Six years ago today, Bush announced we were going to war with Iraq.

Listen to the language he uses:

“…to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”

“…Saddam’s ability to wage war…”

“We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat, and restore control of that country to its own people.”

“[we] will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”

“We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters, and police, and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

“…the dangers to our country, and the world, will be overcome.”

Today we look back, and we can say there was no threat. Yet the Bush Administration clearly whipped up support for the war by implying impending attacks on the American people. We were duped, and it can be very hard to admit that.

It’s especially hard for the families of the troops still over there. Faced with a lack of justification, many of them have understandably substituted a new rallying call: the liberation of the Iraqi people. Don’t get me wrong, spreading freedom is a noble cause, but this gripes me for two reasons.

First, the American people are not generally preoccupied with this kind of thing, and if we were, there would be far more worthy subjects for our attention. I don’t mean to downplay the atrocities committed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, but North Korea, East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, and Cambodia are all instances where someone should have stepped in to end brutally oppressive regimes or mass murder, and the U.S. didn’t step up to the plate. We shouldn’t be allowed to wear the ‘liberator’ hat unless we are out there indiscriminately liberating.

Of maximal relevance is Saddam’s gassing the Kurds. There was no palpable threat to the American people at that time, so we let him have at it. When we went to war in 2003, it was because we were made to fear him. Make of that what you will — our obligation to peace and freedom as a superpower is another debate entirely — but we are not liberators, and that is not why we went to war in Iraq.

The second problem is that we were not spreading freedom. Freedom would entail allowing the Iraqis to choose their own goverment and economic systems. We essentially installed your standard western Executive/Parliamentary/Judicial representative republic, which we assume to be the most highly developed form of government (debatable). It was certainly better than the dictatorship they had before, however what concerns me is that with American style democracy, came American style economy. We didn’t separate the two concepts, we just set up a capitalist market and called it done.

Nowhere is it written that Democracy = Captalism, which is one thing that frustrates me so much about the American political environment today. One could imagine a capitalist dictatorship, a socialist democracy, or a communist republic, but in practice we don’t distinguish economic system from political system — we mistakenly think it’s a package deal.

The Iraqis very well may have wanted to be socialist country like France, but we didn’t give them the option. Instead, we opened their market to all of our ridiculously cheap American products and services, so they will never be able to develop industry of their own. We won’t let them institute tariffs on our goods, so they will be perpetually suckling at the teat of American hypercapitalism; without economic autonomy, they will remain a third world country forever.

We are quick to “bring ‘em what we got,” but we soon forget how we got here: a century of sky-high tariffs and economic isolation, which fostered growth of our own economy. Only then did we open up our market to foreign goods. We are denying this to the Iraqis.

Some ‘freedom.’

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One last thing Bush said:

“…coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm.”

Yeah Right.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

For the last couple weeks, I have been reading the book “End of Faith” by Sam Harris. Besides artfully derobing religious faith that we might gawk at its naked and unflattering truth, he provides a compelling argument about torture. It unfolds as follows.

If we are willing to accept “collateral damage,” which is a euphemism for the unintentional murder or maiming of non-targets in military operations as an inevitable consequence of modern warfare, then we should similarly be willing to accept torture. We accept collateral damage because we believe that the suffering or death of one is acceptable if it saves many from harm, and this is exactly the line of justification that could apply by extension to torture. In fact, Harris goes on to say that torture should actually be more acceptable for the following reasons:

• In a torture situation, the subject is guaranteed to be an enemy, but in collateral damage, the victim may well be an innocent, such as a child or non-combatant.
• Even if they are only suspected to be an enemy, torturees can at least be subjected to ’selection criteria’ that increase the likelihood that they are a desired target, while collateral damage is by nature indiscriminate.
• Torture can be controlled in such a way as to minimize or eliminate permanent bodily harm, whereas collateral damage will always be, well, damage.
• From a callously utilitarian standpoint, there is potentially something to be gained from torture. Collateral damage is, frankly, wasteful killing.

If this is true, why do we have such a visceral aversion to torture, but not to accidentally killing innocents? The reason is probably because the latter is something of a hypothetical. Our minds are in part removed from the end result, while torture is all too easily envisioned. It’s really the same reason we know intuitively that it takes a different kind of person to drop a bomb from 40,000 feet than it does to beat someone to death with a shovel, although the results are similar. It seems our minds have developed a knee-jerk negative reaction to killing, but the further we remove ourselves from the stimulus that induces the shock reflex, the easier it becomes to make the decision to kill. So, even though torture and collateral damage could both be seen as “inflicting harm on someone who may not deserve it, in order that we may further the cause of protecting the multitudes,” only one of them seems atrocious.

Whether you agree or not, the moral equivalence is worth noting.