by hilzoy
From the NYT:
“As the Senate prepares to begin a new debate this week on proposals for a withdrawal from Iraq, the United States ambassador and the Iraqi foreign minister are warning that the departure of American troops could lead to sharply increased violence, the deaths of thousands and a regional conflict that could draw in Iraq’s neighbors.
Two months before a pivotal assessment of progress in the war that he and the overall American military commander in Iraq are to make to the White House and Congress in September, Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador, laid out a grim forecast of what could happen if the policy debate in Washington led to a significant pullback or even withdrawal of American forces, perhaps to bases outside the major cities.
“You can’t build a whole policy on a fear of a negative, but, boy, you’ve really got to account for it,” Mr. Crocker said Saturday in an interview at his office in Saddam Hussein’s old Republican Palace, now the seat of American power here. Setting out what he said was not a policy prescription but a review of issues that needed to be weighed, the ambassador compared Iraq’s current violence to the early scenes of a gruesome movie.
“In the States, it’s like we’re in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we’re done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else,” he said. “Whereas out here, you’re just getting into the first reel of five reels,” he added, “and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.”
Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister, sounded a similar warning at a Baghdad news conference on Monday. “The dangers vary from civil war to dividing the country or maybe to regional wars,” he said, referring to an American withdrawal. “In our estimation the danger is huge. Until the Iraqi forces and institutions complete their readiness, there is a responsibility on the U.S. and other countries to stand by the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people to help build up their capabilities.” (…)
In the interview, Mr. Crocker said he based his warning about what might happen if American troops left on the realities he has seen in the four months since he took up the Baghdad post, a knowledge of Iraq and its violent history dating back to a previous Baghdad posting more than 25 years ago, and lessons learned during an assignment in Beirut in the early 1980s. Then, he said, a “failure of imagination” made it impossible to foresee the extreme violence that enveloped Lebanon as it descended into civil war. He added, “And I’m sure what will happen here exceeds my imagination.”
On the potential for worsening violence after an American withdrawal from Iraq, he said: “You have to look at what the consequences would be, and you look at those who say we could have bases elsewhere in the country. Well yes, we could, but we would have the prospect of American forces looking on while civilians by the thousands were slaughtered. Not a pretty prospect.”
In setting out what he called “the kind of things you have to think about” ahead of an American troop withdrawal, the ambassador cited several possibilities. He said these included a resurgence by the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which he said had been “pretty hard-pressed of late” by the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush ordered deployed here this year; the risk that Iraq’s 350,000-strong security forces would “completely collapse” under sectarian pressures, disintegrating into militias; and the specter of interference in the chaos by Iran, neighboring Sunni Arab states and Turkey.”
Obviously, both Crocker and the Iraqi foreign minister have an interest in making the consequences of a US withdrawal from Iraq sound as bad as possible. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t right. More below the fold.
There is an understandable temptation for people who advocate withdrawal to say that if we withdraw, things won’t be so bad. Since I do not have the gift of second sight, I cannot say that they are wrong. But I think they are, and I think it’s important for those of us who advocate withdrawal to be clear about that, and to base our arguments not on the thought that withdrawal will make things better, but on some basis that’s more likely to stand the test of time.
I think it’s almost inevitable that a full-blown civil war will break out once we leave, and that it will be very, very, very bad. I think it’s pretty likely that the Iraqi army will splinter, or at least be seriously weakened by defections, and that the training we have been providing will be put at the service of the militias. I’m not nearly as clear that al Qaeda in Iraq will take over Anbar — the Sunnis seem to have decided that they don’t care much for AQI, and will presumably resist their influence. Iran will certainly continue to interfere, although it may have a greater interest in promoting stability once we leave, since promoting instability will no longer be a way of keeping us tied down. Turkey could invade the Kurdish region; they are furious that the Iraqi Kurds are allowing the PKK to operate from the Kurdish areas, and that we have not forced them to kick the PKK out. Turkey is already amassing forces on the border, and may not wait for us to leave before invading. I hope the countries in the region are thinking now about how to avoid a regional war; I suspect the greatest danger is that they will try some limited interventions that will spiral into a regional war even though no party wants it to. Wars are not manageable or predictable, and any supposedly “limited” intervention by Iraq’s neighbors seems to me to run a serious risk of starting a general conflagration.
