What would Kant say?
The
administration’s claim of a right to overthrow regimes it considers
hostile is extraordinary – and one the world will soon find intolerable.
by Paul W. Schroeder
Most Americans seem little concerned at the prospect of an American
war on Iraq. This is surprising considering that, of America’s friends
and allies, only Israel openly supports it, while other states in the
Middle East, including longtime rivals and enemies of Iraq, warn
against it, and the Europeans view it with alarm and growing
frustration. Those challenges to the planned war now being raised,
moreover, tend to center on prudential questions – whether the proposed
attack will work and what short-term risks and collateral damage might
be involved – rather than on whether the war itself is a good idea.
The practical risks are indeed serious. The attack would
entail a new military campaign while the so-called war against al-Qaeda
and terrorism is far from over, involving many thousands of American
troops in ground fighting with corresponding casualties, fought with
few allies or none and paid for entirely by the United States in
troubled economic times. Across the Muslim world hostility toward
America is already inflamed, and radical Islamic movements are active.
The global economy – particularly the oil and stock markets – is
vulnerable to shock. Such a war would also come at a time when
America’s alliances in Europe and the Middle East are strained, certain
fragile Middle Eastern and South Asian regimes are at risk, and other
international dangers (tensions between India and Pakistan, North and
South Korea, and China and Taiwan, and economic crisis in Latin
America, to name a few) are looming. If the war succeeds in toppling
Hussein, the United States will be saddled with the new
responsibilities of occupying, administering, rebuilding,
democratizing, and stabilizing Iraq (beyond its existing
responsibilities in Afghanistan), tasks of unreckoned costs and
manifold difficulties for which neither the American public nor the
administration have demonstrated much understanding, skill, or stomach.
In the light of all this, the enterprise merely on practical grounds
looks remarkably rash.
Yet even these grave considerations should not take
priority over questions of principle: do we have a right to wage
preemptive war against Iraq to overthrow its regime? Would this be a
necessary and just war? What long-range effects would it have on the
international system? If the answers to these questions make this truly
a necessary and just war, Americans ought to be willing to make
sacrifices and undergo risks for it.
On these critical issues the administration has so far won
by default. The assumption that a war to overthrow Hussein would be a
just war and one that, if it succeeded without excessive negative side
effects, would serve everyone’s interests has gone largely
unchallenged, at least in the mainstream. The administration’s
justification for preemptive war is the traditional one: that the
dangers and costs of inaction far outweigh those of acting now. Saddam
Hussein, an evil despot, a serial aggressor, an implacable enemy of the
United States, and a direct menace to his neighbors must be deposed
before he acquires weapons of mass destruction that he might use or let
others use against Americans or its allies and friends. A few thousand
Americans died in the last terrorist attack; many millions could die in
the next one. Time is against us; once Hussein acquires such weapons,
he cannot be overthrown without enormous losses and dangers.
Persuasion, negotiation, and conciliation are worse than useless with
him. Sanctions and coercive diplomacy have failed. Conventional
deterrence is equally unreliable. Preemptive action to remove him from
power is the only effective remedy and will promote durable peace in
the region.
This essay proposes to confront this case for preemptive
war on Iraq head on. My argument stresses principles and long-term
structural effects rather than prudence and short-term results. It
rests not on judgments and predictions about future military and
political developments, which I am not qualified to make, but on a
perspective missing from the current discussion, derived from history,
especially the history of European and world politics over the last
four centuries. Rather than criticizing the proposed preemptive war on
prudential grounds, it opposes the idea itself, contending that an
American campaign to overthrow Hussein by armed force would be an
unjust, aggressive, imperialist war which even if it succeeded (indeed,
perhaps especially if it succeeded), would have negative, potentially
disastrous effects on our alliances and friendships, American
leadership in the world, the existing international system, and the
prospects for general peace, order, and stability. In other words, a
preemptive war on Iraq would be not merely foolish and dangerous, but
wrong.
This essay attempts to build a case against the war on
systemic grounds; it cannot for reasons of space hope to treat
all-important aspects of that systemic case or answer all possible
questions and challenges. It talks about the damage a preemptive war
would do to the existing international system, but not about the
equally important impacts it could have in terms of side effects on
nascent changes in the international system needed to meet new problems
already looming on the horizon. It draws on international history in
regard to preemptive wars, but will not take up a legitimate though
tricky question of counterfactual history, i.e., whether certain
preemptive wars, had they been waged in the past, might have averted
disasters as the advocates of such a war against Iraq claim a war will
do now. (1) While examining the official case for a war on Iraq, it
will not take up, except in passing fashion in the last footnote, what
is possibly the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy
– security for Israel.
Even with these limits, this is a tall order for a short
essay; the argument must be highly compressed and asserted rather than
demonstrated here. But it can be condensed into four fairly simple
propositions: that a preemptive war on Iraq would be
Illegitimate, because it cannot be justified on
any of the grounds by which preemptive wars are and should be judged
and would represent and promote dangerous, lawless international
behavior; Incompatible with the purpose, spirit, and aims of
the worldwide military and political alliances which the United States
leads, and therefore harmful both to these alliances and to American
leadership; Incompatible also with the two central principles
by which the international system has evolved over centuries, namely,
the right of all states to be recognized and treated as independent,
and the simultaneous and corresponding need and requirement for states
to become part of associations for common purposes and to follow the
rules; Unnecessary, unhelpful, and utopian (better, dystopian)
because some of the goals the administration proposes to achieve by
preemptive war are impossible to achieve by any means, and because the
essential, legitimate American aims and the requirements of the
international community vis-à-vis Iraq can be better realized by other means.
