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Talking Points on Iraq and the Futility of War

by Keith Morton

This talk was presented in June 2005 as a public lecture and discussion for East Bay Citizens for Peace, a peace group based on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

When did the war start?

Officially, the war with Iraq began on March 19, 2003. It is more realistic, and more useful, however, to see the war as continuous since the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Shield, which began when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990. Operation Desert Storm began five months later on January 17, 1991. “Hostilities” ceased on February 28. This hot war was followed by sanctions – not lifted until July 29 2004 – and fly-overs. The sanctions and fly-overs have been followed by more hot war – the current war.

For the Iraqi people this has been going on a long, long time. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported in December 1995 that more than one million Iraqis had died—567,000 of them children—as a direct consequence of economic sanctions. At that time, UNICEF reported that 4,500 children under the age of 5 were dying each month from hunger and disease. By the time sanctions were lifted in 2004, the United Nations estimates that they had cost some 1.7 million Iraqi lives, including 500,000 children. Since the war began on March 19, 2003 there have been 1,703 American deaths (176 deaths of Coalition soldiers); and 12,855 wounded. In this same period, between 22,000 and 25,300 Iraqi civilians have been killed. (Iraq Body Count; Antiwar.com; DoD)

The evidence increasingly suggests that the Bush administration made the decision to go to war with Iraq and then searched for evidence to justify its decision. The most recent piece of evidence is the “Downing Street Memo,” which includes minutes of a July 2002 meeting of top British foreign policy officials. The fourth paragraph of the memo reads:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action….

The Bush administration has offered no explanation for what seems to be evidence that “the facts were being fixed around the policy,” and less for missing discussions of the “aftermath.” Representative John Conyers of Detroit, second most senior in the House and the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is leading the call for an explanation, joined formally by a group of 88 other Representatives.

Violence Considered

There is a belief in this country that violence resolves conflict; that it is the punctuation at the end of a sentence; that it simplifies complex situations; that it clarifies priorities and creates order. That it gives the aggressor control. From this point of view, the US invasion of Iraq was a decisive act, bringing a violent dictatorship to an end.

The historic reality is that while violence gives the appearance of decisive action, of useful punctuation, it is in practice simply a postponement of the much harder act of putting already broken pieces back together again - and its consequences are that the pieces are that much more shattered and that much harder to work with.

Consider El Salvador,Guatemala and Liberia, as somewhat representative examples. In 1923, a US investor named Minor Keith negotiated $16.5 million in long-term loans to El Salvador. When the loans were defaulted, it left the United States in control of the country’s international trade, assisted by an oligarchy that became know as “the 14 families.” The population became increasingly landless and poor. A civil war broke out in 1979-80, and lasted through 1992. Since then, it has been a tenuous and awkward peace. The war pitted a populist movement symbolized by Archbishop Oscar Romero against a military dictatorship. In 1981, the Salvadoran military killed 2,644 civilians. In 1981-82, they killed, or “disappeared,” more than 30,000, including four US churchwomen. In 1987, I met three young boys, ages 11-14, in the town of Brownsville, Texas. They said they had walked and hitchhiked from the small town where they were born, the last three surviving males. Their plan was to make it, illegally, to a refugee camp in south Texas known as Casa Oscar Romero. Because nuns ran it, they could claim sanctuary there while they tried to gain some legal way of remaining in the country.

And Guatemala, again briefly. By the time the government and the guerrillas signed the peace accord in 1996, some 160,000 people had been killed and 40,000 "disappeared" -- 93 percent at the hands of the Guatemalan security forces, according to "Guatemala: Memory of Silence," the report of the Historical Clarification Commission. In both El Salvador and Guatemala the United States offered technical and financial support to the military backed governments.