In short, I think that once we leave, all hell will break loose, and that a lot of the most horrifying predictions about what will happen in the event of a withdrawal stand a decent chance of coming true.
And yet I still think we should withdraw. The easiest way to explain this would be to note, first, that we don’t have much choice, since we are on the verge of breaking our army as it is; and second, that our presence doesn’t seem to have helped much so far. But the real reason is that I think that our presence only delays the inevitable.
This wouldn’t necessarily be true if there were some prospect that the Iraqi government would turn into a government that was willing and able to exercise control over the whole country. In that case, there would be something to be said for sticking around to allow it to fully take over. But, as I wrote yesterday, the present Iraqi government is only barely functioning at all, and I see no indication whatsoever that that will change in the near future.
This is partly because there are parties who have substantial financial interests in the Iraqi government not exerting full control over its territory. According to this horrifying article about the meltdown of Basra, for instance, Muqtada al-Sadr’s organization is heavily involved in oil smuggling. If you were al-Sadr, would you want a government capable of shutting down oil smuggling to emerge? Not unless that government were under your control.
But the real problem, of course, is the civil war. It’s not just that the civil war is the immediate cause of unimaginable suffering, and that it will get worse once we leave. The civil war is also the reason the Iraqi government is weak: that government is made up of representatives of the various parties to the civil war, and so of course it’s hard for it to act decisively, since that would require finding agreement among parties who are at war with one another. It’s the civil war and the resulting weakness of the government that will both tempt Iraq’s neighbors to intervene and make them think they can do so without great cost. And it’s the civil war, and the resulting absence of a government that can control its territory, that allows al Qaeda in Iraq to have even a chance of establishing itself.
The civil war is not a problem we can solve. People sometimes say that civil wars have to “burn themselves out.” I always want to know what metaphors like that mean: after all, a civil war is not a fire; why should it have to “burn itself out”? Why shouldn’t it just explode all at once and then be done, like a firecracker, or ebb and flow like the tides, or stand firm against the elements like a well-built house?
I think that the reason is just that at the outset of a civil war, everyone thinks that they can win, and so they are unwilling to compromise; to settle for less than they imagine they could get if they fought, namely, everything. It would be wrong to say, at this point, that neither side wants peace. Anyone not wholly maddened by vengeance always wants peace on some terms — for instance, peace on condition that s/he gets all the power and all the fruits of victory. And most people are not willing to accept peace at any price — there are usually some outcomes so horrible, or so shameful, that war looks preferable. The problem is rather that the terms the various sides are willing to accept are incompatible: none of the various sides sees any reason to settle for less than everything, or almost everything, since all of them think that they will be the winner if it comes to war.
Moreover, for a long time now the price of being on the losing side of a battle for power in Iraq has been not a nice sinecure at the Heritage Foundation, but death: death for those who fight on the losing side, and often death for their families and communities as well. The knowledge that if you lose, you and those you love lose everything presumably does not make people more likely to stop fighting so long as they have any expectation at all of winning.
It usually takes a while for the idea that you can win it all to give way: for the actual experience of fighting, and perhaps losing, to replace airy confidence. But by the time that happens, enough people have suffered enough that ending the civil war is much, much harder. Accepting a compromise, especially a compromise that you might have achieved early on, looks like a kind of betrayal. Presumably, the people on the other side will have done horrible things, and the people they did them to will want vengeance. (Your own side will probably have done horrible things too, but those are normally explained away.) The very idea of cutting a deal with your enemies looks like a way of breaking faith with everyone on your side who has suffered or died; or like admitting that they suffered or died in vain. And that can seem unthinkable.
Later still, even the idea of compromise can get lost. Simone Weil, in a wonderful essay on the Iliad, describes this:
“The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot travel through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conception of purpose or goal, including its own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The human mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.
Nevertheless, the soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance, but deliverance itself appears to it in an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction. Any other solution, more moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne, even as memory. Terror, grief, exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of comrades — is it credible that these things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not intervened to drown them?”
There are, I think, only three ways out of this. The first is for someone else to take over the country and force an end to the conflict. But there is no party that can do this, and certainly none that has both the ability and the inclination. The second is for the leaders on both sides to be wise enough to recognize the need to end the madness. But while there are generally some people who are wise enough to recognize this, those people are usually not in a position to agree to a compromise on behalf of one side, and make that compromise stick. The third is for the violence to go on so long, and for people’s suffering to be so unbearable, that even those whose loved ones have been dismembered or tortured with drills or blown apart come to think: this has to stop, and if stopping means giving up my dreams of total victory and cutting a deal with the people who killed my child or my wife or my father, then so be it.