Why Preemptive Wars Are Rarely Justified, And This One Cannot Be
Whether starting a preemptive war is justified in
a particular instance is not primarily a question of international law.
The critical question is whether the action is one of aggression or of
legitimate self-defense, and no law can answer that. There are,
however, criteria for judging the action, deriving from something more
basic in international politics than specific international laws: the
unwritten understandings international actors reach on an ongoing basis
as to what is within the bounds, is permissible or not under the rules
of the game. These understandings change with time and circumstance, of
course, but a fairly wide and stable consensus on this particular issue
has developed, especially in recent centuries.
To justify a resort to preemptive war, a state needs to
give reasonable evidence that the step was necessary, forced upon the
initiator by its opponents, and also that it represented a lesser evil,
i.e., that the dangers and evils averted by war outweighed those caused
the international community by initiating it. This requires showing
that the threat to be preempted is (a) clear and imminent, such that
prompt action is required to meet it; (b) direct, that is, threatening
the party initiating the conflict in specific concrete ways, thus
entitling that party to act preemptively; (c) critical, in the sense
that the vital interests of the initiating party face unacceptable harm
and danger; and (d) unmanageable, that is, not capable of being
deterred or dealt with by other peaceful means. These criteria are
naturally open to interpretation and contest. They represent, however,
a consensus of enlightened international opinion, make sense of
historical experience, and are easily illustrated with historical
examples. They have helped actors in the past judge claims and weigh
arguments for preemptive wars and have had some effect in deterring
illegitimate resorts to it.(2) They are stringent; most claims made to
justify preemptive wars do not pass the test, which is as it should be.
But the criteria are not unrealistic or utopian, and do allow for
preemptive war in certain particular cases.(3)
In fact, the rhetoric of administration leaders
and their supporters urging a preemptive war against Iraq indicates
that they are generally aware of these criteria and attempt to justify
it on these terms. But they cannot; their arguments everywhere break
down.
To show that the threat is clear and imminent, the
president and his supporters repeatedly insist that Saddam Hussein has
long wanted weapons of mass destruction and tried to develop them.
Since 1998, he has prevented the United Nations' international
inspectors from returning to Iraq. He may therefore already be close to
acquiring such weapons. The United States must stop him before he
succeeds.
Seriously examined, this proves the opposite of
what is required--that the threat is not clear and imminent. It
indicates what, under pressure, administration spokesmen must admit: we
simply do not know whether Iraq has developed weapons of mass
destruction, or whether it will, or when. Still less do we know what
Hussein would do with them if and when he obtained any. What is more,
we do not seem greatly interested in finding out. Pleas from our
closest allies, including even Tony Blair in Britain, that there must
be a real effort to get UN inspectors back into Iraq before taking any
other action against it, meet with impatient skepticism; any suggestion
from Iraq that it might agree to this demand is dismissed as a bad
joke; Vice President Richard Cheney insists that even actual UN
inspections would not be enough. In short, the administration really
does not know whether there is a clear and imminent threat from Iraq,
cannot prove that one exists, and resists proposals for finding out
because the answer might undermine its plans for war.
To show that the threat is direct, i.e.,
specific, concrete, and pointed at the United States, administration
spokesmen and other advocates of preemptive war deduce from Saddam
Hussein’s criminal record and evil character, especially the fact that
he used poison gas in his war against Iran and against his own people
in the 1980s and has resorted to brutal repression since, that if and
when he obtains weapons of mass destruction he could and would use them
against the United States or its allies in the region.
In so doing, they ignore certain inconvenient
facts – that the United States generally supported Iraq in its war
against Iran, may have known and winked at his use of chemical weapons,
and never at that time considered Hussein’s attack on Iran or the
atrocities perpetrated in it grounds for overthrowing him, and that the
people whom Hussein brutally repressed in 1991 were mainly Kurds whom
the United States encouraged to rise against him and then failed to
support. The main point, however, is that again these arguments fail to
prove what they are supposed to – i.e., that the threat from Iraq is
concrete, specific, and directed against the United States or any
American ally. They prove only what hardly needs proof, that Saddam
Hussein is a ruthless despot who will do anything to stay in power,
including using poison gas against external and internal enemies in a
losing war or slaughtering his rebellious subjects. He might indeed use
weapons of mass destruction against anyone for reasons of political
survival – a point which counts if anything against attacking him and
putting him into that kind of corner. But this says nothing about what
he might do with them under other circumstances for other purposes and
certainly fails to show that he would use them against the United
States or its allies or allow terrorists to do so. Stalin had nuclear
weapons, was a worse sociopath than Hussein and even more paranoid
about threats to his reign, and his record of atrocities against his
own people was far worse than Hussein’s; yet none of this gave any
indication whether or how he would use nuclear weapons in his foreign
policy. On that score, he was demonstrably cautious.