In the year 2000, some 2,600 Liberian refugees entered the United States. Liberia was founded by freed slaves in 1822 with the assistance of the United States, which saw this new African country as an opportunity to repatriate US slaves. Its capital is named after US president, James Munroe. It became an independent nation in 1847. A negotiation brokered in 1926 by Harvey Firestone, to protect his sources of rubber, essentially placed Liberia under US economic and political control. In 1980, Liberia’s president was assassinated and replaced in a military coup by Samuel Doe. In 1989, Charles Taylor, a descendent of American slaves and an ex-convict, began a civil war with Doe, whom he captured and executed. There were some 150,000 deaths in the war. In 1995, Roosevelt Johnson challenged Taylor, and a 10,000 soldier West African peacekeeping force was called in to restore order, which it failed to do. In 1996, Taylor regained control. Taylor subsequently supported an insurgency in Sierra Leone – which resulted in Sierra Leone charging him in international court in 2003 as a war criminal. In 2003, Taylor resigned and was granted asylum by Nigeria. The current leader of Liberia is Gyude Bryant. At present, some 300,000 rural Liberians have been displaced by 14 years of civil war, and an additional 200,000 have scattered to surrounding countries.

Saah N’Toe, a Liberian friend of mine from Providence, younger than me, describes the moment when his life changed. He was a college student in Monrovia, the capital, and on campus, when he learned that the active violence of civil war had erupted. “Everything changed,” he says. “Nothing I counted on could be counted on any longer. I no longer had any plans. I am here now, but I want to go back and help rebuild my country.”

These are but three examples from a long list of US adventures abroad. Violence, especially calculated, state-sanctioned violence, destroys relationship – inside ourselves, to other persons, among institutions, between countries. The fundamental challenge of the modern world is to maintain and build relationships in the face of forces dedicated to eliminating or reducing them – an ecological view of social relationships.

The war in Iraq has a history: perhaps it can be said to have begun in 1972, when Iraq nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company, a Western-owned consortium. Or perhaps it begins in 1979 when Saddam Hussein seizes power and executes 400 members of the opposition party. Or perhaps it comes with the start of the Iran/Iraq war in 1980, and the US support of Iraq in that war.

And certainly current experience – and the comparisons to the “quagmire” of Vietnam – suggest that the war has achieved no clarifying resolution. Military officers on the ground in Iraq have recently gone public with declarations that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily. Why are they, and we, surprised?

Escaping History

The belief that violence is a decisive act grows from a deeply American idea that you can escape history, start over: have a revolution in Iraq, hold a constitutional convention and start anew. There is no real appreciation by the Bush administration for the obvious fact that history always comes with you. You have choices about what to do with that history, but you can’t escape it and violence is not a means of escape. Violence simply postpones the moment when you have to seek resolution, reconciliation, justice. And it makes it harder to achieve. History teaches us, I believe, that war fails over and over again to remedy the problems that cause it. When a war is over – the fighting concluded – we still have to live with all the history that went before it.

The idea that we can escape history demands that we grossly simplify our view of the world: you are with us or against us. There is good and evil. God is on our side.

This sets up a logic that argues: if we eliminate “them” then the problems will go away. And when the problems go away, we will be able to start over. History, on the other hand, argues that there is no simple “them.” It suggests that the problems are systemic and institutional as much as they are personal or national. Conflict does not go away because you win a war. War is simply a postponement of resolution.

If the Iraq war is about resolution, I am afraid that we can predict its failure. It is like trying to settle a dispute with your next-door neighbor by knocking him down, stepping on his chest and saying, “Now, do it my way!” The continuous involvement of the US in this region during the last 50 years suggests that our interests are instead maintaining political influence in the Middle East and ensuring continuous access to energy. In other words, the war is an effort to increase our influence and control – not to topple Saddam Hussein and bring about a just and democratic state.

Is the War Just?

You can also ask, “Is THIS war “just?” No. I believe it violates all principles of just war theory:

it is not a last resort- it is preemptive;
it is, arguably, not enjoined by a legitimate authority as we have undertaken it unilaterally and without due public consideration. The CIA’s report on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction actually notes 9 relevant UN Security Council Resolutions. The first and most important is Resolution 687, which “requires Iraq to declare, destroy, remove, or render harmless under UN or IAEA supervision and not to use, develop, construct, or acquire all chemical and biological weapons, all ballistic missiles with ranges greater than 150 km, and all nuclear weapons-usable material, including related material, equipment, and facilities.” The problem is, it is a violation of this resolution on which the Bush administration hangs – or hung – its case for war. No evidence has been found that Iraq violated this resolution, and the Downing Street memo – as well as other evidence - strongly suggests the administration knew this would be the case;
the current evidence makes clear that the war is not being fought to redress a wrong we suffered;
asymmetric warfare fought under these conditions does not have a reasonable chance of success, especially when there is no vision of what success would look like;
there is no suggestion that the “peace” following the war will be preferable to the “peace” preceding the war – and the 14 (by most estimates) “hard” military installations currently being erected in Iraq make the concept of peace an absurdity, anyway;
the violence inflicted is not proportional to any violence that we suffered or are suffering, especially if you view this as a 14 year-long war, as I do;
there is no way to ensure that the weapons used discriminate between combatants and non-combatants – resulting in undue harm to both civilians and soldiers who are forced to try and make such judgments.
we are pursuing this war more or less unilaterally, when other options have not been fully tried, let alone exhausted.

Some Immediate Domestic Consequences

You can look at what it is doing to our country, beyond the obvious toll of casualties. Energy costs are rising dramatically and will not come down. The debt incurred to fight this war - which has cost some $200 billion to date - is contributing to record levels of national and trade debt, and much of that debt is being purchased by countries that have no reason to take our interests to heart – China, for example. Our economy is much less secure in global terms than it was in 2002. It is contributing to high levels of long-term unemployment, an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, growing levels of homelessness nationally and here in Rhode Island, where I live, among the working poor and families.

Will Iraq be more Democratic or Economically Viable?

Any optimism that the ends might be worth it also seems to me unjustified. The versions of democracy and free market trade being exported under the Bush administration have historically failed to work, and have most often created less stable, more dangerous conditions inside countries and internationally - as described in Amy Chua’s World on Fire. We are trying to export a form of democracy we don’t practice; and even then we forget that it took, in our own American Revolution, nearly three decades - 1761-1787 - to set our government and Constitution in place.

Additionally, we haven’t historically practiced the type of free trade being exported. Ours has been state regulated, muting the worst effects of industrial capitalism. The combination of direct democracy and free market capitalism, Chua argues, results in a rapid growth in the unequal distribution of wealth, and the organizing of a democratically elected people’s movement, most often led by religious fundamentalists and fueled by the injustice of this inequality. It doesn’t lead to more stability or security.

This is the current picture in Iraq. Most recently, this argument has been reinforced by Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations and until June 2003 the director of policy planning at the State Department: Haass writes in his just-published, The Opportunity, “The direct costs to the United States [of the war in Iraq] were and are simply too high.” In the June 6, 2005 issue of Newsweek, he says in an interview, “ I worry that our current policies are alienating much of the world and we are also eroding the economic base of American power.”

The Failure of the Ritual

In addition to securing political, if not direct, control of oil reserves, I believe the Bush administration entered this war because of its ritual and symbolic potential: in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 it defined an enemy (singular), and created a scapegoat in the person of Saddam Hussein, who Bush likened to Hitler, and the state of Iraq. This scapegoat offers us a sacrifice. If the sacrifice works, it reunites us as a people - us- who are fragmented, feeling lost.

The problem is, such ritual violence, especially on this scale and launched into a modern cultural landscape, inevitably fails and the result is, predictably, more fragmentation and polarization: frenzied efforts to escalate the violence so it achieves its original goals – and more fragmentation; a horrible backlash. I think it is this backlash we are seeing in the increasingly polarized and ideologically divided cultural landscape of the US; in the growing efforts to suppress and control public information; in the rolling back of basic civil liberties under the Patriot Act; in the denial of human rights protections to the detainees at Guantanamo. And we forget at the risk of our own humanity that we did not literally go to war with Saddam Hussein: we fought, and fight, the war against the people of Iraq. The scapegoat is gone in a puff of smoke.

Why Nonviolence and Pacifism

I grew up in a military family. I have become, gradually, a pacifist, because it seems to me the only rational and life-affirming position to take. I believe there are other ways of stepping into harsh conflict than using state-supported military violence. Think about ending apartheid in S. Africa; Indian independence; Civil Rights in the US; the Danish resistance to Nazi Germany; the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – the vast majority of lasting victories of the last 100 years have come out of nonviolent resolution of conflict. This argument has recently been made very clearly in Jonathan Schell’s Unconquerable World and in Peter Ackerman and Paul Duvall’s A Force More Powerful. Nonviolence works and is reasonable. There are religious and existential reasons for pacifism, as well, some of which are important to me; but these seem to be largely matters of individual conscience and not as important to public deliberation as the historic record.