That, I take it, is what it means for a civil war to “burn itself out.” Once a civil war has gotten started, keeping a lid on the violence is not a way of ending it, at least not in the absence of a strong government with some semblance of legitimacy. It’s just a way of inducing the warring parties to keep their heads down, guard their weapons, and wait for you to leave so that the killing can start in earnest.
That’s why the best way to deal with civil wars is not to let them get started in the first place. And it’s also why I think we should leave. We are breaking our army. We are paying $10 billion every month we stay there. (While looking for the cite on this, I found a CNN story from 2003 saying: “The White House is downplaying published reports of an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion price tag for a war with Iraq.” Hahahahaha.) Over 500 troops have died since the surge began, and God alone knows how many have been injured.
If we were paying this price in order to bring real security to Iraq, then I would be in favor of paying it. It’s easy for me to write this while sitting in my comfortable study, I know, but I think we have an obligation to the Iraqi people to fix what we broke, if we can. But that’s the problem: I don’t think we can. And I don’t see that there’s anything to be said for continuing to send our soldiers to die for nothing.
***
I fully expect that when we withdraw and things go to hell, people will blame the withdrawal and those who advocated it. That will happen, but it will be completely wrong. One reason is that, as I’ve said, I see no reason to think that our presence in Iraq does more than delay the moment when things fall apart. But the more important reason is that the real reason why things will go to hell is not our withdrawal, but the fact that we invaded in the first place. Specifically:
* Before we invaded, Iraq was not, and would not become, a sanctuary for al Qaeda. Now it is.
* Before we invaded, Iraq was not about to descend into civil war; it is now in the middle of one.
* Saddam was horrendous to his people, and I have never tried to minimize that fact, but I think that the life of an ordinary Iraqi now is plainly worse than it was under his regime.
* Before we invaded, there was no real prospect of a regional war: Saddam was effectively contained, but not so weak as to tempt his neighbors to invade. Now, a regional war is a serious possibility.
* Before we invaded, Saddam posed no significant threat to us. He had been disarmed and contained, and had we given the inspectors enough time to finish their work, we would have known that. Now the blowback from this war has reached the United Kingdom, and it is only thanks to the incompetence of the would-be terrorists that no one was killed. It will undoubtedly reach other countries as well, possibly including our own.
* Before we invaded, Iran was in a much weaker position than it is in today, and it was seeking negotiations with us. The invasion has undone decades of work trying to contain Iranian influence in the region.
* Moreover, the invasion has threatened the stability of a number of nearby countries, including allies like Jordan.
We created all these problems — along with others, like the immense damage to our moral standing caused by the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere — when we invaded and then failed to act immediately to restore order and security for Iraq’s citizens. We have been trying to fix them for years, without anything remotely resembling success. When we leave, those problems will probably get a lot worse. If we leave soon, they will get a lot worse soon; if we stick around to keep a lid on them, they will get a lot worse when we eventually give up.
The timing of our withdrawal will determine when the Iraqi people will be plunged into a deeper hell than the one they are already in. But that that will happen is not the result of the withdrawal. It is the result of what we set in motion when we had the clever idea of invading a complicated country without either a good reason or a clear idea of what we were going to do once we got there.
We sowed the wind. The Iraqi people are about to reap the whirlwind. We can delay this, at a terrible cost, but we cannot prevent it.
Everything you say is true, eloquently so. But I agree with other bloggers who feel that no matter what arguments are made, nothing will really change until Bush is out of office.
Until then, the small cherubic Senator will always appear at the end of the day and say that Godot cannot make it, but will surely come tomorrow.
And we’ll be told it’s best to wait another day.
Now the blowback from this war has reached the United Kingdom, and it is only thanks to the incompetence of the would-be terrorists that no one was killed. It will undoubtedly reach other countries as well, possibly including our own.
It reached Jordan first with the hotel bombings.
Heartbreaking. I am literally crying from shame and grief. But I, too, see nothing helpful we can do.
