probably now be engaged in a frantic nuclear arms race.
The hyper sloppy logic of the war's critics is that they never compare the invasion to what the reality would have been without the invasion. Instead, they compare the invasion to some imaginary mythical vision of peace which had never existed in Saddam's Iraq. A million killed in the war with Iran. Peace????
Without the invasion, the containment strategy would have inevitably failed and once again Saddam would have been up to some trouble that likely would have made an invasion necessary at some point anyway.
Anyway, I'm being stupid to bother typing this because those who didn't get it then will never get it.
Like Abu Ghraib? No, Americans just did that for kicks.
Just think about why that projection is difficult:
- British conquered the area of Iraq in WW1 from the Ottoman Empire and it's the British who set up present Iraq, which had divisions to Shias and Sunnis and also ethnic division including Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Yazidis, Shabakis, Armenians, Mandaeans, Circassians, Sabians and Kawliya put together in a totally arbitrary way. Iraq had it's first elections in 1925, but free elections (that we take as granted in a genuine democracy) basically happened in January 2005.
- The Australian continent was colonized solely by the British first by penal colonies bringing with them British institutions (jurisdiction, politics, etc.) and European style government since 1788. Hence Australia has a long history of democracy. Universal male suffrage Australia has had since 1850's and womens suffrage in 1903.
Just stop and think of the totality of the difference between the two countries and in the history of law and democracy. You are simply totally disregarding how much difference there is and this has an enormous effect on how politics is managed in these two countries.
Quoting Paul Edwards
And ask yourself, why is that?
It really would very naive to think that it's just threat of violence. It simply isn't. Yes, Saddam Hussein built his system based on fear and intimidation, just like Stalin, BUT there is a huge issue you totally forget. Just how did his terror apparatus stay intact? With Stalin he was a firm believer in communism and so were those NKVD troops that did the purges. In Hussein's case, as he was a genuine thug, it is the totally broken character of Iraq itself that truly gave him the power. Iraq was simply ungovernable before. The (British made) monarchy couldn't handle it. The Kurdish uprising against Iraq had flare up in 1918 right continued ALL THE TIME during Iraq being independent. And Husseins worst atrocities happened in the Al Anfal campaign against the Kurds. The basic fact is that this artificial British creation called Iraq has been so ungovernable, that the outcome has been that a brutal dictator kept it from falling apart.
Dictatorship don't happen from out the blue. There is a reason why the political process falls into the level of organized crime. Those reasons are found in the society and it's history.
Then just to waltz in, take control of a country through a military occupation and demand a highly function democracy where there hasn't been any, when the various population groups have suffered genocide done by the others and want their own country and independence, is simply condescending Western hubris that basically is totally indifferent to the reality in the country. It is simply just smug self posturing likely to hide other objectives. Or hubris. Democracy is not an app you can start using: there are demands that a society needs to have starting from social cohesion and national unity.
Actually, we know now that Operation Desert Fox in 1998 destroyed the last remnants of Saddam Hussein's WMD projects. The real threat of Hussein getting a nuclear weapon was before the invasion of Kuwait and Desert Storm. Then in 1998 it was just a sham that Hussein himself kept up for appearances. Afterwards, totally nonexistent. And actually the UN observers noted this already before the 2003, but who would listen to them. Nope, it was "yellow cake from Niger".
Likely the Arab Spring would have hit hard a Saddam's Iraq and likely it would have gone the way of Syria/Libya.
Yet what you are forgetting that the US would be in a total different light in the Arab world. We simply would have had the media concentrating on the war in Afghanistan. Even if it was Gore that had become President, the US surely would have gone there and got it's next Vietnam.
If anyone wishes to make a case that all parties would have been better off without the invasion, ok, make that case. But please don't compare the invasion to peace, because there was no peace in Iraq to be preserved. If someone wishes to make the case against the invasion they are required to compare one list of horrors to another list of horrors.
It could be argued, and was argued, that the real threat to the region is Iran, because of it's larger size and fundamentalist ideology. If this judgement is made, then one could construct an argument that Saddam should have been left in power as a check on Iran. You know, instead of us fighting the psychopaths, let them fight each other.
We did try this strategy, but it so bankrupted Saddam that he was forced to make a grab for Kuwait to restore his bank balance. And so the problem was just moved from one box to another.
We could have kicked Saddam out of Kuwait and left it at that. And now we'd be watching a nuclear arms race spread across the region. Anyone here wish to vote for that?
What's interesting is that while Bush gets slammed for invading Iraq, nobody seems to mind that Obama didn't invade Sryia right at the beginning of the Syrian civil war, a decisive act which might have saved 400,000 Syrians from the carnage which was about to unfold there.
Bush invades Iraq, improving the situation.
Obama does nothing in Syria, opening the door to chaos.
Sorry, but there simply is no fucking 911 to call for a police in this World when it comes to sovereign states. It's anarchy out their.
Quoting Hippyhead
Starts a war that in the end helps Iran.
Quoting Hippyhead
Does not intervene in an ongoing civil war.
Spot any difference?
It seem very necessary to me and it's been done many times.
The idea that the USA is a democracy is a game of words. It looks like a dictatorship to me.
Besides, as Churchill noted, democracy is the just the least worst form of government. It is not even always appropriate to the situation, as should be obvious.
If you note the supporters of war here you'll note they're not considering all the factors but just pushing an ideology.
The real threat of Saddam getting a nuclear weapon was his living existence. The Iranians are inching right up to the edge of having nukes. What Saddam would do in response is utterly predictable. And then everyone in the region would want their own nukes. A nuclear war in the Middle East could erase the entire region off the map in literally just a few minutes, and could quite credibly suck all the major powers in to a Biblical scale end times scenario.
That could still happen some day, but we can thank George Bush for the fact that it's not happening now.
And in case anyone might be wondering, I'm a liberal Democrat. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson. Liberal Democrats used to understand such things.
I knew you'd dodge the question. They always do.
I'm surprised to find we disagree on this. I suspect it's very difficult for you guys over there to see the wood for the trees, so powerful is the 24/7 political propaganda. At least you might ask yourself why Britain was about the only country to support Bush's war. Why not more?
We must be careful here. I do not want to be rude to an entire nation, but I wonder if you realise the vast extent of the disgust for US foreign policy.
Saddam just moved in next door to you. Will you be calling the police, or listening to the screams?
America Frst, and the devil take the rest.
They're all happy to accept our help when it's their head on the psychopath's chopping block. I don't recall resistance to the invasion of Normandy by our British and French friends.
1) We saved your ass in WWI
2) Then we saved it again in WWII
3) Then we risked nuclear war on the American homeland to save you from being over run by Russian tanks.
The entire 20th century spent saving Europeans from their own problems.
And in return you lecture us from a position of imaginary moral superiority when we try to save somebody other than you.
The Brits stood with us in the war against Iraq because the Brits are honorable grateful people who have brains. As for the rest, no comment.
This is an irrelevant question, as you must surely be aware.
The UK is in danger of having to do a trade deal with the US, and everybody I know is terrified of the possible consequences. We want nothing to do with your constant warmongering, military and political interference or approach to life.
. .
Well ok, that's one way to dodge the question. Why not just retire from the thread though? I enjoy your insights on other topics and look forward to more.
So I take your point to be that if Saddam was torturing your family we should not intervene. Ok, duly noted.
What has this got to do with anything? It seems to be utterly irrelevant./I have not suggested nobody ever needs to go to war.
Let's leave it. I won't be sticking around so you can relax. . . .
What a damn silly comment. Surely you can see that it s silly. .
Your argument here is absurd and not worth engaging with.
Any time you wish to withdraw from NATO, you are free to do so. Hey, maybe you could strike up a good deal with Putin, he seems like a nice guy.
It probably would be wise for you to retreat before this becomes any more embarrassing.
You know how you know a LOT about Buddhism, and I know almost nothing? I learned from you, I didn't slam down the phone and run away.
You've very engaged by this subject obviously, but you just don't know that much, that's all. Not a crime.
Ok Paul, I carried this ball for awhile. Handing the baton back to you.
One thug doesn't simply make a bomb.
Just look at Ghaddafi: his nuclear ambitions went nowhere, where a laughable joke. And after 1998 so was with Saddam Hussein. His only ability and the thing that invested 100% of his dedication was to stay in power. He couldn't rebuild his army, so he surely could not rebuild a nuclear bomb. This is a very, very unrealistic argument, which history can easily show not to be true.
Quoting Hippyhead
Look,
The reason why these countries wanted a nuclear was only to have deterrence against the Israeli nuclear deterrence. The simple fact is that when one side has the nuke and the other side hasn't, then the nuclear armed power can do whatever it wants. Your simply not reasoning the facts here.
And how would they suck all powers to a Biblical end times scenario? You think the Chinese or the Russians will say: "Oh, there having a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, we have to launch our own nuclear deterrence on...somebody?" No. Likely they would demand an immediate halt to the battle just like every other country in the World (except perhaps the US, because the White House has to think about all those Evangelicals and how they will vote in the next elections, because those loonies would be absolutely thrilled about the end times finally coming).
Why have none of the VERY rich gulf oil states developed nukes in response to Israel, who has had nukes for a long time now? They're not afraid of Israel, that's why. They have rationally concluded Israel is not a threat to them. They're making peace with Israel.
Israel still has a bunch of nukes. The gulf states have none. They're ok with that. Or they would have long ago done something about it, given that they are richer than God.
Quoting ssu
Are you aware that North Korea has a bunch of nukes, built out of an economy about the size of a house cat?
Quoting ssu
Are you aware that without Mid East oil supplies the global economy goes in to an immediate drastic nose dive and that such circumstances have always been ripe grounds for conflict among the major powers? Here's what happens when the economy goes down the tubes. People start yelling, "Do something, DO SOMETHING!"
And why have those countries that Israel has annexed territory from and/or been in war with Israel have made efforts to gain a nuclear deterrent?
And it's easy to make peach WHEN YOU HAVEN'T BEEN IN AN ACTUAL WAR. The first war that several Gulf States participated was in the liberation of Kuwait. And now some are fighting in Yemen. None have sent troops to fight Israel in any of the Arab-Israeli wars.
I think that the furthest contributer of troops to fight Israel has been Morocco. Yet people don't describe the two countries being in war. They simply haven't yet gotten to normal diplomatic relations. And that's btw what the Gulf "peace deal" is about. Great, but perhaps not so astonishing as Trump wants to picture it.
Quoting Hippyhead
The massive conventional army of North Korea already prohibited Clinton to strike North Korea when it was obvious they went on with their nuclear program. Same conclusion came younger Bush too.
Iraq was defeated in 1991 and a no-fly zone was installed back then. The US could with impunity attack it in 1998 destroying the remnants. And likely could have done similar strikes.
Just like with the Syrian nuclear arms program, these things are difficult to hide and once destroyed, you have to start again.
Quoting Hippyhead
Now you are making arguments for my case that just why a nuclear exchange between let's say Iran and Israel would not escalate bringing other powers to launch their nuclear arsenal.
I asked you to reflect on why a thing is a certain way not what you think it should be. Why does Australian law or Dutch law or UK law prohibit you from travelling across the country and attacking a person you believe is a murderer and rapist? You'd be convicted of murder is you did. Why is that? What are the specific exemptions to that and why?
But this is exactly the heart of the problem. We're dealing with a world that has traditionally been rife with dictators. The dictators are never going to agree that democratic nations are the ones who should be judge, jury and executioner of other dictators, but that's exactly the sort of thing needed for justice. It is the democratic countries that have just governance.
So we need a "plan" to deal with the world as it is. YOU should come up with that plan yourself. Then you can compare the plan with what the US government is doing, and maybe email them any suggestions for improvements. If we were all planning on liberating the rest of the world, to end the screams coming from next door, then when the US (et al) executed their plan to liberate Iraq, it would likely have dove-tailed into your own plan.