In fact, it is extremely unlikely that Hussein
would do something so suicidal as to attack the United States or one of
its allies directly, or allow a proxy to do so, and the administration
knows it. One expert witness at the Senate hearings on the proposed
campaign against Iraq, frankly admitting this, remarked that the real
danger was that possessing such weapons would give Hussein and Iraq
more influence in the region (a significant admission).
The administration’s case thus fails both the
imminence and the directness tests. Its attempts to prove that the
threat is critical are no stronger. They consist mainly of repeatedly
invoking the memory of 9/11 and the war on terrorism, the right of
American citizens to security against terrifying new threats revealed
by that attack, the duty of their government to provide that security
at all costs, and (once again) the possibility that Hussein, if he does
get control of nuclear or other weapons, will supply them to terrorists
for use against the United States. All this lays the basis for the
general doctrine, repeatedly proclaimed, that the United States has a
right to prevent weapons of mass destruction from coming into the hands
of evil, hostile regimes by any means necessary.
I reserve for later some discussion of how novel,
dangerous, and subversive of international order and peace this new,
unprecedented American doctrine is. Here the point is that these
arguments the administration and its supporters use again undercut the
case for preemptive war.
How? Because they prove that the threat of
international terrorism, even if it were the critical danger the
administration claims it to be, does not stem from Hussein or Iraq and
will not be met by ousting him. Despite many efforts, no one in the
administration has ever proved a connection between Hussein or others
in the Iraqi regime and September 11 or al-Qaeda and its terrorist
activities. The evidence and probabilities, all well-known, point the
other way. Hussein’s regime and his ruling party are secular rather
than Islamist. He rules a country deeply divided along ethnic and
religious lines, and belongs to a branch of Islam (the Sunnis) that is
a minority in Iraq. He has good selfish reasons to fear radical
Islamism and terrorist activity just as other governments do. Why
should a ruler obsessed with maintaining his power collaborate with
some of his most dangerous enemies?
The only way to argue that overthrowing Hussein
would help protect Americans from international terrorism would be to
claim a beneficial ripple effect from it. By demonstrating American
resolve and leadership, it would discourage terrorists from targeting
us and frighten off hostile regimes from helping or harboring them
while encouraging other governments to join us in the fight. This is
pure guesswork and very unconvincing. Our allies and friends consider a
preemptive war on Iraq a proof not of resolve and leadership, but of
recklessness and unilateralism and want no part of it. Terrorists and
their sympathizers would find in it more weapons with which to vilify
the United States, recruit followers, and bring down the traitorous
Arab and Muslim regimes cooperating with America.
And so the administration’s case fails again. The more one
thinks about it, the more implausible it becomes to claim that the
United States, a superpower with an historically unprecedented position
of unchallenged military superiority, is threatened by an impoverished,
ruined, insecure state halfway round the world. Yet surely, one might
object, the administration’s case is right in one important respect:
that whatever threat, great or small, an Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein
and possessing weapons of mass destruction would present would be
impossible to manage or deter by normal peaceful means. No moral
scruples, religious or philosophical principles, or appeals to the
long-range interests of his country would stop him from using them
against us or any other enemy, and ordinary means of negotiation,
coercion, and deterrence have manifestly failed in dealing with him.
Therefore, overthrowing him by war (the administration’s euphemism for
this is “regime change”) is the only remaining choice.
Well, yes, this argument is correct – in one limited
sense. If our basic problem is that Saddam Hussein is an evil ruler
with hostile and dangerous attitudes and purposes, and if the only
solution to that problem we will accept is to get rid of him right now,
then the problem is indeed insoluble by peaceful means. All our past
methods of dealing with him – first conciliation and appeasement, then
war and crushing defeat, then extreme economic, political and military
sanctions, and now massive overt threats – have failed. He remains a
villain and remains in power. But to claim that any ruler we consider
evil and hostile represents a danger to peace and American interests
and security such that he should be overthrown by American military
power is a really extraordinary claim – one that the rest of the world
must sooner or later find intolerable and one out of keeping with
central American traditions and values. We have not reached our
position in the world by dealing with evil, hostile rulers and regimes
through this policy of “regime change.” (To be sure, we have sometimes
used it, but mainly in dealing with small, weak governments in our own
hemisphere, and these exercises in “regime change” have had, to put it
charitably, very mixed results). In dealing with real, major evils and
threats both to the United States and the world such as those once
represented by the Soviet Union, China, and their allies, we have won
not by waging preemptive war for “regime change” but by deterring
opponents from aggression and relying on outliving them, proving the
superiority of our own system, and ultimately inducing peaceful change. That is the real American way.