Thoughts on Alternatives

People often ask, usually derisively, so what are the alternatives? You’d just sit by and let a dictator butcher his people? No, I wouldn’t sit by and there were and are alternatives that could work. The fundamental question, I believe, is what can we contribute that will allow the Iraqi people to create their own civil society? History suggests that violence does not achieve this. History also suggests that the United States has its own interests at heart in interventions such as we are witnessing in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our misuse of the United Nations caused international sanctions to fail in Iraq. Our unilateralism means that there is much less room for creativity in resolving this crisis than there would otherwise be. The reason Bush One didn’t dethrone Hussein was that he recognized that no viable alternative existed to replace the vacuum that would follow. For ten years, we did nothing to change this situation.

There are two things that we could have, and still might, do. First, we could work to reframe our understanding of our national interests in such a way we no longer wanted control of Iraq. This means dramatically cutting our dependence on fossil fuels - oil. It means that, as a matter of policy and culture, we should make economic sustainability a goal in terms of land use, industrial production, and cultural imagination. We might, in my opinion, seek a way out of the intense consumer culture that we have created for ourselves. In the long run, this would be a gift to us and to the rest of the world. Principles of nonviolence suggest that I begin by asking what I have contributed to a violent conflict, and that I next take some constructive step toward eliminating or remedying that contribution. We need to begin this type of reflection – not to moralize, and not based on the idea that if enough individuals act better society will change. My argument is that only in this type of reflection can we develop the creative imagination of alternatives.

Imagine, for example, what might have happened if, following 9/11, the US and the world community had expressed its consciousness of contributing to Afghanistan’s violent history and sought reconciliation rather than punishment. What if we had committed tens of billions of dollars to helping Afghanistan, and organized a nonviolent service corps of a couple of hundred thousand volunteers willing to help rebuild the country following years of civil war? Afghanis could have determined the allocation of resources and the agenda. The political process for determining this allocation may have taken several years to develop – but it would have done so transparently, held to integrity by the watching world. And we would have had those several years to build political capital that we could bring to bear on Iraq. We might have opened up dialogue with predominantly Muslim nations. The causes of violence would have been relieved, at least in part. Estranged relationships between east and west might have been reframed and started to grow. The fear and anger fueling reactionary backlashes would have begun to diminish.

How would Iraq, in its turn, have resisted a peaceful, nonviolent invasion? This approach would have allowed us time to reflect on what we had done to help create the conditions that resulted in the violence of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq. There are no guarantees it would have worked, but the scale of it and the pressure of a more united world opinion would have served as protections. Nonviolence is not isolationism. And actions like these can only work when we are conscious of what we have contributed to the problem and are genuinely searching for a just alternative. The goal is not to fix a problem, but to enter into a different type of relationship with people you perceive as “other.”

Well, people respond, that’s just too romantic or unrealistic. I don’t think so. It seems much more rational, with a higher percentage chance of success over the long haul, than current practice, which we know will create irremediable antagonisms lasting for generations. I’d feel more secure knowing we were pursuing a policy of peace and justice. Given what we have actually done, I feel much less secure than I did 2 or 14 years ago. Our illusion of control is sliding into the reality of growing instability.

What we would give up, if we followed some such plan, is our energy supremacy – our six percent of the world’s population consuming 40 percent of its resources at an unsustainable rate. And we would have to give up the pathetic fallacy that violence equals control. But the rest of the world could help us figure out how to do this – it would be in their self-interest to do so – and we could come up with a better vision of how to live a good life. That’s all I hope for. How do we begin to have this conversation?

Imagine the ideas we might come up with if we put our minds to peace with all the determination we now give to making war.

Keith Morton is a Professor of American Studies at Providence College, in Rhode Island.