The US shouldn't need to sell this war to you. You should be selling your liberation plan to them *in advance*.
And note that your plan will necessarily call for deception. You can't let the dictators know you're coming for all of them, as we need the help of allied dictators against non-allied dictators, and we don't want a hostile "dictator alliance". We don't have the luxury of only rubbing shoulders with fellow democracies. The world hasn't yet reached that stage of development. One day it will be a requirement for entering the UN that you are a democracy, and that any country that has a military coup is immediately subjected to a UN liberation. But we're not there yet.
The operative word there is "believe". People have all sorts of faulty beliefs, so if you only have a belief, and a police force as exists in a modern liberal democracy exists, you should report your "belief" to the competent authorities to deal with.
If you see an actual crime *in progress* you are allowed to act rather than wait for the authorities to arrive.
Now back to Iraq. You probably subscribe to the theory that the UN regulates the use of force. But I don't see a collection of thugs as some sort of moral authority to decide when force is used. I see them as a collection of immoral thugs.
So I will pay lip service to the UN, as I don't want dictators to start wars the same way we do, but I will ignore the UN whenever it is strategic to do so. And my argument is that you should be doing the exact same thing. Don't let dictators or other immoral actors decide US policy. Do the right thing instead! And we can debate what the "right thing" is in an open forum. We have more scope for debate than our government does. Our government has to swear blind that they want "just one more war". We can instead talk about how we're planning to liberate the whole damn world.
Almost all of the death toll was due to sectarian violence, not war. Are you saying we should let religious bigots decide whether they can enslave a population or not? And does freedom for brown people have no value to you? Brown people shouldn't be fight and die in any fight for freedom? They should just accept eternal slavery? Is that what you would want for yourself, if you were enslaved? Better to be enslaved than have a risk of being killed?
Have you ever met even ONE person who supported the 2003 Iraq war so that America could control oil? If you have met such a person, they are both an idiot, and they failed in their mission, because the Iraqi people are the ones who control Iraqi oil now (instead of Saddam, your preference), and they sell it on world markets for world prices (just like your hero Saddam did).
The problem here is that there are very few non-racist left-wingers. Iraq was suffering a holocaust and you just yawned, as it was only brown people being tortured, mutilated, raped and murdered, and brown people are little more than savages in your eyes, and they certainly can't handle democracy. Not only didn't you care about the welfare of the Iraqi people, you actively tried to stop the cops when they tried to end the holocaust.
You mentioned that US soldiers also committed crimes, which is true. But do you understand the difference between LEGAL and ILLEGAL crimes? When Saddam was committing his crimes, it was LEGAL for him to do so. The police were on the side of the criminal. An Iraqi woman could be LEGALLY raped. Which means the entire population of Iraq didn't even have the right to not be raped. Or have the right to keep their tongue in their mouth.
When the US commits crimes, they are TRIED and JAILED, because it is ILLEGAL.
All this is, plus the war, is done to the best of our ability. We're not perfect. The US police are not perfect when they respond to a 911 call either. That doesn't mean you don't call 911 when you hear screams from your neighbor's house. Only someone truly sick would listen to the screams from their neighbors, or Iraqi women, and then not just not call the police, but complain about the police when they are responding.
The US is already a secular capitalist liberal democracy which is the best system we know of. I don't like Trump personally, and he will be gone in 0 or 4 years. If he is not gone after 4 years, in principle I support liberating the US from a Trump dictatorship. The rest of the world really needs to maneuver into a position where we can in fact liberate the US. That means the nuclear weapons need to go.
But that's a really long-term plan. In the short term I'm just trying to eliminate enemy dictators.
The US soldiers did that (hazing terrorists) ILLEGALLY and they were TRIED and JAILED. Where was your mock concern when Saddam was LEGALLY chopping out people's tongues and committing REAL torture against innocents?
This is why we need 20 liberations under our belt. We STILL don't have enough data to understand war, and in the long term, we need that. In my opinion Iran will be quick and painless. All you need to do is reuse the old security forces and you can be in and out in 3.5 weeks flat.
Or even less than 3.5 weeks, as the Iranian people may rise up in revolution as soon as they have planes overhead to protect them from automatic weapons.
We really need to find out.
I agree. He's the one calling anyone who disagrees with his sick ideology a fascist.
Expecting Iraqis to be as intelligent and sensible as Americans is the opposite of condescending.
And the fact that they are not is exactly why the West needs to get in there and fix the problem.
Note that x% of Iraqis are just like us, so that's a bloody good start. There's no genetic or religious barrier to being just like us. Now over the course of decades or centuries we need to bump x up to 99. As part of responding to 9/11. We need sensible individuals worldwide. Or at least enough sensible people that an individual nutcase finds it hard to find organize a terror group to attack the US.
Have you not seen the media bashing Trump, the opposition party bashing Trump and ahead in polls? You're calling that a dictatorship? The same as Saddam?
How do you actually manage to cross a road safely? "That's not a car, it's a squirrel".
Wow, what condescending tripe. The US has a very vibrant democracy, no different from yours.
There were plenty of countries that joined the coalition, including Australia. It is true that the UK was better than Australia though, providing 7 times as many troops on a per capita basis, and being on par with the US. Impressive indeed.
But more important than the number of countries (I counted 40 here, which is a significant chunk of the world), is the fact that there were decent people in every country who supported freedom for Iraqis. And what is important is whether this IDEOLOGY of freedom is right or wrong. Even if 0 countries supported liberating Iraq, the ideology stands on its own merits. So you need to address the actual ideology.
Also note that 50% of Iraqis themselves supported the liberation. That makes millions of Iraqis more moral than you.
Assuming that is true, it just shows that the US is far more moral than the rest of the world. It's certainly more moral than my country, Australia, because the immoral Australians withdrew our troops from Iraq before the job was complete, leaving our long-standing ally America to fend for herself. Totally disgusting and I hope a future Australian government eventually apologizes for that. Specifically I expect the right-wing party that supported troops in Iraq to apologize for the left-wing party that pulled them out.
The British people don't speak with one voice. There are plenty of decent British people who supported liberating Iraq. Now the challenge is to deal with the immoral Brits who instead supported institutionalized rape and tongue-cutting.
Responding to 9/11 also involves fixing Britain.
I have no idea why you think it is a silly comment. It's a very accurate analogy. If you want the cops called to protect YOUR human rights, you should also call the cops to protect the human rights of OTHERS. It's a very simple philosophical question. It is amazing how people can come up with sophistry to explain why Saddam should have been left in charge to brutalize the Iraqi people.
There is nothing absurd about it. It is the right position to start arguing from. Do you agree with the concept of calling the cops on an abusive neighbor or not? Then we can work our way up to Iraq. It's philosophy. This is a philosophy forum. It's not that complicated, it's something that you can answer yourself. Do you call the cops or not? As Hippyhead said, it's a yes/no question. No sophistry required.
Thanks. You did a good job with your simple analogy. The same analogy you can find from a US soldier here.
I want to further note that when it comes to your OWN human rights, you demand them to be protected to the nth degree. But when it comes to an Iraqi's human rights, there is nothing that can't be ignored. If Saddam had been raping babies and chopping off their feet, would THAT have been enough to goad you into action? Sadly, we both know the answer to that.
Quoting Paul Edwards
No, I'm saying that you cannot justify your evil with the evil of others.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Do you always call them brown people? Is that especially relevant?
Quoting Paul Edwards
One of the two people who pushed the Bush administration into the war at every opportunity was quite clear about why he did it.
Quoting Paul Edwards
This is the most insane conversation I've ever been in. For all you know I was 10 years old during GWII (I wasn't, but...)
Quoting Paul Edwards
The police you keep referring to (the US military) were the criminals in this case. Is that better?
Quoting Paul Edwards
Yet to see anyone responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq to be tried and jailed.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost trillions of dollars. What if we had taken every penny of that expense and invested it in say, solar energy? The goal would be to make MidEast oil irrelevant, thus pulling the rug out from under the power of all MidEast dictators.
Something like this is happening now with Trump's sanctions on Iran. He's steadily yanking the cash cow out from under the mullahs, limiting their ability to make trouble around the region. He very surgically knocked off their head of trouble making, and then immediately sought to defuse the situation. As much as I hate the guy, that wasn't a bad move.
OMG! I said something nice about Trump a few days before an election!! I definitely need to be tortured! :-)
It is not evil to liberate people. Losing your own blood and treasure for the freedom of others is the highest ideal we can strive for.
I have no idea. I don't know what motivates you to not just ignore the screams of brown people but actively try to stop them from being helped.
What did he actually say? Did he say "we need to lose blood and treasure so that we can control Iraq's oil"? If he did, he's an idiot, and he failed in his goal.
I'm talking about in hindsight. It's the position you need to adopt by opposing the action, even belatedly.
If you believe there is a law that prevents the US from liberating millions of Iraqis from state-slavery, you have a responsibility to:
1. Ignore that law for now.
2. Do your best to get that law changed.
How far have you progressed so far?
See above.
Obama wished to shift the focus from the Mid East to the Far East, so doing that is not a conspiracy by right wing baby killing corporate slave masters etc etc.
You mean you're not 10 years old now??? Dang, I got that one wrong.
You are very histrionic, indeed disturbed individual.
Quoting Hippyhead
No, I reached that age where something isn't automatically true because a bunch of right-wing politicians told me. We keenly await your arrival.
But you haven't reached the age where you can make anything close to a credible argument against the Iraq war. So I had to do it for you. See above.
Bringing freedom to millions of people is the best foreign aid you can give. The alternative goal of leaving millions in slavery, and adding insult to injury by trying to reduce their standard of living, is a very sad direction to take.
9/11 was an act by non-state actors. Making Middle Eastern countries poorer will not do anything to address the mindset that would kill American civilians instead of protecting them. You need to move the entire world over to being protectors of America, or at the very least neutral. Thanks to 9/11, having hostile individuals is no longer acceptable. I do agree that the hostile governments should be taken down first, as they have the potential to do much more damage than individuals. But don't underestimate your enemy. Individuals proved on 9/11 that they can do major damage too. Just be grateful the helpful Mr Khan didn't give them nukes.
America has been warned just in the nick of time. Now is the time to take off the gloves.
Note that it was necessary to do nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq to prove that it is possible to deliver democracy by force of arms, even to Arabs. But now that we know there is no genetic barrier to worldwide democracy, it is time to liberate the rest of the world.
If you're worried about the cost of war, then stop all other forms of foreign aid and direct it all into wars of liberation which is a gift that keeps on giving. If you're worried about the American lives lost freeing others, then hire Gurkhas. Just get the job done. Or face a nuclear 9/11.
Every time we knock over a country like Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran, we get an allied democracy. I can't think of a better way of isolating China than having the entire rest of the world as liberal democracies, ready to turn the screws on China when the time is right. We can't directly attack China, the cost is too high, so let's focus on turning everyone else.
Ok, you make good points.
To counter, the dictators will be easier to knock off once they're bankrupt. Russia, the Mid East, Iran, Venezuela, all heavily dependent on oil income.
And it's got to be done anyway.
This may be technically true, but I don't think it is right to make life miserable for those unlucky enough to have been born into dictatorships. If I was in that position, I wouldn't want my life to be made miserable for years, I'd want an immediate liberation. So long as the US is able to fight totally lopsided wars, with allies no less, it seems the best course of action is to do so immediately. There is no need (anymore) to hang around to do nation-building, so you can be in and out in 3.5 weeks for the loss of 100 allied lives. The alternative is a potential nuclear 9/11.