I will note one other thing. Although we certainly helped this mess along in ways large and small, we do not bear sole responsibility for creating it. The British bear some responsibility for the legacy of colonial rule and the cruel partition of the Middle East into non-viable countries. And the Iraqi people themselves bear considerable responsibility for past and present cruelty, willful rage, and general idiocy. As our culpability is limited, so too is our responsibility to keep stacking money and lives against the incoming flood of violence.
“You can’t build a whole policy on a fear of a negative…”
Of course, our invasion was sold to the American people precisely on a fear of a negative, and a totally unjustified fear at that.
I do not see anything pleasant coming after our departure, except for possibly the wiping out of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Yet at the same time, we are, at best, just sticking our finger in the dike, which is going to explode whether or not our finger is there.
There has still been no, or little, attempt by this country to engage outher regional powers in stablizing Iraq. Yet, in the beginning there were offers from Egypt and Jordan to assist in training which were turned down by Bush and Co.
Your analysis of the consequences of our going into Iraq is quite good. I would just clarify one point, and that is that part of the reason there was little danger of regional conflict was because Saddam was in power. He may well have been the most stabilizing person in the ME. When the keystone is missing form the arch, the arch collapses.
Like you, I was reluctant to come to the idea that we have to leave. And like you, althoguh my heart cries out at each death, if I really thought there was even a 50% chance that our presence may end up bringing a positive outcome, I would support it.
But since I don’t think there is even a 10% chance of that, I agree that we have to leave, and the sooner the better.
We sowed the wind. The Iraqi people are about to reap the whirlwind. We can delay this, at a terrible cost, but we cannot prevent it.
Eloquent post, very reasoned and reasonable.
It would be churlish to make too much of the fact that every assessment in the post has been true for at least two and a half years. But it’s just inescapably true that being patient and reasonable and giving the benefit of the doubt has enabled the prolonging of the slaughter, or at the very least has delayed the political reckoning for those responsible for it.
don’t miss this article, “Unit’s Mission: Survive 4 Miles To Remember Fallen Comrade” (WaPo, via Balloon Juice).
I don’t necessarily agree with hilzoy on what will happen, but I agree with her completely on the more fundamental issue: there is nothing we can do to forestall these consequences, short of literally remaining forever.
In theory, it’s always “possible” there will be a political reconciliation tomorrow, as if by magic; but we can’t justify the cost of staying in Iraq based on nothing but unfounded hope. Bush has nothing to lose, so he can afford to keep holding out for the magical reconciliation, but the rest of the country has to deal with reality sooner or later.
The British bear some responsibility for the legacy of colonial rule and the cruel partition of the Middle East into non-viable countries.
To be fair, the only country that has proven “non-viable” thus far is the rump of Palestine.
the blowback from this war has reached the United Kingdom,
As Eric noted above, it has also reached Jordan. I would add the Maghreb, Spain, and Saudi Arabia at least, I think. The irony of Bush’s wars is that they neglected Afghanistan to avoid repeating the Soviet experience there, but then they jumped straight into recreating the same dynamics in Iraq.
You are saying exactly what we heard in Amman last summer. “Iraq will have a difficult rebirth; it may take 10 or 15 years. But Iraq has enough heritage to recover, to stand on its own two feet. There is no other way.”
The best bit of the recent NYT withdrawal editorial was this: “Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.”
We broke it and we can’t fix it.
The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that America[‘s War in Iraq] is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to [America a prolonged continuation of] this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until . . . every drop of blood drawn by the [JDAM] shall be paid by another drawn with the [IED], as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
One thing we could do is help the refugees. If we can afford billions for the war, then we can afford billionns for refugee resettlemnt. We could you put our army to work organizing and defending convoys of refugees on their way to camps supported by our money in Syria or anywhere else that would take them. We could be airlifting people right now.
I wish we had morevocal leadership on this issue.
“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The rest of it is worth quoting too:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations
Ah, the memories (from 2003, h/t Matt Y):
I was so totally in support of tyranny and against the strengthening of power that, as I am sure we will all admit, the invasion of Iraq has brought. Totally.
It’s because I’m a liberal, so of course I believe in the moral equivalence of Saddam and Gandhi; in fact the moral equivalence of everything, except for America, which is icky and bad.
Totally.
rea – of course it is, I just didn’t think the U.S. today worthy or up to the task.