Table of Contents | The Good Life Center | Contact The Best We're Doing

The Best We're Doing : A Journal of The Good Life Center
Vol. 1 No.1 October 2005
Table of Contents GLC Home	Talking Points on Iraq and the Futility of War by Keith Morton This talk was presented in June 2005 as a public lecture and discussion for East Bay Citizens for Peace, a peace group based on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. When did the war start? Officially, the war with Iraq began on March 19, 2003. It is more realistic, and more useful, however, to see the war as continuous since the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Shield, which began when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990. Operation Desert Storm began five months later on January 17, 1991. “Hostilities” ceased on February 28. This hot war was followed by sanctions – not lifted until July 29 2004 – and fly-overs. The sanctions and fly-overs have been followed by more hot war – the current war. For the Iraqi people this has been going on a long, long time. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported in December 1995 that more than one million Iraqis had died—567,000 of them children—as a direct consequence of economic sanctions. At that time, UNICEF reported that 4,500 children under the age of 5 were dying each month from hunger and disease. By the time sanctions were lifted in 2004, the United Nations estimates that they had cost some 1.7 million Iraqi lives, including 500,000 children. Since the war began on March 19, 2003 there have been 1,703 American deaths (176 deaths of Coalition soldiers); and 12,855 wounded. In this same period, between 22,000 and 25,300 Iraqi civilians have been killed. (Iraq Body Count; Antiwar.com; DoD) The evidence increasingly suggests that the Bush administration made the decision to go to war with Iraq and then searched for evidence to justify its decision. The most recent piece of evidence is the “Downing Street Memo,” which includes minutes of a July 2002 meeting of top British foreign policy officials. The fourth paragraph of the memo reads: C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action…. The Bush administration has offered no explanation for what seems to be evidence that “the facts were being fixed around the policy,” and less for missing discussions of the “aftermath.” Representative John Conyers of Detroit, second most senior in the House and the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is leading the call for an explanation, joined formally by a group of 88 other Representatives. Violence Considered There is a belief in this country that violence resolves conflict; that it is the punctuation at the end of a sentence; that it simplifies complex situations; that it clarifies priorities and creates order. That it gives the aggressor control. From this point of view, the US invasion of Iraq was a decisive act, bringing a violent dictatorship to an end. The historic reality is that while violence gives the appearance of decisive action, of useful punctuation, it is in practice simply a postponement of the much harder act of putting already broken pieces back together again - and its consequences are that the pieces are that much more shattered and that much harder to work with. Consider El Salvador,Guatemala and Liberia, as somewhat representative examples. In 1923, a US investor named Minor Keith negotiated $16.5 million in long-term loans to El Salvador. When the loans were defaulted, it left the United States in control of the country’s international trade, assisted by an oligarchy that became know as “the 14 families.” The population became increasingly landless and poor. A civil war broke out in 1979-80, and lasted through 1992. Since then, it has been a tenuous and awkward peace. The war pitted a populist movement symbolized by Archbishop Oscar Romero against a military dictatorship. In 1981, the Salvadoran military killed 2,644 civilians. In 1981-82, they killed, or “disappeared,” more than 30,000, including four US churchwomen. In 1987, I met three young boys, ages 11-14, in the town of Brownsville, Texas. They said they had walked and hitchhiked from the small town where they were born, the last three surviving males. Their plan was to make it, illegally, to a refugee camp in south Texas known as Casa Oscar Romero. Because nuns ran it, they could claim sanctuary there while they tried to gain some legal way of remaining in the country. And Guatemala, again briefly. By the time the government and the guerrillas signed the peace accord in 1996, some 160,000 people had been killed and 40,000 "disappeared" -- 93 percent at the hands of the Guatemalan security forces, according to "Guatemala: Memory of Silence," the report of the Historical Clarification Commission. In both El Salvador and Guatemala the United States offered technical and financial support to the military backed governments. In the year 2000, some 2,600 Liberian refugees entered the United States. Liberia was founded by freed slaves in 1822 with the assistance of the United States, which saw this new African country as an opportunity to repatriate US slaves. Its capital is named after US president, James Munroe. It became an independent nation in 1847. A negotiation brokered in 1926 by Harvey Firestone, to protect his sources of rubber, essentially placed Liberia under US economic and political control. In 1980, Liberia’s president was assassinated and replaced in a military