Well I don't consider Russia to be a dictatorship. It's just a low-quality democracy. We need to win them over diplomatically. America is at fault for recognizing Kosovo there. It was totally unnecessary. The Kosovars were perfectly safe with NATO troops on their territory. There was no need to poke Russia in the eye. And betray it for that matter. No NATO lives were lost thanks to Russia.
I'm not sure that is an accurate statement. I spend a hell of a lot of effort trying to understand why people don't come to the same conclusions as me, and have documented that here. That represents DECADES of investigation.
As just one example, you could be laboring under the "Just World Hypothesis" where you assume that there must be a good reason why an Iraqi man was having his tongue cut out, even though you can't quite put your finger on it.
In this case (correct me if I'm wrong), I assume the mental block is that you see the United Nations as some sort of moral authority (despite the large number of dictators it includes) and you have outsourced your own sense of right and wrong to them, instead of having confidence that you can do a better job than a bunch of dictators and other immoral has-beens.
If you pare this back to a pure philosophical discussion, where the whole world is full of humans, some of whom are being raped, what is your philosophical course of action? There's no such thing as the UN unless you create it. Would you create a body of immoral dictators? Sure, there may be a strategic reason to do so. But you are free to ignore it when you have a suitable dictator-free set of morals to choose instead.
We can argue strategy though. What is the strategic thing to do in a world with nuclear-armed dictators?
As far as I know, I have answered all your arguments. It is you who insists that "Just War Theory" as it currently stands is perfect and doesn't need to be updated for the case of the clearly just 2003 Iraq war.
It's not just me who is explaining this very simple concept to you. Hippyhead has given you a perfectly good analogy too. But you have a dogmatic belief that Just War Theory as it currently stands trumps the clear analogy of responding to a 911 call. Even to the point where you can watch video of a man having his tongue cut out and simply just yawn and quote Just War Theory to him.
No, that is the largest gap in your thinking. You think that a dictator like Saddam is a rightful authority and respect his "right" to oppress the Iraqi people, even to the point where you yawn at Iraqis having their tongues cut out.
If you read the Russian's blog post here you could see a different way of looking at the exact same world. Perhaps it would be good if you tried to understand your enemy if you wish to defeat him. Tell me what the Russian did wrong when he flipped position. It's a short read.
And I have answered that, although I'll come back to you again later after my Russian friend has had a chance to vet it. I already agreed with you that intent is important when it comes to an individual being charged for murder vs manslaughter. But when the correct action is being taken, intent doesn't matter a damn. It's only if bad intent causes a bad action that we should seek to prevent the action being taken. You shouldn't be so super-confident that it isn't you that has a mental block on this.
Not that I'm even conceding that Bush had bad intent. He said he believed that God wanted everyone to be free, and he's damn right there, if we postulate a loving god. It's good intent - IF that was even needed.
Quoting Paul Edwards
There is no correct action without rightful intent. If I intend to murder you and you happen to be raping someone when I walk in on you with the intent to murder you at the time, it's still murder regardless of the happy outcome. If I walk in on you by happenstance and you're raping someone and I accidentally kill you in the process of defending the victim, only then am I not a murderer.
But yeah, never mind 2000+ years of thinking on criminal law. :snicker:
Perhaps. But perhaps you are demonstrating that you can't accept fresh thinking on the subject. When you have data such as the very obviously just liberation of Iraq conflicting with the theory, it's time to revisit the theory, rather than trying to manipulate the data to fit the theory.
Even if you want to call that murder, you should not prevent the murderer from killing the rapist.
Wars of liberation are a very recent and rare thing. We're still collecting data on how people actually react to that. We still don't even have enough data to be able to predict an Iranian liberation. People are still claiming 99% in opposite directions. The 2000 years is of totally irrelevant wars of conquest.
BTW, I am a programmer by trade, and I came up with a radical new idea (S/380) which the experts couldn't even imagine, and even went so far as to say it would never work. The good thing about computers is that they respond to logic, so MVS/380 became a reality. There are rare humans who are willing to switch worldview in response to cold hard logic, and my Russian friend was one of them. Please read his blog post and tell me where he went wrong.
Hippyhead, over to you for night-shift.
I don't have such data because I don't agree with that conclusion. It surely highlights what's going wrong. You assume the Iraq war was a good thing because of whatever nebulous moral feelings you have about the matter and then proceed to justify your feelings by dressing it up in what you want to call a theory but is so far just you sharing your feelings.
Quoting Paul Edwards
You don't know because you haven't studied it so you're not qualified to make that judgment. That's like me saying C++ is a terrible programming language without ever having programmed in that language. I could be accidentally right but I wouldn't know what I'm talking about.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Good for you. Total red herring. It still doesn't stop you from committing fallacies apparently.
The problem with this approach is what we see in this thread, the undermining of support for such projects. No US administration can just willy nilly do whatever it wants. It requires a good measure of public support to dethrone dictators by force. Consider Vietnam, a bungled mess which crushed the consensus developed by the WWII generation. That fiasco set up a couple of generations of Americans to resist any intervention anywhere.
I think the course we are on right now with Iran is the wiser strategy over the long run.
1) Build the alliance against Iran
2) Bankrupt the regime
3) Patient deterrence
Yes, sanctions have a negative effect on the Iranian people, that's true. But let us not forget they overthrew the Shah in 1979 with no help from anyone. So when they are ready they can do that again.
If an invasion of Iran went FUBAR that's the end of deposing dictators by force for another century. Once we start the necessary shock and awe we become the focus of everyone's concern, and the mullah's get a free pass, and increased support from the Iranian people.
The best weapon we may have is public education. This thread would seem to illustrate we aren't currently doing such a great job of that.
Readers please note, this is a tactical argument, not a moral one.
How are you going to do that without it causing massive harm to the population?
I feel there are two major misrepresentations of reality in your laying out of things.
1. History of Success
There are many countries which are democracies in no small part to the actions of the US but past the Korean war, really none which came about as a result of a US invasion. Calling Iraq or Afghanistan flourishing democracies is simply incorrect, I looked for a democracy index which would describe them as such but couldn't find one, they all list them as authoritarian states and whether democracy survives is really unclear.
2. Ease of US victory
How long until people put 1 and 1 together? The US has no had an easy time in occupying nations with hostile non-state actors and that's exactly what they're going to get in the African and Middle-eastern authoritarian states. Do you think Iran, the most notorious supporter of militant non-state actors, Iran, with its mountainous geography and both infamous and sizeable anti-US sentiment is going to be a cakewalk for the US?
Despite US interventionism, the world is becoming less democratic and the US is a part of that trend. Military interventionism has such a terrible track record, I don't think you can back up your optimism. For the Iraq war, I think most of the complexity comes from how difficult it has been. Much like Vietnam, I don't oppose aiming to stop the spread of authoritarian regimes like communism but it didn't stop it and instead, it just killed millions. So if someone wants to prevent a repeat of the Vietnam war, can you really say "oh, you like communism then?"? As if all the US has to do to stop communism is precisely what clearly didn't stop communism in Vietnam, military interventionism? You want to do exactly the same thing over and over again until it works?
Stop right there.
This is your fundamental problem. You perhaps cannot even see it. It's that YOU are going with YOUR plan to LIBERATE somebody, free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression. The objective, the people you liberate are like a damsel in distress, a totally helpless entity, which then YOU then give a plan forwards they have to do. This is simply not the way democracy spreads: the model of Germany and Japan just go that far.
Perhaps it's difficult for you to understand how offensive the idea of a foreign military forces taking over your country and implementing changes to your society as you as an American never have had the threat of it (at least after the 1812 war). Reminds me how the Soviets wanted to liberate us in 1939 using quite the same rhetoric. Lucky that both of my grandfathers came back alive from the war.
For starters, how about not thinking immediately of using military force to liberate / attack a country?
Or you think that would be somehow immoral thing to do?
Quoting Paul Edwards
That's not what I was saying.
If Americans have difficulties with racial relations when slavery has been abolished a long time ago and segragation laws some 60 years ago, what about countries where those relations have been worse yesterday? You simply cannot assume there aren't huge problems in these societies, which have ended up with dictatorships. It's not as if before everything was just fine until somehow an evil dictator got himself into power and once you have taken away the dictator, democracy could flourish.
This is especially true in Iraq, as we have already seen. The only place where I could see a rather peaceful transition to a democracy and a justice state would be Belarus, if the present dictator would be toppled.
Planning to use military force to oust Lukashenka in Belarus would be playing with the possibility of WW3.
Which reminds me, the best of luck to the Belarussians in ousting their dictator!
It's more I *define* the end of institutionalized rape and mutilation to be a good thing. I don't know how you don't. This is a philosophical question. If in your philosophy you don't think rape is a bad thing, then we will never come to an understanding. I treat it as an axiom.
How about a society that has surveillance everywhere, not just the streets but in your home too in order to combat rape? Perfectly fine because it will stop rape.
Yes, that is what I am trying to do now. Retrospectively explain that the 2003 Iraq war was a good thing, shouldn't be treated as a disaster, and should be repeated.
The Shah didn't mow the protesters down with automatic weapons. The Mullahs do. What you're asking for is a militarily impossible feat. In WW1 we had *armed* soldiers charging automatic weapons and being defeated. Unarmed civilians have no chance at all. Think Tiananmen Square.
That's why the 2003 Iraq war is so important. We need to reset the count.
Yes, that is what is required, and what I am doing now.
I looked it up, and that applies both ways.
I can agree with that. When a 911 call comes in from a Sydney resident, Washington shouldn't just drop a nuke on Sydney. They should use minimal force necessary to respond to the crime. But the objective word there is "respond" rather than "ignore". They shouldn't just ignore the screams of the woman calling 911. Nor should they use sophistry to insist that they have no obligation or even right to respond.
No, I believe consenting couples have the right to privacy.
Also, even though my Russian friend hasn't engaged yet, I now know how to answer your previous question. When a BAD ACT like killing an innocent person happens, it is necessary to determine the INTENT to find out whether to charge the killer with murder or manslaughter. But when a GOOD ACT is done, intent doesn't actually matter (as to whether you should try to prevent the action or not), although it would certainly be nice if there was a good intent.
And this is where a better understanding of criminal law will come in handy and the wiki pages on that are actually pretty good. You can't have a good act with bad intent. If a corrupt cop steals from a criminal who'd otherwise use it for a crime (without the cop knowing), the cop is still a thief.
If I murder you because I like murdering people and you were on your way to kill someone else (but I didn't know), I'm still a murderer even though I saved someone else.
The lack of indexes merely shows the bias of those behind creating the indexes. They simply don't want military intervention to be seen as a success when it clearly is. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, multiple parties vie for power in competitive elections. It is a WORLD of difference to what was there before. As to whether democracy survives (which implies it is currently living anyway), that's just a reason for an organization like NATO to stay engaged.
There was a reason to disband the old security forces in Iraq and do nation-building. This is no longer the case. The target country's security forces can take care of any hostile non-state actors, and anyhow, this is the same result you would get with a revolution. Are you saying revolutions are always wrong because there might be some hostile non-state actors?
Absolutely I do. It would look like a cross between Afghanistan and Libya. You just need to fly some planes over Tehran, let the people rise up, and bomb any security forces that show up to suppress their revolution.
But you're never going to believe it until we actually do it. Which is another reason to do it. We need to reorganize our standing armies so that they only ever have to do wars of liberation.
It has had an excellent track record. What about Panama? What about Kosovo? What about the allegedly impossible Iraq? What about the allegedly impossible Afghanistan? MANY people said it was impossible to install democracy by force of arms, it needed to come from the people themselves via revolution. That claim was absolute bunk. In Libya there was an actual uprising, but they would have been mowed down by automatic weapons if we hadn't intervened. And yes, because we went for a cheap (0 allied casualties, air only) war in Libya (which is all the UN would allow), Libya has had problems (which they presumably would also have had if they had had a successful revolution country-wide), but I fully expect those problems to be sorted out, as all sides support democracy.