Equally important, one simply cannot argue on the mere
ground of Hussein’s survival that coercion and deterrence have failed
with Iraq and must be replaced by preemptive war. The purpose of
coercion and deterrence in international relations is to deter
– to stop dangerous regimes and rulers from actually doing things that
harm or threaten others--not to make such regimes disappear or such
rulers commit suicide. For purposes of deterring Iraq, the coercive
measures imposed since 1991 have worked well. Before 1991, Hussein did
many things in foreign policy that were clearly aggressive, above all
his war on Iran and his seizure of Kuwait. Since then, Iraq, greatly
weakened and restrained, has done nothing that could be called
aggression against its neighbors. This is successful deterrence –
effected, to be sure, at some cost to the United States in terms of
effort and reputation, and enormous cost to the Iraqi people in terms
of lives and standard of living, but, from a purely power-political
point of view nonetheless the desired overall outcome. That Iraq and
Hussein himself are not the regional menace they once were is shown by
Iran’s rapprochement with its old enemy and by the warning Iraq’s
historic rival for leadership of the Arab world, Egypt, now gives its
American patron against war. They fear another war on Iraq more than
they fear Iraq.
Thus the
administration’s case for preemptive war on Iraq fails the test on
every criterion. But who cares? Why should we care if what America does
in its own interest for its self-defense and that of its friends fails
to satisfy some arbitrary legalistic criteria concocted by some liberal
theorists and professors? What relevance do these arguments and
examples drawn from history have in a world completely changed by
weapons of mass destruction, instantaneous global communication and
interpenetration, globalization of the economy, and the prospect of
modern weapons and tools being used against us by fanatics driven by
extremist ideologies?
We had better care. Norms, rules, standards of conduct,
understandings about what is and is not permissible still count in
international relations, now more than ever. They govern the
expectations and calculations of statesmen; they influence public
opinion and play a major role in the struggle for hearts and minds,
increasingly important in this age of rising democracy, mass
participation in politics, and instantaneous global communication. They
form a central component of essential values in international politics
– those universal values we constantly claim to be defending against
the enemies of humankind. These norms, rules, and standards are vital
not because they are immutable, unchallengeable, and enduring, but
precisely because they are not. They are changeable, fragile, gained
only by great effort and through bitter lessons of history, and easily
destroyed, set aside, or changed for the worse for the sake of
momentary gain or individual interest. And the fate of these norms and
standards depends above all on what great powers, especially
superpowers and hegemons, do with them and to them. The actions of
great powers above all shape norms, mold expectations, provoke
reactions, invite imitation and emulation, uphold or destroy or change
the prevailing rules.
Consider what norm the administration’s planned attack
will set for the world. The United States will be declaring not simply
verbally but by using its overwhelming armed force that a state may
justly launch a war against another much smaller and weaker state even
though it cannot prove that the enemy represents an imminent, direct,
and critical threat, or show that the threat could not be deterred or
managed by means other than war. It need only claim that the regime and
its leader are evil, harbor hostile intentions, were attempting to arm
themselves with dangerous weapons, and might therefore attempt at some
future time to carry out their hostile aims, and that this claim as to
an opponent’s potential capabilities and intentions, a claim made
solely by the attacking state and not subject to any international
examination, justifies that state in eliminating the allegedly
dangerous regime and leader preemptively.
A more dangerous, illegitimate norm and example can
hardly be imagined. As could easily be shown by history, it completely
subverts previous standards for judging the legitimacy of resorts to
war, justifying any number of wars hitherto considered unjust and
aggressive. It would, for example, justify not only the Austro-German
decision for preventive war on Serbia in 1914, condemned by most
historians, but also a German attack on Russia and/or France as urged
by some German generals on numerous occasions between 1888 and 1914. It
would in fact justify almost any attack by any state on any other for
almost any reason. This is not a theoretical or academic point. The
American example and standard for preemptive war, if carried out, would
invite imitation and emulation, and get it. One can easily imagine
plausible scenarios in which India could justly attack Pakistan or vice
versa, or Israel any one of its neighbors, or China Taiwan, or South
Korea North Korea, under this rule that suspicion of what a hostile
regime might do justifies launching preventive wars to overthrow it.
We cannot want a world that operates on this
principle, and therefore we cannot really want to use it ourselves. In
a real, practical sense, Immanuel Kant’s famous ethical principle that
one must so act that the principle of one’s action could become a
universal law must also influence the conduct of states in
international politics, above all the policy of the world’s only
superpower. Without some application of it especially in critical cases
like this, a sane, durable international system becomes impossible.
Why a Preemptive War Would Undermine Our Alliances and World Leadership
The previous discussion makes it possible to
answer this question more quickly. Many practical, prudential reasons
explain why our allies almost unanimously oppose the idea of preemptive
war on Iraq (some of them grounds already mentioned that ought to worry
Americans as well). Europe has special reasons for concern: the large
Muslim and communities within many European states and the effects an
American attack would have on their domestic politics; the fact that
Europe’s relations with the Arab and Muslim world geographically,
historically and culturally, and even economically are much closer to
the Middle East than ours, so that the repercussions of war (an oil
shock, for example) could easily be far worse for them than for us.
In other words, Europeans see the United
States riding roughshod over many European interests in a critical area
where they have more at stake than do the Americans. And if that holds
for Europeans, it holds trebly for the countries of the Middle East
itself, Israel excepted. Turkey and Iran, for example, are directly,
vitally interested in avoiding a war in which Iraq might break up and
the Kurds fight for their independence. No Arab leader, however opposed
to Saddam Hussein, wants to see Iraq destroyed or another Arab state
crushed and humiliated by a Western power. And of course no moderate or
pro-Western Arab or Muslim regime, vulnerable precisely because it is
pro-Western, wants to stoke the fires of radical dissent and revolution
with more television pictures of more Arabs being killed and their
country subjugated by the Great Satan, infidel America.
