Conversation with a sceptic Just because a war has positive results, that doesn't make it just. Liberating Baghdad doesn't change the fact that we went about it in the wrong way, instituting a change in US foreign policy that will have negative repercussions for years to come. I started out on the fence, but Bush failed to provide answers to questions I needed answered. Every speech made his motives seem more suspect, every time he referenced a connection he couldn't prove between Saddam and 9/11, I got angrier.
No one's arguing that Saddam was good (although some might argue that Bush is just as bad, albeit in a more subtle way.) But aren't there worse dictators currently out there? Aren't some of them our allies? Why Iraq? Why now?
It's not that I don't feel sympathy towards ordinary Iraqis. But I feel more sympathy wondering where they'll be in three years, when we've abandoned them to a new, more palatable, pro-US warlord. And sympathy towards all of the oppressed people we have ignored, and will continue to ignore.
You make a fair point. I'm sure one could have argued during the Vietnam war that US forces were saving the inhabitants of South Vietnam from a ruthless dictatorship. And it's clear, in hindsight, that the war was a terrible mistake, against the interests of both the US and the Vietnamese people.
I agree also that Bush administration has mixed motives, and Saddam will be replaced, not by a Jefferson, but by an Ataturk at best. Even so, the Iraqi people will be better off.
The problem with the anti-war movement is that most of its participants were more interested in protesting against authority figures in their own lives, and indifferent to the plight of the Iraqi people. They have no conception of what it's like to live under a capricious totalitarian regime.
And those with a morally coherent abhorrence of war are, with purer intentions, equally barren. They prefer the utopia of their imaginations to the inching improvements of human progress.
I agree that are many problems with the anti-war movement as a movement, not the least of which is the questionable motives of those who lead it. As I wandered through Washington Square Park a few weeks back (I had chosen not to join the march itself), I was annoyed by the communist party taking the protest as an opportunity to recruit, and amazed by the folks who still thought that chanting "The people. United. Will never be defeated." was a effective way of affecting change.
Nonetheless, I felt that those negative aspects were mitigated by the sheer numbers of participants. These were not career protesters, they were people that believed, for one reason or another, that the war was wrong.
I also think that most pro-war folks, including the US government, are just as indifferent to the plight of the Iraqi people. In my view ‹ and I think the view of many who marched ‹ the liberation of the Iraqis was one of many _excuses_ for the war, not the reason for it.
One could argue that the unilateral nature of this particular fight is actually a retardant to the inching improvements of human progress. The flagrant disregard Bush demonstrated for world opinion (as well as his previous dismissals of various international agreements) has set global politics back quite a few years. Many see this as the removal of a man who bullies his own county by a man who bullies the whole world.
I would also propose that without the imagined utopias, there could be no human progress.
The numbers of the protestors are no more an argument than the support for the war in the polls. That "many people" hold Bush equivalent to Saddam shows only that "many people" substitute an outrageous parallel for reasonable criticism. And I think you set too much store by process. The morality of the war should not hinge on the support of a country, France, with a debilitating complex about its world status.
I do take your point about the value of a utopian fantasies in at least setting a direction for human progress. The record is poor, however. All too often, the pursuit of ideals has been a substitute for progress, an excuse for inaction, or, a cover for mediocre intellectuals from Lenin to Osama bin Laden, who subordinate to their wishful blueprints the humdrum virtues of good government, material wellbeing, and microwave ovens.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting the volume of protesters is a legitimate argument against the war, simply that the numbers involved make generalizations about an "anti-war movement" less than compelling.
I'm sure there were many participants who, as you say, are simply protesting authority figures in their own lives. There were also many intelligent people who, offended by Bush's inability to justify war in a coherent and well-reasoned manner, to the public and the UN, given no compelling reason to invade Iraq over other countries with similar or worse human rights violations, or similar or worse anti-U.S. agendas, chose to protest a war they had no reason to support.
An old professor of mine says it best about France: "If only they were against the war for the right reasons." He takes issue with the fact that their anti-war sentiments are not rooted on an actual moral objection, but in rampant self-interest. He takes issue with the countries supporting the war for the exact same reason.
You're right about fallen Utopias, of course. The US itself is a failed exercise in Jeffersonian Democracy. One of the less catastrophic failures out there, granted -- perhaps because of the checks & balances system that was so casually sideswiped with the Patriot act -- but a philosophical failure nonetheless.
I'm not saying one should ignore motives, just that one can harness and transcend them. We assume that the opportunists, as a law of nature, exploit the idealists. Why not turn the tables?#