If you have any complaints about millions of dead Vietnamese, take it up with Mr Marx.
South Vietnam was secure (just like South Korea) at the time the US left. The US shouldn't have left. THAT is the lesson from Vietnam. Not that we shouldn't physically stand against communism. ISIS was only able to take over part of Iraq in 2014 because the US left too. When the US re-engaged it was a cakewalk, with close to 0 dead US soldiers.
It did work in South Vietnam. South Vietnam was a non-communist state like South Korea. It worked in South Korea. It worked in Panama. It worked in Grenada. It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Afghanistan. It worked in Iraq. It worked in Libya. It will work in Iran too if we can just get people to recognize reality. When Iraq has 300+ political parties instead of 1, you should be able to recognize that something changed. And if democracy indexes don't note that, don't trust them. Also, none of the 300+ parties wins 100% of the vote like Saddam did.
BTW, there wasn't just one reason for the 2003 Iraq war. You won't win just by defeating one of the three reasons. See here.
But what if a 3rd party knows that the criminal is going to use the money for a crime? Should the 3rd party take action to prevent the corrupt cop from stealing a criminal's money? I wouldn't.
This is a philosophical question.
That's just selective justice then which is no justice at all. If we start there we can have rules for poor people and rich people. Black people and white people. The law should apply to everyone equally. The corrupt cop should be apprehended because he's committing a crime.
It's the way democracy SHOULD spread. These people shouldn't have to fight alone, to be mowed down by automatic weapons. The only thing that is standing in the way of success is YOUR BRAIN. It's literally that simple. Western brains are the ONLY thing preventing worldwide democracy.
I'm Australian. I realized in 2002 that I was in a unique position to argue the case for the 2003 Iraq war, because I was neither American not Christian (I was an atheist). That forces people to actually respond to the argument instead of dismissing me as a biased American.
Now to answer your actual point - why did 87% of Afghans support the US military intervention if foreign forces are so bad? Why did 50% of Iraqis support the US military intervention if foreign forces are so bad? What percentage of Australians do you think would support a US military intervention if we had a military coup and a cruel dictator? I would hope 99%, but I don't know. Whatever percentage it is, those are the only ones I actually care about. I don't care if my ideological enemy opposes my intervention. I will arm my ideological allies and they will take care of the rest.
The difference is that for the Soviets, "liberate" means "communist dictatorship". For the US, "liberate" means "democracy". There's a huge difference. Can't you see it?
My first preference is to write a nice letter to Saddam saying "Dear Saddam. Please stand down in favor of democracy. Yours truly, Paul Edwards (from Australia)". If he fails to act on that letter, then I will resort to force. Did you send such a letter to Saddam? What was your plan otherwise?
I don't believe that religious bigots/racists should determine Iraqi policy.
Plenty of places would be. E.g. Vietnam. It's very simple. All you have to do is a military defeat of the standing army, and then REUSE it.
Sure. Russia, despite being a democracy, is still full of immoral people, and that is reflected in their government. We have work to do to win them over now that they have freedom of speech. But I don't see how I'm going to convince them when I can't convince you.
Again wrong.
They actually did do that. Here's a picture from "Black Friday" of the Iranian Revolution when that exactly happened:
The inept Shah then condemned the officers that followed orders (and did not have any riot gear or training), yet the massacre of some 100 people lead to a point of no return for the Shah. What was more hated was the Iranian secret police SAVAK that did torturte Iranians and had killed thousands of political opponents of the Shah. The Federation of American Scientist list the torture methods of the SAVAK with "SAVAK torture methods included "electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails". Imperial Iran was far from a justice state or a democracy. And when the Shah finally agreed to implement reforms in 1979, it was far too late.
If you wish to call that "selective justice" or "no justice", that's up to you. I believe preventing the crime is the right thing to do. You would rather the criminal commit his crime, without even detailing how heinous that crime is.
No, that is not my position.
You seem to be blinded by the law, as if it was perfect. In the past there were laws against harboring Jews too.
No, the crime by the criminal should be prevented. Especially if it was going to be a 9/11. And if it takes a corrupt cop to do the right thing, so be it.
"Again wrong. They actually did do that."
The Shah could have put down the revolution by mowing down much more than 100 people.
It's physically impossible to defeat men with automatic weapons who are prepared to use them. The Chinese tried it in 1989. The Iraqis tried it in 1991. The Iranians have tried it several times. Soldiers in WW1 on both sides tried it.
What is needed for freedom in Iran is an external military invasion, to make their revolution a success.
Yes, we can help. Yet that is a delicate issue just how to do it.. In the end it's your job in Australia to either to cherish uphold democracy. No foreigners can do it, it's only you and your society can do it. And no bombing of Australians will make things better.
I do understand that we have to dismiss the stereotypes we have of people. If the Korean War would have been lost, we would now treat all Koreans as we treat North Korea and we couldn't imagine a Korean culture and prosperity that now exists in South Korea. The idea of K-pop would be absurd. So democracy can take root anywhere. But for starters, there ought to be building blocks like a people and a nation, for starters.
Quoting Paul Edwards
And both of these are failures. You don't look at the real examples of success.
Bill Clinton was successful in getting finally peace in ex-Yugoslavia. It hasn't flared up. But it wasn't NATO fighterbombers that brought down Milosevic. It was the Serbs themselves along some little support from the State Department. Yet now democratic Serbia is an ally of Russia: they do remember who bombed them.
Serbs having enough of Milosevic:
Namibia was a success. That country didn't go the way as Angola or DRC once it finally got it's independence.
And so on. Don't dwell on the epic failures.
We've previously established that not all methods of preventing crime are acceptable. You even agreed but we're now back at "anything that will stop the crime is allowed, including another crime". That just opens the door of allowing me to shoot the cop, because he's committing a crime so I'm justified in doing so, which in turn allows someone else to stop me... Ad infinitum. In other words, what you just came up with is logically inconsistent and unworkable to reach any form of justice.
You mean to turn their Islamic revolution into a success or breath new air into it?
Yes, likely an external military invasion will indeed unify the Iranian people to fight a holy war alongside their Mullahs just as it did with Iraqi invasion.
The Iranians are surely used to sacrifices.
You can call it vigilante justice if you want. I call it a "posse". Internationally, there is no "modern civilization". There is a cesspit of dictators enslaving their populations. Yes, everyone should be Batman. The state of the world as it currently is, calls for the US and others to be Batman, and we should be thankful for it.
One day hopefully there will be wall-to-wall liberal democracies, and at that point I can agree for Batman to stand down.
I'm not sure what you're quoting, but it's true that I don't think you should rape a woman to prevent her from jaywalking, even if you knew for certain that she was going to jaywalk.
Actually this is exactly what we face internationally. The USSR could have taken over the world. A posse was formed to contain the USSR. There was no justice in the USSR, and no justice when the USSR invaded someone else. There was no justice when the communists took over Vietnam with USSR help. We live in a fundamentally unjust world. One day I hope that will change, but right now, dictators are committing human rights abuses, and even if we wanted to, we can't stop all of them at once. I'm at least trying to establish a baseline of "we want to", combined with "call Batman IF NECESSARY (which it most definitely is)".
And yes, if we had tried to help liberate Eastern Europe during the Cold War, we would have been pushed back by USSR nukes. It's a rough-and-tumble world we live in. Not a neat set of laws that protect human rights. It is laughable to talk of justice in this environment.
We really need to liberate Iran just to answer this question. We can't have such large gaps in our military knowledge because it prevents us from planning the future of the US military. In my opinion the US military needs to be pared down to pretty much just air power, so that it can effect wars of liberation, like Afghanistan and Libya were done. Actually, even Iraq could have been done with US air power alone, but it was never tried (for good reason).
You think the Iranians would be unified (100%) against the external invader, despite the fact that 87% of Afghans supported an external invader, 50% of Iraqis supported an external invader, god knows how many Libyans supported an external invader. You will never change your mind until we actually get into Iran and do it. And if the US follows my playbook, they will prove that it can be done purely by air, purely supporting revolutionaries. They should drop noise bombs on Iranian air bases, along with a radio that the base can use if they wish to defect. Try to jump-start both a military coup and a revolution.
The US, especially when acting as part of a coalition, especially a coalition that includes Australia, will be seen as a liberator, far different from the Iraqi conquest attempt. But you won't believe it until you see it with your own eyes. Hell, even then it might not be enough. You can view Iraq's 300+ political parties with your own eyes and still say "nope, no sign of democracy there".
Actually you can make the coalition even more trustworthy by putting the Philippines or South Korea or Estonia in charge of the liberation, with the US just quietly providing muscle. This is what the world needs. We already have injustice. It's not like we are breaking a just system.
I'm not sure you're fully taking in to account the results of the last two invasions.
We've been in Afghanistan for 20 years and the outcome is still unknown. We're being forced to leave because the Taliban have succeeded in exhausting the patience of the American people, just like in Vietnam. The invasion of Iraq went a long way to undermining the unity of the democracies, basically making it politically impossible for more invasions until everyone alive now is gone.
Whatever the merits of such a decision might be, there is basically no chance we're going to invade Iran or North Korea, unless their armies roll across the border in to some other country, which neither despot is stupid enough to do.
It was only in 1945 that democracy became a settled fact in Western Europe. Almost in my lifetime. The Middle East is centuries behind us in political maturity. Many in the Middle East view democracy as "we get elected and then jail our opponents".
An invasion of Iran would be a huge roll of the dice. It could literally lead to WWIII, see for example American and Russian troops delicately avoiding each other in Syria. If Afghanistan takes 20 years, and Iraq takes ten, Iran could take a generation. As evidence, note how determined the mullahs were in resisting the invasion of Saddam. A million dead.
In order to control the air over Iran we'd have to shock and awe Iran's air force, all it's missile installations, and navy too. Trying to shoot the mullah's henchmen from the air in the middle of urban chaos all over the country is not likely to go very well.
You have excellent goals, we just need a more sophisticated strategy. This is a very long chess game.
Quoting Paul Edwards
I am not really suggesting any particular one-size-fits-all solution, I think we could begin to come to an agreement if you didn't want everything to go perfectly, your optimism is based on wishful thinking and that's an issue I'm taking up with you. If an Iran war is barely an inconvenience to the US or if it's a tumultuous decades-long transition, don't you think that matters? It's really important that Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam were not nearly as successful as you're making it out to be because that's probably the main reason why these wars are so infamous. If the wars were outstanding successes, easy wars for the US, the people rose up after being liberated and the transition to democracy was easy then this stigma for the wars that exists, would not be there.
Quoting Paul Edwards
I think given your unwillingness to even accept the judgement of non-affiliated organisations who rate democracies and your unwavering but quite frankly unsubstantiated optimism about how easy future wars will be, that our disagreement is fairly well clarified but I don't see a way to proceed beyond that.
The Iraq war may not even deserve to be called a war of liberation, the US has made it clear many times that the war was to prevent Iraqi acquisition of WMDs. The war cost billions of dollars for the US, many lives were lost and WMDs weren't even there. The war damaged US credibility, it undermined US leadership and still today, Iraq is not far from anarchy, it is a place of instability and violence and its very existence is under threat. So when you zoom out from this issue of liberation, a high price was paid, we can't only focus on the morality of the invasion. It's just really hard to see why Westerners like Australians would support the Iraq war in my opinion, given the facts and benefit of hindsight.
If you really think your list (besides SK) is a list of US success then I just don't know what to say. The poor opinion of these wars is due to how badly they went but then you say that they were massive successes. You have this optimism for future wars despite every previous war being messy and horrible, I don't think it comes from analysis of history, it's just wishful thinking? Oh well, I think it is clear where the disagreement is and clear enough that we won't progress from here. If an Iran-US war occurs, I'll hope it goes as you say.