Hilzoy: But I think they are, and I think it’s important for those of us who advocate withdrawal to be clear about that, and to base our arguments not on the thought that withdrawal will make things better, but on some basis that’s more likely to stand the test of time.
Very honest, I’m afraid though ultimately wrong, or iffy at best. Not that I know squat. I swing back and forth every day. I fear you are correct, and I am mainly in your court, but forgive me if I hope you are wrong wrong wrong. On the outcome, I fear you are correct. On standing the test of time, I fear you are wrong, I as well. I’m already on the wrong side of history though… I don’t agree with all your bullet points (OK, some of them), but then I wouldn’t be me. It feels like things are tipping to the good side and all the weight coming down on withdrawal irregardless of all that is wrong, is strictly political. But I don’t know.
We absolutely can win this; we are just not willing to pay the cost. (Broke Army, draft, 250,000 boots on the ground, 5 more years). I am not willing to pay the cost. Nell pointed it out to me first, but I’ve sought other evidence. More today (h/t BJ):
The 26-year-old Port St. Lucie man has been ordered to report to Fort Jackson, S.C., on July 15 for his fifth deployment. And that has compelled Botta, a first-generation American who counts himself a quiet patriot, to do something he never thought he’d do: sue the Army.
The Army is broken. It can not take another year of this, and a draft is just not a serious option. Asking volunteers to do two combat tours in a crisis may be rational, if asking too much. Asking them to do five is freakin’ insane. I would not. I would go AWOL. Anyone who has followed me here knows that is a significant statement. I am proud of my service and my Army – if they said, “We need you to go back for a fifth time”, I would in fact say “Screw you, do your worst, I’m not going.” I could happily make big rocks into little rocks for years rather than that.
Yes – if that sounds incoherent that is in fact my state of mind these days…
OCSteve: well, I hope I’m wrong too. If I believed in God, I would pray to be completely, wholly, totally misguided on this one. I’d say to God: please don’t concern yourself with me: just make this not happen, please.
Hilzoy: As long as that is your hope (and I believe you totally), you and I are on the same side.
Now the blowback from this war has reached the United Kingdom, and it is only thanks to the incompetence of the would-be terrorists that no one was killed.
Uh… 7/7/2005? Not to pick nits, or anything…
slightly_peeved: I wasn’t sure about the motives for that one.
Also, to people who earlier mentioned Jordan etc.: I didn’t mean that this was the first bit of blowback, but I should have been clearer.
OCSteve, I think that almost everybody, even those that were against the invasion from the get go, such as myself or hilzoy, still hope that it can work out. It’s just that we really doubt it.
So we are on the same side.
Hopefully my son won’t have to go back there, but there is a strong possibility that he may if we stay long enoug. I think he will probably leave the Army before that happens, as he has 8 years in next January, which means he can’t be called up no matter what.
The tragedy is that he, like many, really love the military services, but this administration has totally soured them on it.
The only difference you and I may have is that I don’t think if we even had the resources, that we, (the US) could turn this thing around.
“OCSteve, I think that almost everybody, even those that were against the invasion from the get go, such as myself or hilzoy, still hope that it can work out. It’s just that we really doubt it.”
If I believed that another year, or two, or three, of sustained deployements of American troops would resolve the Iraqi problem, and produce by then a clear arc of a non-sectarian Iraqi government proceeding to a successful control of the country in a democratic way, with a fair amount of human rights, I’d stand up and call for us to devote and commit our troops to that.
But that’s not the case. So I don’t.
A minor note: the fact a soldier dies in a losing cause does not necessarily mean that soldier died for nothing. There is more at stake in Iraq than the outcome of the war.
I may as well note that I don’t think a draft and five years of a quarter-million soldiers in Iraq, fully funded, trained, and equipped, with proper support on the home front, would in fact lead to the establishment of a lasting peaceful democracy in Iraq. Nor would it have (I think) if Bush had delayed his initial invasion order to prepare such a force in 2003-4. The war would have gone about the same, the occupation since Hussein’s defeat rather differently, but we’d still be the occupying power in a nation that did not initiate aggression against us, we’d still be the people responsible for the massive misery of a decade of sanctions before the war, we’d still be the bad guys and the target of complex opposition. We’d have had a better chance of getting bin Laden himself (assuming that it was made a higher priority than in reality), but that wouldn’t be a huge offsetting factor in the basic injustice of our presence in Iraq.