Yet prudential considerations, powerful
though they are, do not exhaust the reasons for the European
opposition. (I cannot speak about Arabs and Muslims with any
confidence.) The basic reason is precisely the one identified and
discussed above: the sense that this will be an unjustified,
unnecessary war, and that regardless of how it turns out militarily it
will have bad long-range political consequences.
Many Americans explain away this opposition
in Europe as the product of instinctive anti-Americanism, envy of
American power, cynicism and world-despair (Weltschmerz),
a war-weariness that makes them not merely eager to avoid more war, but
ready to appease third-world dictators, the sense of their own decline
and relative unimportance in the world, an inability to unite behind a
common European foreign policy and defense capability accompanied by a
tendency to carp at America for acting without them, and sometimes even
anti-Semitism or a bias against Israel.
This
is unfair, even where there is a modicum of substance to the charges.
Americans ought to heed the advice of logician Morris Cohen: “First, if
you can, refute my arguments. Then, if you must, impugn my motives.”
How little real, deep anti-Americanism there is in Europe and how
ineffective it has been in influencing government policy have been
repeatedly demonstrated in the past fifty years, right down to the
reaction to September 11. Europeans, like Canadians, are not really
envious or afraid of American power per se
– at least their governments are not, which is what counts. These
governments have been, if anything, too cautious in confronting the
United States and asserting their views, rights, and interests as
allies. What they fear is what they see as an ignorant, arrogant
American hubris and recklessness in the use of that power increasingly
evidenced by this administration, especially on this issue.
If
this is true, it bodes ill for the future of the Atlantic alliance, a
crucial element of world peace and stability over the last fifty years.
No doubt this uniquely durable and flexible alliance has survived
innumerable challenges and stresses and already outlived the
predictions of its obsolescence and demise since the end of the Cold
War. It is also true that differences between the U.S.A. and its
partners have always existed, and that there were European and Canadian
complaints of American unilateralism and excessive reliance on force,
answered by American charges of appeasement and indecision leveled
against them, long before this issue became acute. But this is
different. Other issues on which the two sides have disagreed during
this administration (capital punishment, the Kyoto Protocol, the
International Criminal Court, issues of trade and tariffs, etc.) do not
really concern the central security and foreign policy aspects of the
alliance. This issue goes to its heart. When the United States makes
publicly clear that it intends to launch military action to overthrow
the regime in a key state with which Europe has important relations
regardless of what its alliance partners and other friends (e.g.,
Russia) think of the idea, this touches the core of the alliance as a
joint instrument for security, peace, and freedom as nothing else has
done in the past.
How? Both
because the unilateral American planning of preemptive war against Iraq
concerns the central collective security purposes of NATO and its
machinery for joint action and alliance solidarity in critical
situations, and also because here the general European approach to
international peace clashes headlong with the American version (at
least that of this administration). It will not do for the
administration to say, as it often has, that it will be glad to consult
with its European allies, but will do whatever it considers necessary
for the defense of American interests regardless of what anyone else
thinks. An essential element of any alliance relationship is that
allies must exert influence on the foreign policy of their partner(s)
and that the joint alliance policy must take account of the concerns of
all the partners. The administration’s stand on Iraq flatly contravenes
that basic requirement for a durable alliance.
If this persists, it will not necessarily
mean the formal end of NATO, but it will mean its hollowing out, as
America’s partners search for other combinations to defend their
interests and find refuge from the likely consequences of America’s
actions and as America’s opponents are encouraged to seek partners and
form coalitions against it. America’s power and position are strong
enough and its margin of error wide enough that it can get away with a
good deal of what one administration spokesman described as
“internationalism à la carte,” calling for support where it
wants it, going its own way when it wishes, and insisting on having its
way as the leader. But there are limits, and on this crucial issue the
United States could well overstep them.
Why This Preemptive War Would Attack the Foundations of the International System – and Why We Should Care
This is a bit more abstract and needs a
little more thumbnail history of the current international system to
explain, but the basic point is not hard to understand. The planned war
would violate and weaken the two basic principles which, developed over
the past five centuries and combined in a fruitful tension, have
enabled the international system to work and peace to grow in our own
time.
Since the 16th century, the international
system, first confined to Western Europe, then expanding to all of
Europe, then becoming global under European domination, and now simply
global, has developed inexorably though unevenly, with many advances
and retreats, in two fundamental directions, different and divergent
from each other, but nevertheless inextricably united. The first
direction is the recognition and acceptance of the idea that the system
must consist of independent units (in the main, states) coexisting in a
coordinate system of equal juridical status and rights, as opposed to
the medieval hierarchical system in which power and authority descended
in ranks from God to Emperor to kings and princes down to the lowliest
peasant. The triumph of this principle is usually ascribed, not wrongly
but too simply and prematurely, to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648
ending the Thirty Years War and the era of religious wars in Europe.