coup by Samuel Doe. In 1989, Charles Taylor, a descendent of American slaves and an ex-convict, began a civil war with Doe, whom he captured and executed. There were some 150,000 deaths in the war. In 1995, Roosevelt Johnson challenged Taylor, and a 10,000 soldier West African peacekeeping force was called in to restore order, which it failed to do. In 1996, Taylor regained control. Taylor subsequently supported an insurgency in Sierra Leone – which resulted in Sierra Leone charging him in international court in 2003 as a war criminal. In 2003, Taylor resigned and was granted asylum by Nigeria. The current leader of Liberia is Gyude Bryant. At present, some 300,000 rural Liberians have been displaced by 14 years of civil war, and an additional 200,000 have scattered to surrounding countries. Saah N’Toe, a Liberian friend of mine from Providence, younger than me, describes the moment when his life changed. He was a college student in Monrovia, the capital, and on campus, when he learned that the active violence of civil war had erupted. “Everything changed,” he says. “Nothing I counted on could be counted on any longer. I no longer had any plans. I am here now, but I want to go back and help rebuild my country.” These are but three examples from a long list of US adventures abroad. Violence, especially calculated, state-sanctioned violence, destroys relationship – inside ourselves, to other persons, among institutions, between countries. The fundamental challenge of the modern world is to maintain and build relationships in the face of forces dedicated to eliminating or reducing them – an ecological view of social relationships. The war in Iraq has a history: perhaps it can be said to have begun in 1972, when Iraq nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company, a Western-owned consortium. Or perhaps it begins in 1979 when Saddam Hussein seizes power and executes 400 members of the opposition party. Or perhaps it comes with the start of the Iran/Iraq war in 1980, and the US support of Iraq in that war. And certainly current experience – and the comparisons to the “quagmire” of Vietnam – suggest that the war has achieved no clarifying resolution. Military officers on the ground in Iraq have recently gone public with declarations that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily. Why are they, and we, surprised? Escaping History The belief that violence is a decisive act grows from a deeply American idea that you can escape history, start over: have a revolution in Iraq, hold a constitutional convention and start anew. There is no real appreciation by the Bush administration for the obvious fact that history always comes with you. You have choices about what to do with that history, but you can’t escape it and violence is not a means of escape. Violence simply postpones the moment when you have to seek resolution, reconciliation, justice. And it makes it harder to achieve. History teaches us, I believe, that war fails over and over again to remedy the problems that cause it. When a war is over – the fighting concluded – we still have to live with all the history that went before it. The idea that we can escape history demands that we grossly simplify our view of the world: you are with us or against us. There is good and evil. God is on our side. This sets up a logic that argues: if we eliminate “them” then the problems will go away. And when the problems go away, we will be able to start over. History, on the other hand, argues that there is no simple “them.” It suggests that the problems are systemic and institutional as much as they are personal or national. Conflict does not go away because you win a war. War is simply a postponement of resolution. If the Iraq war is about resolution, I am afraid that we can predict its failure. It is like trying to settle a dispute with your next-door neighbor by knocking him down, stepping on his chest and saying, “Now, do it my way!” The continuous involvement of the US in this region during the last 50 years suggests that our interests are instead maintaining political influence in the Middle East and ensuring continuous access to energy. In other words, the war is an effort to increase our influence and control – not to topple Saddam Hussein and bring about a just and democratic state. Is the War Just? You can also ask, “Is THIS war “just?” No. I believe it violates all principles of just war theory: it is not a last resort- it is preemptive; it is, arguably, not enjoined by a legitimate authority as we have undertaken it unilaterally and without due public consideration. The CIA’s report on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction actually notes 9 relevant UN Security Council Resolutions. The first and most important is Resolution 687, which “requires Iraq to declare, destroy, remove, or render harmless under UN or IAEA supervision and not to use, develop, construct, or acquire all chemical and biological weapons, all ballistic missiles with ranges greater than 150 km, and all nuclear weapons-usable material, including related material, equipment, and facilities.” The problem is, it is a violation of this resolution on which the Bush administration hangs – or hung – its case for war. No evidence has been found that Iraq violated this resolution, and the Downing Street memo – as well as other evidence - strongly suggests the administration knew this would be the case; the current evidence makes clear that the war is not being