More force to stamp on resistance in Iraq would probably translate into more terrorism here. Assuming a leadership who still had the basic goal of conquering and reshaping Iraq even while willing to go about it more competently, there’d likely be more atrocities, because the desire to make enemies suffer and the obsession with humiliation and status displays aren’t really dependent on available manpower. Furthermore, given what we’ve seen in recent years of ambitions on the part of the Vice President’s little cabal, a better fighting force in Iraq might very well mean earlier war on Iran, too, along with assaults on Syria, Lebanon, and whoever else is the flavor of the week.
Fighting an immoral war competently can only get so much better. Society-building only works (so nearly as I can tell) when the occupiers have a basic measure of moral legitimacy, and American forces in Iraq simply can’t have that. We are the unjustified invader and the Iraqi people are only doing what anyone would in their situation, including us, when it comes to keeping up resistance until at least the unjustified invader goes home.
(A well-funded properly-trained etc etc effort to get bin Laden and as much of his network as possible, topple the Taliban, help establish civil order in Afghanistation, and then leave…that might have worked. But of course it wouldn’t have happened.)
we’d still be the people responsible for the massive misery of a decade of sanctions before the war
Yeah, that was all our fault. Iraq and the UN had nothing to do with that…
G’Kar: “the fact a soldier dies in a losing cause does not necessarily mean that soldier died for nothing.”
I hope I didn’t imply that I thought that. I do think that some similar thought makes people less willing to consider peace, but that that thought exists doesn’t make it true.
G’Kar: ah, on rereading this I found the part that presumably prompted your comment, namely: “I don’t see that there’s anything to be said for continuing to send our soldiers to die for nothing.”
Here, as always, I think it’s crucial to separate two questions: first, why has any given soldier decided to fight? What is s/he fighting for — what values or motives of his or her own? And second: why has the government decided to send those soldiers off to fight? I think that I should have been clearer here: I was talking about the second, not the first.
If the government’s aims cannot be achieved through war, then it is sending people off to fight for no god reason. Possibly for nothing. As I see it, though, that doesn’t imply that the people who are sent do not have good and admirable reasons of their own for obeying. They might, for instance, believe generally in civilian control of the military, and believe as well that if they are in the armed forces it is their duty to go if asked. They might think that to try to shunt this duty off on someone else would be dishonorable. And they might be right.
I think it would be wrong to say that such a soldier died “for nothing.” That soldier’s own motives involved honor and duty, and dying for honor and duty is never dying for nothing. Nor is dying for your friends, or because your country asks, however misguidedly.
But I’m less clear that it’s wrong to say that they are sent for no good reason.
I should absolutely have been clearer about the difference between saying that they are (sent to die) for nothing, and saying that they are sent to (die for nothing.) The first is what I meant. The second doesn’t follow at all, since unlike the first, it involves not just our reasons for asking soldiers to fight, but what those soldiers themselves do about that request, and why, and whether their reasons count as “nothing”, which I don’t think they do.
Steve, it’s true we didn’t do the sanctions regimen solo. But three of our administrations had a lot to say about how it went, and said a lot of things about it that Iraqi listeners could very easily hear as “We just don’t care how many of you suffer and die, when it comes right down to it.” And then unlike the other nations involved in the sanctions, we mounted this big ol’ war. The later activity ends up framing the earlier.
OCSteve: Yeah, that was all our fault. Iraq and the UN had nothing to do with that…
The UK was also involved. For which, yes, I think we ought to take our share of the blame. I think (though it would take some delving into records not yet online to show it) that the UK followed, rather than led the US in the program of destroying infrastructure inside Iraq and then setting up a sanctions program to make it difficult for Iraqis to rebuild, with the predictable (and, according to some sources, predicted) results that at least half a million Iraqi children died of preventable illnesses.
This was, in effect, setting out to kill Iraqi children in the hope that Iraqis would become miserable and desperate enough to overthrow Saddam Hussein without any outside help.
I consider this one of the most disgraceful acts that my country was involved in during the last 25 years: making war on children is never acceptable. Never.
Delendo italica!
hilzoy,
My apologies; I did not intend to imply that you were suggesting any such thing, but as I was secure in the knowledge you would not do so, I failed to take the time to make that clear in my comment.