The second major direction of development appears
directly contrary to the first. It is the movement toward the
association of independent units in international relations into unions
(leagues, alliances, confederations, associations, etc.) for common
vital purposes that could be realized only through such associations,
the most important of these being stable peace and security. The
fundamental story of that movement toward association, allowing for all
the ups and downs, advances and retreats, is that this movement, though
hopeless and marginal in its effects in the 16th, 17th, and much of the
18th centuries, nonetheless experienced a major early flowering in the
19th, and, after apparently disastrous setbacks in the early 20th has
ripened and borne unprecedented fruit in the late 20th century.
I am aware that the notion that the
history of international politics over the last four to five centuries
has been one fundamentally of the growth and development of
international peace will strike many as absurd, if not perverse. Yet I
think it can be demonstrated (though not here). The central point is
that while it may be difficult and controversial to document a decline
in the incidence of war and other violent international conflict,
including organized terrorism, there is no question or difficulty at
all in demonstrating the reality over the centuries of a huge,
immensely valuable growth in international peace. Critical areas of
modern international relations – trade and business, communications,
travel by land, sea and sky, the commercial use and exploitation of the
sea and sky, international tourism and travel, international science
and scholarship, immigration and emigration, the control of state
borders, international property rights and business practices – even
human and civil rights and religion – which were once in the realm of
war, that is, governed solely by power, force, fraud, and individual
state self-interest, have now throughout the developed world been
generally brought into the realm of peace. That is, they have been
brought under the governance of international treaties, conventions,
common practices, and institutions to enforce jointly accepted rules.
Where this is not true in certain parts of the world, we notice, it
makes a critical difference, and we try to do something about it. The
modern world in which we participate, from which we profit, and of
which we boast could not operate without this enormous expansion of the
realm of peace in international affairs. And this expansion is the
product of a long-sought, dearly-bought, highly fragile combination of
these two fundamental principles of modern international relations: the
recognition of state independence, and the willing acceptance by most
international actors of the necessity and benefits of international
associations and their requirements and rules.
This structure is what the
intended American preemptive war on Iraq threatens and would violate.
It would do so in two ways: by denying the right of Iraq to be treated
as an independent state, and by rejecting the obligation of the United
States to comply with the requirement bearing on all states to join in
international associations and to abide by certain rules. The
fundamental offense committed by Iraq against the United States is not
any particular aggression or criminal act. The only one of these in the
litany of Saddam Hussein’s crimes and to which we decided to respond
was his occupation of Kuwait, and that was duly reversed and punished.
The offense has been and still is that Iraq, under the leadership of
someone we consider an international criminal, has purportedly been
trying persistently to acquire the same weapons that both we and some
of our best friends and a number of neutral states already possess,
namely, weapons of mass destruction. Note that our argument is not that
these weapons (nuclear, biological, chemical) are inherently illegal
and dangerous and should be banned universally by the international
community. We could not argue that without condemning ourselves along
with our friends, as we are notoriously the world’s largest possessors
of such weapons and have no intention of giving them up. The charge is
rather that states like Iraq, because they have undemocratic
governments, unjust social structures, dangerous ideologies, and
criminal leaders (all according to American criteria) have no inherent
right to seek or possess the same weapons of mass destruction as
law-abiding democratic states possess, and deserve to be restrained,
punished, and finally militarily overthrown by the United States if
they persist in developing them, regardless of what other states think
about this procedure.
Only deliberate effort enables one
fully to grasp the implications of such a position. It is as clear a
negation of the fundamental principle of the juridical equality and
coordinate status of all recognized states within the international
system as one could imagine. To put it bluntly, it declares that there
is one law for the United States and other states of which it approves,
and another law for all the rest. It is Orwellian: all states are
equal, but some, especially the United States, are vastly more equal
than others. There is no state, allied, friendly, neutral, or hostile,
that will not note this implication, and fear it.
This position and policy is more
than Orwellian; it is imperialist. I know full well how slippery,
ill-defined, and emotionally loaded this term usually is, and how often
and easily it is abused. Let me, at the risk of personalizing the
discussion, state quickly the standpoint from which I make this claim.
I consider myself by every standard save that of the current one-sided
American political spectrum a conservative, especially in political
outlook and general world view. I have no sympathy with the view that
America has been historically an imperialist power. There are major
imperialist chapters and aspects in its history, of course, and it was
a full participant with others in the great wave of late 19th and early
20th century European imperialism, but its founding ideology was and
remains anti-imperialist, it has passed up more tempting opportunities
for imperialist gain than it seized, and its overall record is more
anti-imperialist than imperialist down to this day. Nor do I share the
left-wing denunciation of American hegemony as per se
a great menace today. It has its dangers and negative aspects, but on
balance American leadership has done much more good than harm in the
decades since World War II, and I want it in general to continue. It is
precisely from this conservative, pro-American stance that I claim that
this would be an imperialist war.
I do
so because there is no defensible definition of imperialism that would
not fix that label upon it. Imperialism means simply and centrally the
exercise of final authority and decision-making power by one government
over another government or community foreign to itself. Empire does not
require the direct annexation and administration of a foreign territory
or its people; in fact, it usually does not mean that at all. Imperial
rule is normally indirect, exercised through local authorities co-opted
by the imperial regime. This was the case with the Roman Empire, the
so-called Holy Roman Empire, the British, the Ottoman, the Napoleonic,
and many others one could name – even Hitler‘s short-lived one. All
that is required for an imperial relationship is that the final
authority and power over crucial decisions of foreign policy, war and
peace, and the place of the territory and people within the
international system lie with the imperial power.