fought to redress a wrong we suffered; asymmetric warfare fought under these conditions does not have a reasonable chance of success, especially when there is no vision of what success would look like; there is no suggestion that the “peace” following the war will be preferable to the “peace” preceding the war – and the 14 (by most estimates) “hard” military installations currently being erected in Iraq make the concept of peace an absurdity, anyway; the violence inflicted is not proportional to any violence that we suffered or are suffering, especially if you view this as a 14 year-long war, as I do; there is no way to ensure that the weapons used discriminate between combatants and non-combatants – resulting in undue harm to both civilians and soldiers who are forced to try and make such judgments. we are pursuing this war more or less unilaterally, when other options have not been fully tried, let alone exhausted. Some Immediate Domestic Consequences You can look at what it is doing to our country, beyond the obvious toll of casualties. Energy costs are rising dramatically and will not come down. The debt incurred to fight this war - which has cost some $200 billion to date - is contributing to record levels of national and trade debt, and much of that debt is being purchased by countries that have no reason to take our interests to heart – China, for example. Our economy is much less secure in global terms than it was in 2002. It is contributing to high levels of long-term unemployment, an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, growing levels of homelessness nationally and here in Rhode Island, where I live, among the working poor and families. Will Iraq be more Democratic or Economically Viable? Any optimism that the ends might be worth it also seems to me unjustified. The versions of democracy and free market trade being exported under the Bush administration have historically failed to work, and have most often created less stable, more dangerous conditions inside countries and internationally - as described in Amy Chua’s World on Fire. We are trying to export a form of democracy we don’t practice; and even then we forget that it took, in our own American Revolution, nearly three decades - 1761-1787 - to set our government and Constitution in place. Additionally, we haven’t historically practiced the type of free trade being exported. Ours has been state regulated, muting the worst effects of industrial capitalism. The combination of direct democracy and free market capitalism, Chua argues, results in a rapid growth in the unequal distribution of wealth, and the organizing of a democratically elected people’s movement, most often led by religious fundamentalists and fueled by the injustice of this inequality. It doesn’t lead to more stability or security. This is the current picture in Iraq. Most recently, this argument has been reinforced by Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations and until June 2003 the director of policy planning at the State Department: Haass writes in his just-published, The Opportunity, “The direct costs to the United States [of the war in Iraq] were and are simply too high.” In the June 6, 2005 issue of Newsweek, he says in an interview, “ I worry that our current policies are alienating much of the world and we are also eroding the economic base of American power.” The Failure of the Ritual In addition to securing political, if not direct, control of oil reserves, I believe the Bush administration entered this war because of its ritual and symbolic potential: in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 it defined an enemy (singular), and created a scapegoat in the person of Saddam Hussein, who Bush likened to Hitler, and the state of Iraq. This scapegoat offers us a sacrifice. If the sacrifice works, it reunites us as a people - us- who are fragmented, feeling lost. The problem is, such ritual violence, especially on this scale and launched into a modern cultural landscape, inevitably fails and the result is, predictably, more fragmentation and polarization: frenzied efforts to escalate the violence so it achieves its original goals – and more fragmentation; a horrible backlash. I think it is this backlash we are seeing in the increasingly polarized and ideologically divided cultural landscape of the US; in the growing efforts to suppress and control public information; in the rolling back of basic civil liberties under the Patriot Act; in the denial of human rights protections to the detainees at Guantanamo. And we forget at the risk of our own humanity that we did not literally go to war with Saddam Hussein: we fought, and fight, the war against the people of Iraq. The scapegoat is gone in a puff of smoke. Why Nonviolence and Pacifism I grew up in a military family. I have become, gradually, a pacifist, because it seems to me the only rational and life-affirming position to take. I believe there are other ways of stepping into harsh conflict than using state-supported military violence. Think about ending apartheid in S. Africa; Indian independence; Civil Rights in the US; the Danish resistance to Nazi Germany; the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – the vast majority of lasting victories of the last 100 years have come out of nonviolent resolution of conflict. This argument has recently been made very clearly in Jonathan Schell’s Unconquerable World and in Peter Ackerman and Paul Duvall’s A Force More Powerful. Nonviolence