I in general concur with your separation of the reasons for soldiers going to war. I will add, however, that ‘for nothing’ is an extreme position. Some soldiers sent off to any war will end up doing some good things. In this case, some American soldiers will almost certainly help some Iraqis; medics, in particular, are likely to provide a level of care not otherwise available to the average Iraqi. (Conversely, some soldiers will do bad, even horrific, things even in just wars. This is part of what makes war so horrible.) If the good soldiers are killed in pursuit of their noble ends, they certainly did not die for nothing.
What I suspect we could agree on, however, is that the price of their deaths was greater than the benefits we expect to gain from sending soldiers off to war. I myself do not know that the Iraq War is unwinnable; cognitive dissonance, perhaps, or perhaps just my inherent skepticism. But I do recognize that the Iraq War is unlikely to be won based on the political situation on the ground in the U.S.; America’s national will is the center of gravity for this fight, and the enemy is well on the way to securing that objective. (By which, it should be noted, I am not accusing anyone of treason, but only pointing out that once a sufficiently high number of Americans believe the war is unwinnable, the enemy will achieve the objective of driving America out regardless of the rightness or wrongness of that belief.) Therefore I can empathize with those who are frustrated to see their friends and loved ones go off to war when the goal of that war is unlikely to be achieved. It is difficult, as someone once noted, to ask a soldier to be the last person to die for a mistake.
G’Kar: do you think it’s just the political center of gravity, or also the limitations on what we can ask of, or do to, the army without breaking it? My sense was that the strain on the army was an independent constraint, one that would be felt with increasing urgency by next March or April. But, of course, I am getting this from various newspaper accounts.
— I think that even the political will depends in large part on the strains on the army; see OCSteve’s comment above. Not to belittle the role of failing trust in Bush, of course; but I think for a lot of people the following thought matters a lot too: we have asked too many people to sacrifice too much, and when people’s fourth or fifth tour of duty comes up, we really have to stop and ask ourselves where this ends, and whether we are willing to see people asked to go on their twelfth or thirteenth tour without an end in sight. If anyone was still in the army by that point.
hilzoy,
I am not well-equipped to discuss the relative strength of the American Army relative to the insurgency. Perhaps in the future I can gather enough information to give a real answer, but for the present I do not know if the Army would, in fact, break if it stayed in Iraq indefinitely (although I’m sure that there is a breaking point to be reached, I simply don’t know how close that point is, or if we have already crossed it). I am sure that concerns over the strength of the Army are a factor when it comes to national will, and it is quite possible that those who say the war is already lost are correct and the strength of their having been correct may be lending additional weight to the breaking of the American national will.
I do believe, however, that the Army can last longer than the national will. It should be noted as well that breaking the Army will not necessarily lead to the war being lost, depending on the timing. Whether or not taking that risk is worthwhile over Iraq is a separate question, I am merely pointing out the fact that breaking the Army does not necessarily equal losing.
Jesurgislac says our sanctions program against Iraq was “one of the most disgraceful acts that my country was involved in during the last 25 years,” becuase “making war on children is never acceptable.”
Never? Children died in Dresden, too. As General Sherman said, “War is Hell.” I suggest that there is no nice way to wage war, no way to coerce a country without hurting innocent civilians. Sanctions were supposed to be the nice way — and maybe they were, compared to any of the alternatives.
Once we decided — and it was not an unreasonable decision — that we could not afford to have Ba’athist Iraq expanding into Kuwait and perhaps beyond, we had no good options. We wisely refrained (then) from conquering Iraq, for reasons that should by now be obvious. We did not dare just leave, because we could not trust Saddam Hussein to keep the peace terms, and in fact he didn’t (though, as it turned out, inspection kept his violations much more controlled than we believed after 1999 or so). So, we settled for a war of attrition, aggressive containment, to keep Iraq weak while hopefully fostering some kind of viable home-grown replacement for Ba’ath. It was slow, ugly, and, yes, it cost childrens’ lives. But it had a chance of working, and I don’t know what else could have.
So, Jesurgislac, what would you have done instead?
I am merely pointing out the fact that breaking the Army does not necessarily equal losing.
Merely?
Any objective worth breaking the Army for, which is the only sense in which ‘breaking the Army does not necessarily equal losing’ makes sense to me, would have to be one hell of an objective — something absolutely essential to our national existence.