Yeah, @Ciceronianus the White @Hanover, what do you think? Lawyer material. :snicker:
Well, he's totally kicking your ass. Isn't that what lawyers are supposed to do?
95% of the time, Iraq war critics will list all the price tags for the war, conclude those prices were too high, and base their argument on that judgment. They may be factually correct in listing the price tags for the war, but it's still sloppy reasoning.
The appropriate calculation is to compare the price tags of the Iraq war to the price tags of doing nothing.
As example, if an escalating nuclear arms race between Iraq and Iran had been the price tag for doing nothing, are we willing to pay that price? A million people were killed in the Iran/Iraq war without any nukes involved.
I believe such sloppy reasoning occurs because critics of the war are comparing the horrors of the invasion and occupation to a mythical imaginary state of peace which never existed. The critics had no interest at all in the Iraqi people until the Americans got involved so evidence like the Iran/Iraq war and Saddam's ruthless oppression are obscure to them.
I'm sorry, you're totally out of your depth here, though your enthusiasm is applauded.
You're subscribing to might is right but only if you're a certain type of country. We're back at selective justice, which is no justice at all.
Quoting Paul Edwards
We already established you shouldn't commit a crime to prevent a crime. If starting a war is a crime, even though it prevents another crime, it is still a crime and therefore can never be just. That's a matter of definition. A purely consequentialist approach necessarily fails, as was already illustrated several posts ago because you can't tell the difference between a crime and a just action without taking into account intent (which is why proving intent in criminal law is important).
Quoting Paul Edwards
Of course there was justification. You just happen to disagree with it but it's exactly the same hubristic bullshit you're peddling now. The USSR thought they were bettering the world by installing communist regimes through violence. You believe installing liberal democracies through violence betters the world. Welcome to the world of aggressors.
Any way, for what it's worth the Iraqi war was unjust because:
1. The US has subscribed to the UN system and therefore cannot declare a war of aggression single-handedly unless it was in defence of an immediate threat to itself or an ally, (in other words; if you agree another authority makes these decisions, you abide by that: pacta sunt servanda);
2. There was no right intention, the grounds for war were a lie, probably hiding other intentions but at no point was it to prevent the cutting of tongues or rape;
3. There was no just cause (please note that if preventing rape and torture would be a just cause then on that basis we can invade the US as well);
4. It wasn't a last resort because it was already proved no WMDs existed;
5. It fails because it was disproportional, causing more deaths in a timespan of 3 years than Saddam murdered during 24 years in power.
I choose the later. You can declare victory if you want. Who cares? Not me.
Sorry, I'm not sure just what you mean. I'm something of a legal positivist, or realist, and think morality and the law are different things. My knowledge of international law is very limited.
I'd love to weigh in to this decades old debate of whether Bush lied or if he were just profoundly mistaken, but I don't think I can read these 8 pages of comments (so far) and get really up to speed with the subtleties of this debate.
Generally, I think we can all agree that GW's legacy would be redefined from what it is today had there been WMD found in Iraq. He'd be seen as a Rambo like character who cut through the international bureaucracy and inaction and saved the world from mass death, a real life dragon slayer. Instead, he has to justify whether he's violated international law in waging this war and then he has to present the difficult argument of "well, even though my reasons were wrong, my result was good." I suppose some really bad guys got a stake through their heart, some average citizens were freed from a life under Hussein that was worse than the turmoil introduced by the war, but whether the world is an overall better place because of the war requires we impose all sorts of idiosyncratic values on an entirely foreign people we spend very little of our time thinking about.
The truth is that if the war were able to be judged a complete debacle from the most objective of standards, I don't think that would move the meter much as far as US sentiment goes. As long as the US can convince itself that it relied upon information it had good reason to believe accurate, and as long as it can convince itself that it's intentions were righteous, the war was just.
And this isn't meant to be overly condemning of the US. This whole event occurred at the heels of 9/11, the US was a powder keg waiting to explode, and we had a satanic character mocking the US and its inspectors, pretending to possess WMD. The ineptitude of Bush was child's play when compared to Hussein, and I have no difficulty heaping the lion's share of blame upon Hussein.
I think the Iraq war in the aftermath of 9/11 was understandable but fundamentally wrong. Aside from the fact that the relationship between 9/11 and Iraq was very tenuous (practically non-existent) I was against it then, recognising the lies about WMDs in light of Hans Blix' reports at the time. Even so, if all the terrorists had come from Iraq, you can still wonder whether a war against Iraq would be justified if the terrorists weren't state sponsored. And that opens up the question as to how to deal with non-state sponsored terrorists in the first place. War seems inappropriate but Eichmann type abductions to have them stand trial would be something I would support. Extra-judicial killings in foreign countries like Bin Laden are wrong even if I didn't shed a tear because there the proof was pretty conclusive. But if you accept it there then next time we do it when the proof isn't that clear. Due process is valuable.
The unfunny thing with the Iraq war was that the US intelligence apparatus decided to believe Saddam at his word because he was of course trying to convince people he did have WMDs for fear of interventions by foreign countries and particularly Iran.
I meant to say I had nothing I could contribute as a lawyer, being largely ignorant of international law. But I think it clear that if one nation freely enters into a treaty, it should be bound by it. It should decline to enter into a treaty if it intends to disregard it whenever it believes it's in its interest to do so.
Apart from any legal issue, I think the U.S. shouldn't act as or consider itself the world's police and insert itself, unasked, into any conflict or state except in extreme circumstances. Clearly, we have trouble enough trying to police ourselves. We have neither the resources nor, I think, the will to engage in nation-building. I suppose, though, we could still "drop the Big One" as Randy Newman sang in the hope that "every city, the whole world round, would just be another American town." Yes, "how peaceful it would be--we'll set everybody free."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_LDeUEiWY
Seems that you have no military training, because this is again nonsense.
Even the air campaign of Desert Storm could not give the final blow to a conventional army deployed on an absolutely flat desert that used very traditional strategy and tactics in it's deployment. No, you needed those 100 hours of the spear of the US Cold War army and it's allies to destroy the Iraqi forces.
Even Rumsfeld didn't believe that US air power alone would do it, even if he had widely erroneous ideas of how little troops you need to invade and occupy a country. (Or how cheap it would be.)
Quoting Paul Edwards
Well, I hope that Australian politicians will not listen to your politico-military strategy, because it's a disaster waiting to happen. Your reasoning is perhaps a direct result of assuming war being as the one sided as it has been with the US engaging dirt poor Third World countries in it's war on terror.
Again, this is why we need to do it. Even with the result of air-alone in Afghanistan and Libya, you're still disputing what is possible. During the 2003 Iraq war, some Iraqi generals turned over their bases to the coalition. Mostly the enemy deserted though. Either way, all you need to do is take over a small area and call for volunteers. There were long queues of Iraqis willing to join the new Iraqi security forces. We know that now, but we didn't know that for sure then. These volunteers can be armed, given air support, and they can do the rest of the job.
There was a reason we didn't use that strategy in 2003. Partly because we couldn't guarantee long lines of volunteers when Sistani could well have declared a jihad instead.
He didn't have erroneous ideas. You're totally ignoring the fact that we got what we want with the troops actually used. And we have succeeded in lowering the barrier to war. Instead of having to convince people to pony up the cash for a 500,000-man invasion force like Desert Storm, we can instead point to Libya done purely from the air, or Afghanistan where the initial defeat was done purely from the air, or 2003 Iraq done with a relatively small force.
These wars of liberation require a new calculus compared to wars of conquest.
We already live in an unjust world. We're not breaking a just system. We're in the fortunate position where the strongest country in the world is a liberal democracy, and it has powerful NATO allies that are also liberal democracies. We have the ability to pounce, and that's exactly what we should be doing. We have the ability to make the world a more just place. Our politicians shouldn't say that out loud though. They should instead come up with some other bullshit reason for invading "just one more country". Because that is the strategic thing for our leaders to be doing. We don't want a "dictator alliance" to challenge NATO.
No, that is not my position. If you need to jaywalk in order to stop a rape in progress, then by all means jaywalk. It depends on exactly what the circumstances are.
I don't consider starting a war to be a crime. I consider Saddam ordering rape and mutilation to be a crime.
You're still not getting it. A good action does not require justification as far as intent is concerned. Only bad actions require justification. You need to update whatever textbook you are reading with this apparently new information.
Yes, this is exactly correct. You just don't trust your own judgement that liberal democracies are true freedom, unlike communist slavery. So you're giving them moral equivalence. We spent an enormous amount of effort countering the "communism = freedom" brigade. Now we're in an enviable position able to finish off the job that our ancestors spent decades or even centuries doing. We should pounce. But in a cunning way that makes it as easy as possible for us by avoiding a "dictator alliance".
Not anymore apparently when it no longer suits you. I suggest you read our exchanges and figure out your inconsistenties.
Again, if you think the UN creates a pact that protects Saddam's "right" to rape and mutilate, you should ignore that law for now, and do your best to get it changed. What it needs to be changed to is "all countries should be liberal democracies to be members of the UN, and any liberal democracy can liberate a dictatorship". Now you need to come up with a plan on how to make that change official. Good luck.
YOU should have been doing it to prevent cutting of tongues and rape, even if you are SURE that the US is not doing it for those reasons. Why don't you read Bush's "State of the Union" address in 2003 where he specifically says that Saddam was raping women, and if that's not evil then evil has no meaning?
No, rape and torture are already illegal in the US, and if you have evidence of either, you can report it to the US police and US media and it will be actioned in accordance with the limits of the US democracy. That's a far cry from Saddam LEGALLY chopping out people's tongues.
No such proof existed (I was fooled by Saddam's cagey attitude myself), nor does war need to be a last resort. It's just a resort. A tool. To be used whenever you've got your ducks in a row.
The actual 3.5 week war caused hardly any deaths. Subsequent deaths by terrorists against the new democratic state are on them, not the US.
BTW, the Russians lost 20 million keeping the Nazis at bay, and didn't even get freedom at the end of it. What is a fair price that Iraqis should pay for freedom?
Yes, exactly. A good start would be to stop dictators from teaching children that the West is evil. Ultimately we need every country to be a clone of Australia, where a nation (both government and people) volunteers to spend its blood and treasure on *protecting* America, instead of *harming* America.
That still leaves the problem of individual Australian terrorists, but they are already being chased down to the best of the government's ability. And individual Australians have difficulty trying to create a group of terrorists. It's not like Afghanistan 2001 where they had a place to go to get trained.
It is insufficient for you to simply say "there were no WMD, so the war was wrong". You also need to address the response to 9/11. You also need to address the human rights abuses. Geostrategy is just one of the 3 reasons (which I provided a link to already).
Translated: You ran out of arguments. Not surprising. You have a fundamentally untenable position. You need to support rape and mutilation to oppose the liberation of Iraq.
My optimism is based on the fact that huge numbers of people living in dictators want to be free. That's the basis for a controlled uprising. Something similar to Afghanistan and Libya. Regardless of what percentage of the population that is, those are my allies. I wish to support them the same as I would hope they would support me if the tables were turned.
It needs to be done regardless, as part of the response to 9/11. Also for geostrategic reasons we should be taking down hostile dictators with an official policy of "Death to USA".
If it is indeed tumultuous, that is a measure of the Iranian people themselves, it's not the fault of the US. In Tunisia and Panama we didn't see a tumultuous situation.
Vietnam was very tough because we were fighting an appealing ideology that people were dumb enough to believe. After the 3.5-week war in Iraq we were fighting a large number of religious bigots.
In Iraq the people did rise up, just as they rose up in 1991. But this time it was a controlled uprising, which you could see by looking at the long queues to join the new Iraqi security forces. Even when those queues were repeatedly bombed, ie people were being killed before they even received their first paycheck, the people lined up again and again and again.