This is the relationship between
America and Iraq that this war intends and is designed to establish. We
intend to use armed force against Iraq in order to acquire the power to
decide who shall rule Iraq, what kind of government it will have, what
kind of weapons it will develop for its own security, what kind of
foreign policy it will have, and whose side and what stance it will
take in the crucial questions affecting it and its region (Israel,
terrorism, Islamism versus secular rule, even for some Americans what
kind of economy it will develop and what kind of educational and social
systems it will erect under American tutelage). This is clearly
imperialism, even if we claim and really believe that we are doing it
for noble ends – liberation, democracy, capitalism, human rights,
whatever. 19th
century imperialism was also conducted under the banner of noble ends –
Christianity, civilization, an end to the slave trade, economic
development, etc.
Let no one reply that this is what we did to Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan after World War II, with great benefit to them and the
rest of the world. We went to war with these powers because they
attacked us and many other nations. That was a justified defensive war,
and the dimensions of the war, the enormous damage it did, the crimes
and atrocities Germany and Japan committed in it (though we and our
allies were not blameless), and the dimensions of their defeat
justified and virtually compelled an occupation and period of tutelage.
A preemptive war on Iraq is a totally different proposition.
Besides being imperialist in
violating one fundamental basis of world order, the recognition of the
independence and equal status of states, this war also would violate
its counterpart, the principle of association and the need to observe
community rules and bounds. In planning and preparing for this war, the
United States is declaring to the world that it really does not
consider this principle of association binding upon it; that the
American government intends to decide what is best for the United
States itself, on its own, listening perhaps to what allies and friends
have to say, but acting strictly for its own self-defined interests;
and that we do not need the sanction of the UN, NATO, or any other
association or institution to which we belong and lead to justify it –
this despite our knowledge that in this issue and decision the vital
interests of many other countries, some of them our closest allies, are
at stake even more than our own.
Once again, we cannot want a world that operates by these rules – but that is the world we would be promoting.
Why A Preemptive War On Iraq Is Unnecessary And Unhelpful For Security
One possible response to this
argument might go as follows: “If you are right that we should not do
this, what do you suggest as the alternative – that we simply sit on
our hands and let Hussein and other dangerous leaders develop weapons
of mass destruction with no control on their possible use by themselves
or by terrorists? Must we really wait until we (i.e., the United States
and allied countries it protects) are actually attacked or at least
overtly, directly, demonstrably threatened before we may justifiably
respond?”
That this does not guarantee
perfect security for us or anyone else is true – but nothing can, least
of all preemptive war. We have, however, powerful means of defense and
deterrence both within our own hands and available through the
international system – another good reason for not wrecking it by
preemptive war. If new, more effective means to check new dangers are
needed, this system is the way to develop them. If we use these means
and this system sensibly, we can enjoy a measure of security far
greater than most of the rest of the world has enjoyed in the past or
enjoys now.
If this seems not good enough, it
is because of our own unrealistic perceptions and expectations. There
can be no perfect security against either terrorism or weapons of mass
destruction – especially not through the use of military force. Trying
to eliminate all the possible nests and sources of terrorism through
military action is like trying to kill fleas with a hammer: it does
more damage to oneself and the environment than to the fleas. (This
does not at all rule out armed police actions like those against the
Taliban or identifiable rebel groups.) The idea of eliminating all evil
regimes that might use weapons of mass destruction or let terrorists
use them is impossible and counterproductive, a bad dream.
What too many seem to forget,
however, is that we and others have lived through this sort of danger
before, and that defensive measures short of war can work. The menace
of having nuclear weapons in the hands of mortal enemies who might use
them against us was far greater during the Cold War than it is now. A
few then called for preventive war to eliminate it; they were, thank
God, not heeded. Terrorism has been around for centuries, and several
countries in the 19th and 20th centuries, notably Spain, Russia, Italy,
and the United Kingdom, survived worse terrorist campaigns and threats
than we have experienced or are likely to experience. Right now the
threat of terrorism is greater for the Philippines, Israel, Colombia,
Peru, Nepal, and Sri Lanka than for us. Terrorism, like nuclear war, is
an evil we must of course combat, but cannot hope to extirpate and must
learn to endure and outlive.
In other words, a preemptive war
against Iraq would be unnecessary as well as wrong, and would serve no
useful purpose (4)
while doing us, the Iraqi people, the world, and the international
system great harm. When the great American historian Charles A. Beard
was asked at the end of his career what was the most important thing he
had learned from history, he replied, “That the mills of God grind
slowly, but they grind exceeding small, and that chickens always come
home to roost.” He was an agnostic, and so presumably meant only that
this was the way history ultimately worked out, and that long-range
systemic consequences were the most important. He was right. If we
carry out what we are now planning, then regardless of any short-term
success we may have, our chickens will ultimately come home to roost.