works and is reasonable. There are religious and existential reasons for pacifism, as well, some of which are important to me; but these seem to be largely matters of individual conscience and not as important to public deliberation as the historic record. Thoughts on Alternatives People often ask, usually derisively, so what are the alternatives? You’d just sit by and let a dictator butcher his people? No, I wouldn’t sit by and there were and are alternatives that could work. The fundamental question, I believe, is what can we contribute that will allow the Iraqi people to create their own civil society? History suggests that violence does not achieve this. History also suggests that the United States has its own interests at heart in interventions such as we are witnessing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our misuse of the United Nations caused international sanctions to fail in Iraq. Our unilateralism means that there is much less room for creativity in resolving this crisis than there would otherwise be. The reason Bush One didn’t dethrone Hussein was that he recognized that no viable alternative existed to replace the vacuum that would follow. For ten years, we did nothing to change this situation. There are two things that we could have, and still might, do. First, we could work to reframe our understanding of our national interests in such a way we no longer wanted control of Iraq. This means dramatically cutting our dependence on fossil fuels - oil. It means that, as a matter of policy and culture, we should make economic sustainability a goal in terms of land use, industrial production, and cultural imagination. We might, in my opinion, seek a way out of the intense consumer culture that we have created for ourselves. In the long run, this would be a gift to us and to the rest of the world. Principles of nonviolence suggest that I begin by asking what I have contributed to a violent conflict, and that I next take some constructive step toward eliminating or remedying that contribution. We need to begin this type of reflection – not to moralize, and not based on the idea that if enough individuals act better society will change. My argument is that only in this type of reflection can we develop the creative imagination of alternatives. Imagine, for example, what might have happened if, following 9/11, the US and the world community had expressed its consciousness of contributing to Afghanistan’s violent history and sought reconciliation rather than punishment. What if we had committed tens of billions of dollars to helping Afghanistan, and organized a nonviolent service corps of a couple of hundred thousand volunteers willing to help rebuild the country following years of civil war? Afghanis could have determined the allocation of resources and the agenda. The political process for determining this allocation may have taken several years to develop – but it would have done so transparently, held to integrity by the watching world. And we would have had those several years to build political capital that we could bring to bear on Iraq. We might have opened up dialogue with predominantly Muslim nations. The causes of violence would have been relieved, at least in part. Estranged relationships between east and west might have been reframed and started to grow. The fear and anger fueling reactionary backlashes would have begun to diminish. How would Iraq, in its turn, have resisted a peaceful, nonviolent invasion? This approach would have allowed us time to reflect on what we had done to help create the conditions that resulted in the violence of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq. There are no guarantees it would have worked, but the scale of it and the pressure of a more united world opinion would have served as protections. Nonviolence is not isolationism. And actions like these can only work when we are conscious of what we have contributed to the problem and are genuinely searching for a just alternative. The goal is not to fix a problem, but to enter into a different type of relationship with people you perceive as “other.” Well, people respond, that’s just too romantic or unrealistic. I don’t think so. It seems much more rational, with a higher percentage chance of success over the long haul, than current practice, which we know will create irremediable antagonisms lasting for generations. I’d feel more secure knowing we were pursuing a policy of peace and justice. Given what we have actually done, I feel much less secure than I did 2 or 14 years ago. Our illusion of control is sliding into the reality of growing instability. What we would give up, if we followed some such plan, is our energy supremacy – our six percent of the world’s population consuming 40 percent of its resources at an unsustainable rate. And we would have to give up the pathetic fallacy that violence equals control. But the rest of the world could help us figure out how to do this – it would be in their self-interest to do so – and we could come up with a better vision of how to live a good life. That’s all I hope for. How do we begin to have this conversation? Imagine the ideas we might come up with if we put our minds to peace with all the determination we now give to making war. Keith Morton is a Professor of American Studies at Providence College, in Rhode Island. Table of Contents \| The Good Life Center \| Contact The Best We're Doing All material copyright The Good Life Center.