It was breathtaking.
The fact that these wars are poorly-understood by the public is something that needs to be addressed. But before informing the public, we need to win the intellectual debate. ie you.
The problem I see is that you're unwilling to accept your own eyes. Don't trust these "organizations". They're probably all fronts for the communists. We had the same thing with feminist groups. Not one of them was saying "Hey, Iraqi women are being raped by their own government. Why aren't we taking action?".
When the number of political parties changes from 1 to 300+, I expect any democracy index to see a MASSIVE spike. If it doesn't happen, don't trust them.
Libya was the future war. It was so damn easy.
Yes, good point. I'm not sure how we can reconcile this. We need another 20 liberations before we can agree on an average and standard deviation. But it first requires you to believe your own eyes instead of what the media tells you. 1 vs 300+ is a MASSIVE difference. Iraq is one of the most fascinating democracies on the entire planet.
YOU should have supported it for the purpose of liberation, if nothing else.
The US doesn't speak with one voice. And there are strategic reasons why WMD was touted as the main reason. But it's easy enough to see where Bush said "I believe God wants everyone to be free" or where he wrote "Let freedom reign" to see what was in his heart.
Yes, the US is a very generous country. Their response to 9/11 wasn't to fire off nukes at random hostile governments, but to liberate millions of people from state-slavery. The UK was very generous too, roughly matching the US on a per capita basis. Australia was well behind, only contributing 1/7 of what the US/UK contributed, and pulling out earlier than both of them. A damn shame we couldn't be last out.
Not many lives were lost in the initial invasion, which is ALL YOU NEED.
That was a good thing. It made the 3.5 week war easier and cheaper.
And now is the time to repair it, starting with you.
Quite frankly, it shouldn't be the US leading this. Someone like the Philippines should step up to the plate and say "we stand for freedom". No-one's going to accuse the Philippines of imperialism. Or at least Australia should be doing this. The world is a disgrace that everything is left to the US or nothing is done. Although I guess Senegal did liberate Gambia. But that's about it.
If the US, or preferably NATO, stays engaged, making sure the Iraqi security forces are professional, then I simply don't see how anything can go wrong. No-one can defeat NATO-backed forces. If you look at the protests in the US (larger than Iraq) are you going to say the US is not far from anarchy, it's a place of instability and it's very existence is under threat? It's just a consequence of freedom. Freedom is messy and noisy.
I'm not ONLY focused on that. But it's a great starting point and needs to be won in the intellectual realm.
I find it really hard to see how westerners like Australians can support indefinite institutionalized rape and tongue-cutting.
Wars are normally judged by how many of your own soldiers are killed to achieve the objective, not how many enemy civilians were killed. By the traditional measure, Saddam was defeated in 3.5 weeks, for a cost of 100 US lives, the majority of which were friendly fire I believe. Contrast this to 3000 dead on 9/11.
What was horrible was institutionalized rape and tongue-chopping under Saddam.
War and democracy are both messy, but they have their place.
Sometimes we get the result we want without a single bomb being dropped. Like Tunisia and Sudan. Sometimes we get what we want (Gaddafi deposed) by dropping some bombs for zero US lives lost. It's not wishful thinking, it's maths.
Afghanistan was close to 0 lives lost for the initial battlefield defeat too. The Taliban were deposed. The Northern Alliance were anti-Taliban and anti-Al Qaeda, exactly as we wanted. We hung around because we had EVEN MORE objectives we wanted to achieve. But that was such a ridiculously good START.
Sure.
Thankyou. I'm actually a computer programmer, so I'm used to dealing with logic. I'm also used to getting a logical response. :-)
Let's see. :-)
The US has had a democracy for 200 years and the outcome is still unknown. I couldn't have predicted that the US people would support someone like Trump who threatens a fellow liberal democracy (Iraq) with sanctions if they don't want the US to remain. I couldn't have predicted that a US president would say that we're only in Syria to protect the oil (whatever that even means, and I'd feel real shitty as a US soldier if that was the motive). I couldn't have predicted that the US would betray Russia by recognizing Kosovo.
Sure. The goal here is to get the intellectuals to accept that with close to 0 US casualties, there is no urgency to leave Afghanistan. Just like there is no urgency to leave Japan after 70 years. Once the intellectual argument is won, we can try to educate the US population. Perhaps show them video of the Taliban hitting women with sticks and say "is this what you want?".
Libya was done. Syria was half-done. Iran should be done too. Anyway, like I said, it's a two-step process. First we need to win the intellectual argument, then we need to explain it to the western population.
I am hoping that Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons will be used as an excuse to liberate Iran. And that when the decision is made that nuclear weapons justify war, that a pure liberation is done in the form that I asked for.
We need to get the Middle East caught up, as part of the response to 9/11. And because 9/11 was done by non-state actors, we need a total war where every single civilians is a potential threat.
Inaction could lead to WW3 too. If Iran fires a nuke at Los Angeles, how do you plan to respond to that? Nuke Tehran? As far as I am aware, most people in Tehran hate their dictator even more than you do. They are actually allies of ours. Do you intend to incinerate our allies? If you have no good option to respond to a nuclear attack then "RESPOND" IN ADVANCE!
Or it could take a few hours. Note that Libya was done in less than a year. And yes, in Libya a civil war started some time later, but that civil war could easily be ended by the US providing air support to one side or the other. Both sides intend to restore democracy.
If we didn't have the actual result (less than a year) from Libya, you probably would have been quoting a generation for Libya too.
And the real figure you should be quoting for Afghanistan is 2 months, and Iraq 3.5 weeks. After that all we need to do is add air support (indefinitely) to whichever side we like.
But there is a huge difference between being invaded by a dictator and being liberated by a coalition of democracies. I'm pretty sure the Iranians are smart enough to tell the difference.
Iran has a conscript army meaning that the soldiers are like the people, and the people hate their dictator. I fully expect the Iranian military to rise up against their dictator as soon as it is safe for them to do so. We'll never know until we TRY. This is a gap in our military knowledge, and we need to try it just for this reason alone (understanding warfare). Because the future of the US military depends on understanding whether wars of liberation are possible or not.
Any of Iran's military that chooses to attack the US needs to be destroyed. Yes, we need a war. An air war.
We need to actually try it and see.
Sure. I'm here for debate. Thanks.
By the way. The above is exactly the same thing that Iranian revolutionaries face, and also what anyone attempting to stage a military coup faces.
If it is even potentially difficult for the US military to do it, why would you expect unarmed Iranian civilians to be able to do it?
They need help. Asking them to revolt against a cruel dictator prepared to use automatic weapons is just a blood-sport.
And even if they were successful, after a new government was installed they'd be in the exact same position as if the US military had liberated them. If it's going to take a generation for them to work out their problems, it has to be done. Or are you saying it is wrong for the revolutionaries to revolt because of the unstable situation they will allegedly be in for a generation?
Actually, it was France who stepped up as the diplomatic front of the Libyan liberation, with the US just quietly providing muscle. And that's how it should be. One day I hope France will be replaced by Tunisia or Iraq, and we can have an Arab Muslim country leading the free world into battle.
What are you talking about?
Afghanistan was never an air-alone war. In fact neither was even the intervention in the Yugoslav war as US forces and NATO ground forces were deployed their. And what success is Libya, a country torn still in civil war with two opposing governments and various countries (some of whom should be US allies) backing their sides? Libya is a case example of how you cannot control everything from the air: you can assist one side, but there stops your influence to what is happening on the ground. End result: you have no control what is happening, or you can get attacked as the US was in Benghazi.
Quoting Paul Edwards
And here one of the biggest errors was made. Paul Bremer decided to abolish the Iraqi Army with his infamous Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2: what better choice than to make hundreds of thousands of military trained men unemployed. Before US general Jay Garner, a professional soldier, had made several plans what to do with the large Iraqi military, yet then this clueless ideologue Bremer comes to the scene and makes one of the worst decisions ever that directly contributed to the insurgency starting.
Quoting Paul Edwards
This is totally delusional.
Libya is now totally unstable with the sporadic fighting going on. The Balkans isn't similar. The ex-Yugoslavia is peace and the civil war is thankfully history. That was done both with air AND ground forces and a sound plan with the international community engaging in this. Libya was just an erratic response in which the US didn't take charge leading to the fiasco it is now. The war in Afghanistan is still going on as also there was no good plan.
How you make Libya and Afghanistan a success story while the liberation of Kuwait (a success) is somehow seen as bad I don't understand at all. Rumsfeld was delusional and should have been sacked years earlier.
In future wars of liberation, the main thing we need to do is defeat the fielded forces so that revolutionaries can rise up (instead of expecting them to do that themselves as a blood-sport). In Afghanistan the fielded forces were the Taliban. The Taliban was dislodged from Kabul in about 2 months, with the US just providing air support and special forces.
THAT is the model we need for all future wars. Air power and special forces. We no longer need large standing armies because we are not trying to conquer the people. We're just trying to liberate them.
The ground forces weren't actually used. The Yugoslav wars were another example of air-alone.
You're misreading Libya. In Libya we wanted to topple Gaddafi, and we did, in less than a year, purely from the air.
Yes, after some time a civil war occurred, but that's not on us. AND we can end that civil war any time we want simply by providing air support to either side.
No, it wasn't an error. With the information available at the time, ie specifically MANY (racist) people insisting it was genetically impossible for Arab Muslims to handle democracy, democracy needs to come from within, democracy can't be imposed by force of arms, we didn't know whether we could stand up democracy or not. We needed to set up democratic institutions and then SEE WHAT HAPPENS. Those democratic institutions include professional security forces that PROTECT human rights rather than violate them. How were we supposed to do that when the Iraqi people have only ever known security forces that oppress them? We needed to make the Iraqi people believe, truly believe (because it was true) that these security forces are totally different from the old ones. We had to start from scratch.
That's just one factor. The other thing we needed to know, in response to 9/11, is what values Arab Muslims had internalized. Was Islam a wonderful religion that made good citizens when there was no force keeping them in line?
Now that we have proven that we can install a democracy in an Arab Muslim country by force of arms, there is no need to disband the old security forces. Future wars will be a cakewalk because of this.
The actual wars to dislodge the Serbs were done entirely from the air.
In Libya we are showing what is possible if you just do the air war and then withdraw that air support immediately once the government is defeated. The Libyans will sort out their mess in due course, but you may not believe that until it actually happens. That's why it needs to be done. Both sides want democracy so they should be able to sort out their differences in time. Once again we are proving a different form of what "air alone" can achieve.
Libya was done with UN permission. We're seeing what happens when the UN instead of the US is in charge. It's a good piece of data to extract.
There was an excellent plan. Help the Northern Alliance to victory from the air. Then replace the Northern Alliance with a democracy, something the racists, again, said was genetically impossible and pointed to the fact that there had never been democracy there, which was true.
Yes, the Taliban think they can defeat a modern military (learning the wrong lesson from Vietnam) so they're still fighting. But they have no chance of militarily defeating the government forces. The enemy gets a vote in how long they remain at war.
I didn't say that Kuwait was bad, I'm just saying that the barrier to Kuwait-style wars is too high. If everything is going to be a Kuwait, we will never get permission to have a war of liberation. But if the war of liberation is a cross between Afghanistan and Libya, or perhaps Panama, or perhaps Haiti, then the barrier is extremely low. The US public doesn't really mind bombing dictators from the air for 0 US losses.
I really want western militaries to be reduced to air power, so that the money can be spent on other things like medical research. But before we can do that, we need to defeat all of our enemies. The sooner we do that, the better.