FOOTNOTES
* I wish to thank Dr. Levin von Trott zu Solz and
Professors Edward Kolodziej, John Mueller, Margaret L. Anderson, Juan
Cole, and David Kaiser for helpful comments and suggestions.
(1) I will mention only one such argument in passing here:
the superficially plausible idea that a preventive war launched against
Hitler’s Germany in 1936 at the time of Germany’s reoccupation of the
Rhineland or in 1938 at the annexation of Austria would have prevented
all the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. (A war at the time
of the Munich Crisis would not have been preemptive, but rather a
legitimate defensive war fought by France and the Soviet Union in
fulfillment of their clear alliance obligations to Czechoslovakia, with
Britain joining in for the same balance of power reasons that had
brought it into World War I.) My reply, in sketchy thumbnail fashion,
would be that asking French and British statesmen in 1936 or early 1938
to launch a preemptive war against Germany on the basis of what Germany
had done to that point would amount not only to asking them to commit
political suicide, but to demanding that they play God or be God. No
one could know in 1936 or 1938 the true, horrible extent of future Nazi
crimes and therefore know or predict that preemptive war would prevent
a world war of catastrophic dimensions or a Holocaust. The predictable
and calculable evils of launching a preemptive war at that time, in
other words, outweighed the predictable, calculable evils of waiting
and trying to prevent war entirely. The real criticism of British and
French policy is not their failure to launch preemptive war, but their
failure or refusal to take either the Rhineland occupation or the
Anschluss seriously and to undertake a resolute course of deterrence
and collective security. In fact, both events caused them to abandon
the half-hearted efforts at deterrence of Germany they had initiated
and go over to appeasement. Thus the argument for preemptive war in the
1930’s really supports the case made here for deterrence.
(2) For example, it was these general criteria that guided
Prince Bismarck in rejecting the urgings of General Count Waldersee,
the Prussian army’s Chief of Staff, for preventive war on Russia in
1888-89, and that led Emperor Franz Joseph and several of his chief
ministers to resist up to 1914 the various schemes for preventive war
promoted by the Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff General Conrad von
Hoetzendorf.
(3) Let me flesh this out with a little history, not to
prove my points (impossible in a short essay) but to illustrate them
and keep them from being naked assertions. Four examples of preemptive
wars that I consider justified are Prussia’s attack on Saxony in 1756,
which set off the Seven Years War, Japan’s attack on Russia in 1904,
and Israel’s resort to preemptive attacks on Egypt in 1956 and 1967. In
every case all the stated criteria are met. Note, however, that even in
these cases those who chose preemptive war were not necessarily
blameless, or fighting purely in self-defense. Prussia had largely
created the Austro-Russian-French threat against it by its lawless
seizure of Austrian Silesia in 1740. Japan, though genuinely threatened
by Russian imperialism, also had its own program of imperialism in East
Asia. And, as revisionist Israeli historians have proved, territorial
expansion was a part of Israeli aims in starting both these wars. Still
less do these examples or others make preemptive war, even when
justified, necessarily a wise choice or indicate that if victorious it
will have good results. The attacking state in all these instances of
justified preemptive war won the resulting war or at least did not
lose. But each of these preemptive wars, even though successful, led to
more conflict and complications later, and the more normal results of
preemptive war are much worse. Austria, for example, tried preemptive
war twice in the 19th century – against Napoleon in 1809 and against
Sardinia-Piedmont in 1859 – and once in the 20th– against Serbia in
1914. In the first and last instances, I would argue (though many
historians would disagree) that the Austrians had a pretty good case
justifying preemptive war as their only way to remain an independent
great power. Yet all three ended disastrously. In other words,
preemptive war can occasionally be justified as a last resort, but it
is never inherently a good policy – only in certain cases the least bad
one available.
(4) There is one possible (in my view, likely) motive for
the planned war that I will mention only in this footnote, not because
it is unimportant but because it involves too many delicate issues to
be discussed adequately here. Some have ascribed President Bush’s
determination to oust Saddam Hussein to certain personal or domestic
political aims, among them his desire both to emulate his father and to
surpass him while avoiding his mistakes, especially the alleged mistake
of failing to finish the job of destroying Hussein’s regime in 1991.
Without claiming any privileged sources of information, I doubt that
these are more than contributing factors. Much more plausible is the
suggestion that this plan is being promoted in the interests of Israel.
Certainly it is being pushed very hard by a number of influential
supporters of Israel of the hawkish neoconservative stripe in and
outside the administration (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William
Kristol and others), and one could easily make the case that a
successful preventive war on Iraq would promote particular Israeli
security interests more than general American ones.
If this is an important factor,
then I would make just two comments. First, it would represent
something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great
powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight
for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a
great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy
of a small client state. Second, while Israel’s survival and security
certainly represent a vital interest for the United States, the Middle
East, and the world, I am convinced that a preemptive war on Iraq would
be as counterproductive in the long run as the Israeli occupation of
Lebanon engineered by Ariel Sharon or the current Sharon/Likud efforts
to destroy Palestinian resistance and terrorism and abort any
independent Palestinian state by sheer military force. There are better
ways for America to insure Israel’s survival, including, for example, a
full, formal military alliance and territorial guarantee. But that is a
separate though closely related topic too vast and complex to open here.