But we're STILL debating whether wars of liberation can be done from the air. So what we need is another 20 liberations under our belt so that you can see for yourself what is possible. The way I envisage it is special forces and helicopters take over a stadium and call for revolutionaries to come to the stadium to be armed. And at the same time call on the military to defect. We know from Iraq that SOME Iraqis defected, but most deserted, and some fought. So there's a mixed bag there. We really do need more data on this.
If Libya hadn't had a civil war (which was largely bad luck for us), would you be convinced that wars can be won from the air alone? If we do 20 liberations, hopefully one of them won't have a civil war (like Tunisia) and we can point to that and say if we have high quality people, air power is enough. And if we don't have high quality people, that's on them. And as part of the response to 9/11 we need to convert low quality people to high quality people anyway. Leaving people languishing under dictators is no longer acceptable. We need free, high quality (ie reformed) people worldwide.
You might like to read my analysis of Afghan and Iraq wars where every single action the US did was exactly what I wanted myself. Whether that was for the same or different reasons I have no idea. But US soldiers couldn't understand why they were asked to withdraw from Fallujah and (separately) let Sadr escape. But both of those things were cunning moves.
BTW, if Sistani had rejected the existence of the old Iraqi army as being an oppressive force, and used the opportunity to call for a Shiite jihad against the occupying force and its oppressive old army, you would instead be on this forum today saying how it was "obvious" that keeping the old army that was responsible for the slaughter of so many Shiites in 1991 was a terrible mistake, and Garner should have been sacked.
If in a future liberation we keep the old army and do in fact get a jihad declared against us, it's not so important anymore. We already know that every race/religion in the world can handle democracy, so it's just a matter of apologizing and disbanding the old military or whatever else the majority of the population want from us.
Ground forces were still needed. Please inform yourself of actual events. IFOR was a 60 000 strong NATO force deployed into Bosnia.
In the war in Kosovo KFOR went into the troubled small territory with 3500 strong force and actually had a near incident with Russian peacekeepers. In fact the Serbian losses weren't so big from the bombing either in Bosnia and Kosovo: from Kosovo the Serbs withdrew substantial amount of forces (roughly 40 000), hence they were not destroyed altogether. It's totally understandable as the mountainous region makes it harder to find targets even now and especially in the late 1990's.
British NATO troops head to head with Russian paratroopers in Kosovo. So in real life obviously not everything happened just from the air:
The simple fact is that you simply need boots on the ground. In Libya there wasn't any. It doesn't mean that the forces have to fight... the basic objective is not to have them fight, actually. If you are so keen to really build peace and democracy.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Again wrong. Read the UN articles.
Quoting Paul Edwards
Oh that's your view? I thought you had in mind bringing peace and democracy, but really seem's that isn't the intent at all. Just kill the bad guy(s). Anything else that happens afterward isn't on us.
Well, you are just promoting the modern day version gunboat diplomacy, literally. Yes, Western ironclads were quite able to lob shells to coastal cities with impunity from the sea without any danger to themselves. If there's a problem, we'll just bomb someone, something and that will take care of everything.
After the war was already won from the air. That's why they faced no opposition.
You're still disputing what can be done from the air. That's why we need to do more air-only liberations. Ideally we want to reach the point where we can just fly a single drone over Venezuela/Iran and the military starts defecting en-masse now that they know they have a chance to make a difference.
I have multiple objectives, not just one. The end state in Libya (and the world) is to have a secular capitalist liberal democracy. But we're not at the stage where we can ram secular, capitalist, liberal down people's throats, so I'm just angling for democracy in the first round.
And the Libyans did in fact vote. They managed to stuff things up after the second vote.
I fully expect the Libyans to work things out themselves, so that we can at least prove "air alone works, if you don't mind the difficulty the locals have afterwards". Libya shows what happens with the lightest possible touch. It would have been great if we had gone into Tunisia first, which apparently has higher quality people, so you can get your example of "air alone works". But since you're not accepting Libya, we need to try again, preferably on Iran. Even if it works in Iran to your satisfaction, you may dismiss that data point as an exception that can't be repeated.
We really need to reach consensus on air wars so that we can stand down our expensive standing armies and reconfigure to "air liberation wars only".
No more wars of conquest. No more ground troops. No more nation-building.
I find myself conflicted in this thread. I applaud Paul's moral vision, which I see as being dead on, and very well articulated.
The tactics being suggested for the implementation of that moral vision seem unsophisticated. As example...
Yes, we had good intentions in Afghanistan, and conducted a brilliantly efficient dethroning of the Taliban. But 20 years later the Taliban has succeeded in exhausting us, and we are now retreating with our tail between our legs, just as happened to the Soviets. The Taliban are talking peace only to give us a face saving way to abandon the Afghan government.
Having defeated the world's two greatest superpowers, there is little chance the Afghan fundies will now stop short of their goals.
With the benefit of hindsight a better plan would have probably been to set up bases in northern Afghanistan from which we relentlessly killed terrorists, skipping the part about rebuilding the country, which we have proven ourselves incapable of.
The big picture is that the real threat is not all these little countries, but Russia and China. And they would like nothing better than to see us bleed ourselves to death in an endless series of inconclusive contests which alienate us from our allies, and our own fellow citizens.
There is a stalemate while we wait for the Afghan military to come up to speed. Their army was built from the ground up. It's not a problem unless you make it a problem. There are close to 0 US deaths.
Also note that the Soviets didn't retreat with their tails between their legs. That's American propaganda. The Soviets left a communist dictatorship that was perfectly capable of seeing off any challengers. And they did so for several years. All they needed was money to sustain the fight. It was only when Yeltsin cut off the money that there were defections and defeat.
South Vietnam similarly had funding/weapons cut off.
The trouble is that with the whole world (except me and my Russian friend) believing that myth (that Afghans can defeat superpowers), the Taliban are continuing to try to defeat a modern military.
Do you think you could defeat an enemy that has total air supremacy and tanks? What do you think a US general would tell you about that plan? Do you think we spend enormous amounts of money on aircraft when they are totally unnecessary?
We want to stand up a self-maintaining democracy there. Not just there, but everywhere. We can't stand down our large militaries until we have worldwide secular capitalist liberal democracy. A self-sustaining solution that doesn't need the US to keep enemies in check for eternity. Wall-to-wall allies instead. Many (racist) people insisted that it was impossible to stand up a democracy in Afghanistan because the Afghans had no history of democracy, and anyhow, you can't install a democracy by force of arms, and democracy needs to come from within. We needed to prove that theory wrong, and we have. Via careful nation-building. The pain is all over. No more nation-building needs to be done. We already know that every culture can cope with democracy, that it can be installed by force of arms, and can be given externally.
Your allies don't speak with one voice. And Iraq and Afghanistan are now allies, and support the new democratic systems the US installed. Surely you can see that the more allies we have, the more we are in a position to squeeze China et al? We can't directly take on China, but we can topple all their friendly dictators and bring them over to our side. All self-sustained. We don't need to force these people to be our allies, they innately choose to ally with the free world. We can withdraw all our troops and they'll still be allied.
Having said all that, if you really want to leave Afghanistan, you can. The new Afghan military cannot be defeated by goons. You just need to continue supplying them with weapons and money, or have allies like Europe who will do that.
2) Fundies fight Soviets
3) Soviets leave
4) Fundies take power in Afghanistan
5) Victory for fundies
------------------
The Afghan government can not defeat fundies even while allied with the world's leading superpower, America, who has troops on the ground for 20 years.
America removes her troops.
What we're seeing now is the "Vietnamization" of the Afghan conflict. Face saving negotiations with the enemy, leading to our retreat, while pledging ongoing support. Government collapses. Enemy wins.
Nobody needed to "stand up" the Taliban. They stood themselves up, and sustained their assault without much assistance from outside powers. The Afghan government needs "standing up" because they don't want freedom as much as the Taliban wants to dominate.
What Vietnam should have taught us is that whoever wants victory the most is usually who wins.
Yes. Because your simplistic ideas aren't based on the real World. It's more to the level of bar room talk where World problems are solved by just bombing the stupid places into submission. And we could have a talk about the pro's and con's about air power, but I think this isn't something you know very well.
You simply have to understand that an occupying force, be it peacekeepers or a peace enforcement force is very essential to pacify the situation if and when it cannot be done by the former sides. You were talking about spreading democracy and helping other countries, so the discussion ought to be more specific than thinking that everything is solved, if you just kill the dictator. Eyes and boots on the ground simply matter. Even if both sides do control their forces and are willing not to engage the other one, even a small force of military observers on the ground works far better than satellite pictures. That Bosnia, which is still divided to Republika Srpska and to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is peaceful came about with the large NATO ground force to stop the fighting. And in this case your logic of just assisting one party with air power would lead simply to ethnic cleansing of Serbs out from Bosnia Herzegovina, so your ideas use of air power simply don't work.
One of the biggest inabilities of the US and the West in general is to look at the examples of how truly lasting peace has been made in the past. Especially the US is absolutely
Let's take the case of the Second Boer War. That war didn't go so well for the British, but in the end they could get a peace negotiation underway after a three year war. What they could do (after putting the Boer people in concentration camps where 20 000 died) was to get a lasting peace with the Boers. And what was their solution? The Boer peace negotiators, Botha and Smuts, were respected and made part of the new union of South Africa. That you have former guerilla leaders that you fought then made high ranking officers and statesmen in your Commonwealth tells quite how the British could handle these things.
(Winston Churchill with Jan Smuts, a Boer guerilla leader turned statesman who was the second prime minister of South Africa and a field marshal. The two first met as Churchill was a prisoner of war of the Boers and Smuts his interrogator.)
The Americans and the present Western attitudes aren't like this. The hubris and the moralistic ideology simply defines those who oppose the US in conflicts as vile terrorists with dubious morals, hence there is not any way similar peace with the enemy could be found.
What the Libyan example seems to illustrate is that while it is indeed possible to depose the dictator from air, that doesn't automatically lead to democracy.
Let's assume we could take out the entire Iranian leadership with precision air strikes. I doubt that's possible, but let's assume it is for now. What happens next?
The mullahs are not the only Iranians who'd like to be in charge. There are many other folks who would like to run the show, and it's likely they begin fighting each other, just as has happened in Libya. Some of those forces would be democratic, but such forces often don't win because they aren't ruthless or organized enough. See the Syrian civil war for example. We could then shift from bombing the mullahs to bombing other bad guys, but at some point so many bombs have been dropped that we lose support of the population.
My suggestion is that we recognize the moral superiority of Paul's freedom philosophy, and then reach for his goals with more sophisticated 21st century kind of tactics.
As example, notice how the Russians are not confronting us militarily but are instead working to undermine our faith in our own institutions. Notice how the Chinese are not confronting us militarily but are instead patiently playing the long game of dominating us economically. Even Bin Laden's attack was not military but psychological warfare.
How about developing methods that would allow us to talk directly to the Iranian people in a manner that couldn't be blocked by the mullahs?
How about looking for ways to funnel money directly to the Iranian people in a manner that couldn't be hijacked by the mullahs? You like air power? Ok, how about 1,000 drones flying over Tehran raining money down everywhere all over the city?
How about offering any Iranian who can get here and pass a background check American citizenship?
How about so infecting the computers used by the regime that they never really know who exactly it is that they are communicating with?
How about taking over their power grid and turning it off for a few minutes every day just to remind everyone that we can?
These ideas came to me as fast as I can type. If the full resources of the federal government were engaged in such creativity I'm sure the list of things we can do to undermine the Iranian regime, short of war, are probably endless.
The hubris is a weakness, the moralistic ideology a strength.
Paul has the morality right, and other posters see the weaknesses in his tactics. The meeting ground is for other posters to drop their fantasy moral superiority poses, and for Paul to take a more open minded look at alternate tactics.
None of us want to see psychopaths machine gunning innocent people down in the streets. We are united in that. So let's focus on how we can help prevent such horrors in the most intelligent manner possible.
Fight the psychopaths. Not each other.
The way to do it is to portray them as psychopaths gunning down innocent people. And once you have done that, no way then to start treating him as a respectable human being. Clearly the moral justification is an inherent part of war propaganda.
They ARE psychopaths gunning down innocent people you nimrod. I stand with Paul in rejecting all such pseudo intellectual supposedly sophisticated fantasy moral superiority psycho-babble. All of that is childlike nonsense.
Debates regarding tactics for defeating the psychopaths can be reasonable. I've attempted to constructively contribute to such a debate above.
And I'm getting tired of the utter military ignorance and naive thinking especially from Paul Edwards on military matters. I have had to correct his errors in history/military history too many times.
If there's no military understanding, no military history understanding and quaint historical understanding, there's not much to say. Other than Oh, air war is neat, so let's do everything from there. Hardly a starting point to discuss the many aspects of modern interventions, because with you it's just "killing the bad guys". Yeah, just go and kill the bad guys.
Quoting Hippyhead
To debate those tactics one needs knowledge about modern warfare, politics and the regional history.
This thread just reminds me how ignorant people were of the Iraqi war when it was in the media focus and how ignorant they still are.
My objection to most Iraq war critics is that they typically get really confused and think that one of doctors attempting to treat the illness is the disease. And so for example we see endless bile aimed at Bush, and nary a word said against Saddam. A typical post from an Iraq war critic goes something like this...
A reasonable critique might have suggested that a full blown invasion and occupation was an excessive treatment for the disease, so instead let's fire cruise missiles at Saddam and his buddies until we finally hit them personally and remove them from the planet. Or perhaps some other alternative to invasion.
And maybe the correct judgment will be that we can't really do anything about a particular despot at this moment in time, North Korea for example. That could be a reasonable conclusion, so long as we remain clear minded about what the North Korean regime really is, a gang of murderous thugs who are raping the North Korean people while stealing their freedom. That's not propaganda, that's just an accurate description of what's happening.
All these despots are just criminal gangs who are smart enough to steal entire countries instead of just robbing banks. Why worry about the cops when you can be the cops?
Well, I've tried to say Paul (and you) just what the US did wrong, but from your 'clear minded moral vision' similar to a view from an ivory tower you simply dismiss any critique. Your 'moral vision' turns into blinders when we talk about the actual stuff of what went wrong. Yes, one has to have a moral vision, but then the part "how to get there" and "do more good than bad" are things to take into consideration. Let's not forget that the invasion and following war cost at least over hundred thousand deaths, but some estimates put the figure to near one milion. That ought to weigh a bit in your moral vision.
So Iraq.
Starting from reality that the argument was a) Saddam Hussein was a threat because of WMD's and b) his alleged links with Al Qaeda and that solely Paul's argument would not have gotten the US to invade one Middle Eastern country without reasons a) and b). Or do you dispute this?
Then for those details. Let's just start from the beginning:
1. The difficulty of invading Iraq and toppling Hussein is explained perfectly by Dick Cheney in 1994 with his argumentation. Cheney gavethe following and understandable reason how Iraq would become a quagmire that would (and did) happen ten years later.
Paul Edwards gave this answer, which doesn't at all even focus on Iraq and doesn't at all respond to what Cheney says:
Quoting Paul Edwards
The USSR was in no condition to respond to this AND Iraq isn't it's "near abroad", so this is simply false. And an answer a neocon would give. The real reasons were given by Cheney.
I'll repost it below.
Now, to start the discussion (again): What is in your view wrong in Cheney's argumentation here?
In fact Saudi Arabia warned older Bush that (as Cheney says) that they and the GCC wouldn't go and invade a fellow Arab country and that this would be highly destabilizing for the region and likely would in the end benefit just Iran (which has happened). Then older Bush listened to his Saudi friends.
That is technically true, but obscures the fact that the war was won by Yeltsin being against communist dictatorships.
What Vietnam *should* have taught us is that TANKS WORK. In 1975, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam with 2 armored columns and won.
Everyone has learnt the wrong lessons from Vietnam and Afghanistan, and the record needs to be cleared up now that it is important to do so.
Note that Vietnam has a capitalist economy now. So as far as the war to defeat communism is concerned, the US won in Vietnam too.
There is no reason for a government (a democratically-elected government) to collapse. Just keep funding them, or make sure someone else is funding them.
That is not true. The Afghan president said in one interview that he would fight for generations if need be. They're not going to surrender to a bunch of terrorists.
Ok, this I can agree with. And it's the same deal with a revolution. So many revolutions replace one dictator with another, as happened in Iran for that matter.
Does that mean revolutions are wrong? If not, wars of liberation are also not wrong. But the result from Libya was actually very good. Even without bombing or ground troops, the revolutionaries adopted democracy. They had 2 elections. Yes, they had problems after that, but since both sides in the civil war support democracy, I fully expect a return to democracy. And we haven't seen what happens if we simply bomb one side or the other in that civil war. It's never been tried. ie add purely air power again. When Libya returns to democracy, as I fully expect to happen, will you agree that Libya is an example of "air alone" working to install democracy? Or does the messiness between the 2nd and 3rd elections invalidate the success?
What happens next in a revolution which so many people demand the Iranians do if they want freedom?
The revolution (or pure air war) provides an opportunity for democracy, but no guarantee of it. This is the reality we need to live with.
What do you think would have happened if we had chosen to liberate Tunisia from dictatorship in 2010, ie prior to their revolution? Note that their revolution essentially triggered a military coup. Maybe then you'd agree that air wars can be totally successful, it depends on the quality of the target country.
Actually, I must say I agree with part of what you are saying. Air wars (and revolutions) don't guarantee democracy, which is what we actually want. We need to maneuver the world to get behind democracy. The main threat to democracy is actually military coups, as we saw in the Philippines. The US used air power to put down a military coup there in 1989. Purely from the air. THAT is the position we need to be in. All we need to do is support some faction of the local military that supports democracy. All military coup plotters should be put in a position where they can call in US air support instead of being expected to be successful on their own.
So my suggestion in Iran is that we drop noise bombs (and a note and a satellite phone) on different Iranian military bases to see if they are interested in supporting democracy. Of course, they could lie and say they support democracy, and instead install themselves as dictators, but if that happens, all we need to do is repeat the process, until we get someone who is genuinely democratic.
As I said before, we really need 20 liberations under our belt so that we have at least one example like Tunisia under our belt, that hopefully people don't dispute. Libya came very close to that. Afghanistan in 2001 came close. But even if we have a Tunisia under our belt, it doesn't mean the next country will be a repeat of Tunisia, which is probably the real point. ie the real point is we cannot guarantee democracy from the air in the initial phase. We MAY need to repeat an air war several times until we get the result we want. I think the world is pretty much in agreement that there is no real alternative to democracy though. So I think the future is bright.
But yeah, western ground troops are the best way of guaranteeing a democracy is installed. I can agree with that. A 500,000 invasion force would be best for immediate standing up of democracy. I can agree to that too. But it's not what I want in the long term. In the long term I want a repeat of Philippines 1989. So that we can stand down our enormous ground forces, and engage in air wars that the US public can stomach. And a UN full of democracies that approve of these air wars. We just need a plan on how to get from here to there. So that is why I support doing "light touch" wars similar to Libya. To prove the technology and get a Tunisia under our belt. Otherwise, even when the whole world is democratic, we'll never know whether the US military ground forces can be stood down or not. And instead people will be insisting that 500,000 ground troops need to be maintained forever. I'd rather spend that money on medical research. Go to war with viruses instead of other humans.
The moral clarity is a requirement for credibility in such conversations. That's how I look at it anyway.
If Saddam and his sons moved in next door to your family you'd freak out, yes? You'd want something done about that, right? Your posts don't show much recognition of this reality. Thus I would ask, which of us is really living in the ivory tower?
What reality are you talking about?
Have you served in the military? Are you an active reservist? Do you have a summer place less than 10 kilometers from a country that people here define to be a dictatorship?
Is, again, your only argument that "What if Saddam and sons moved in next door to your family"?
Answer to your question: No. That is my reality. And I'm not freaking out. Si vis pacem, Para bellum has been a motto for me, really. It works. And I'm happy if I or my children never see war in our country.
Again a question for you: What is wrong in the reasoning that Cheney (in 1994) gave why invading Iraq would have not been a wise decision?
Don't mean this personally, but you are hereby dismissed as a commentator on this subject.
If only soldiers can have an opinion on military matters, you should talk to these two guys.
(If you want peace, prepare for war).
Unfortunately when people talk about "peace" what they really mean is non-combat. The Mullahs of Iran would spread their Islamic "revolution" worldwide if they had the ability to do so. Keeping them in check for eternity is a lousy strategy. A better strategy is to have true peace, where every country in the world is trying to HELP every other country in the world. Because we're all clones of Estonia/Taiwan.
And I'm not even content with 100% allied governments. 9/11 forced us to deal with NGOs too. I want EVERY INDIVIDUAL on this planet to be allied with the US/Australia/Taiwan.
I want everyone to be willing to risk their own lives to PROTECT America, not giving their lives to HARM America as happened on 9/11.
Or at the very least be neutrals.
Trump won nearly half the American vote, twice, in a legal democratic process.
Should he win this time, do we start bombing ourselves?
Good question. It is in America's long-term interest that the rest of the world (now all members of NATO, including China and Russia), be able to liberate the US from someone like Trump who doesn't respect the democratic process. That means you need to get rid of your nukes.
But you need to go through the process of getting everyone else to give up their nukes too. Because they're all NATO allies and no longer need them.
But first things first. Let's take down enemy governments.
No, but to one should be aware of the things when talking about everything being possible by air power. There's enough literature, documentaries and information to understand these things. Just as a non-US citizen might comment US politics, even he or she isn't an American.
Quoting Paul Edwards
What usually people talk about is deterrence.
Quoting Paul Edwards
What that revolution has come to is to defend Shiite communities and thus meddling in the domestic situation of various countries. It's the ISIS loonies that truly want to spread their view of Islam everywhere.
Quoting Paul Edwards
The moment you are talking about came and went with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then there was a window of opportunity to change things as the ex-Soviet people were then very open to the US ideologically. But we would have needed larger than life politicians, and had only average ones. You could have made Russia an ally of the US and perhaps a member of the European Union. Yet the US simply dismissed Russia as past thing and the "Westerners" in Russia were silenced. The Ex-Warsaw pact countries knew better and opted for NATO. That NATO enlargement is seen in the Russian military doctrine as the biggest threat the nation faces. Terrorism in on fourth place. The present elite see's the US as the biggest threat to them.
That moment was in the end lost during the Kosovo War. The effects can be seen now: even if you have those opposition leaders poisoned and driven to exile in Putin's Russia, those same opposition leaders don't have many nice words about the US, actually.
Yes, I agree that was a very unfortunate situation. Unfortunately the racist Russians didn't like their Slav brothers being bombed. I agreed with the Kosovo war, but I totally opposed recognizing Kosovo as an independent state, betraying commitments to Russia. There was absolutely no urgency to doing that. The Kosovars were perfectly safe with NATO protection. We have absolutely no right to annex territory from a secular capitalist liberal democracy (which Serbia was at the time) like that.
However, even if we posit that Russia is lost for eternity, there's no reason why we can't convert the entire Middle East to be our ideological brothers. That's exactly what we should be doing in response to 9/11.
And after we have agreement on the Middle East, maybe we can ask whether anything can be done to win the Russians over. Note that I did manage to convert one Russian nationalist into a very enthusiastic member of the free world. I've posted the link before, but here it is again. It's a shame he is too busy to participate here now.
And it is in the long-term interest of the non-US countries that they not be enslaved by a rogue US. NATO needs to be able to reconfigure on a dime against a hostile US.