No, we lost this the minute “we” decided to invade, which was at a minimum in September 2001. The war was on long before there was any legal basis for it, much less before any admission on the part of the regime that a decision for war had been made — starting with the diversion of funds in December 2001-Feb 2002 from the war in Afghanistan (an impeachable offense, by the way) to planning and organizing for the war in Iraq, continuing on with the ‘Southern Focus’ air war from May-June 2002 into fall 2002, that knocked out Iraqi communications and command and control.
Any objective worth breaking the Army for, which is the only sense in which ‘breaking the Army does not necessarily equal losing’ makes sense to me, would have to be one hell of an objective — something absolutely essential to our national existence.
I don’t dispute that, Nell. But I felt it best to point out that it does exist as an option. Nothing more.
trilobite: Never? Children died in Dresden, too.
And firebombing Dresden wasn’t acceptable, either.
I suggest that there is no nice way to wage war, no way to coerce a country without hurting innocent civilians.
To quote my favorite evangelical Christian:
But it had a chance of working, and I don’t know what else could have.
Like most decisions to kill mass numbers of civilians on tactical grounds, it stood not a hope in hell of “working”: if you think of Iraqis as human beings just like Americans, this becomes clear. (Consider how you might feel had the UN decided, in order to overthrow the unelected and dangerous President Bush, it would be acceptable to have five million American children under the age of five die.)
How should we have defeated the Nazis, Jes? How should we have defeated Japan? What would have been the humane way?
Steve: How should we have defeated the Nazis, Jes? How should we have defeated Japan?
Are you trying to justify the mass slaughter of civilians, Steve? If you think the mass slaughter of civilians can be justified, what then was wrong with the Nazi regime?
I’m not a pacifist, though I almost never think war is justified in practical terms. I will say that if we find ourselves saying things like “We can only do this approach at the cost of likely killing half a million children via malnutrition, disease, and starvation,” that maybe we should rethink the whole thing. I also think that the question of what the US owed Kuwait should have been revisited in the light of the well-documented campaign of deceit mounted on behalf of the Kuwaiti regime – I think we owe less to people who manufacture charges of war atrocities than to real victims, and I’d like to see official lying in the support of war treated a lot more seriously than it is.
I grew up in Pasadena, California, which is part of the San Gabriel valley – there’s a range of hills between it and the main expanse of the Los Angeles basin. The valley includes my home, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories where they run the unmanned space program, Caltech, big communities of immigrants from all around the world including refugees of terror and violence in Cambodia, El Salvador, eastern Europe, and more, and…well, a lot of people.
What we’ve done to Iraq since the first Gulf War is arrange for the death of an Iraqi for every person who lives in the valley, pretty much. One for each of my relatives still living there. One for the teacher whose love of history inspired me so much, and one for my favorite English teacher. Two for the nice couple around the corner whose lawn I used to mow. A trio for the folks who run my favorite hole-in-the-wall used bookstore, and a dozen or so for the people who make my favorite burgers in the world. One for the classmate who saved from a mugging by his gang because he recognized me late at night in an underground parking lot as the geeky guy who’d helped him with his homework the year before….
I try to think of my hometown, dead from one end to the other, of nobody left alive from where the Pasadena Freeway heads toward downtown up to the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. I try to imagine so many people who could conceivably deserve to die, and I try to imagine what’s so good that it could be purchased at the cost of their deaths. Pasadena itself has something like 130,000 people, so the sanctions killed 3-4 babies for every person in my hometown. I am not convinced that anything in Iraq is worth having at that kind of price, not when I imagine filling up my hometown with infants and children, killing them all, filling it up again, killing them all, and filling it up again to kill them again. And then doing it again. My moral imagination fails me here, and all I can see is what Camus saw, that policies of pure reason end in death as surely as policies of pure passion.
None of this makes Hussein a good guy. None of it is to excuse or minimize or justify any of the real harms he did, including the genocide he approved of and that horrible, monstrous war with Iran. It’s just to make me wonder whether we ended up helping anything much at all, or whether the lesson shouldn’t just be “Sometime, stay out o the whole sorry mess.” Speaking very much rationally here now, I think it’s not only appropriate but vital to look square and hard and long at the costs of a policy, and to require every policy that will impose great misery to justify itself very, very thoroughly indeed. I don’t actually have an alternative Iraq policy to propose, apart from hanging back, but I’m thoroughly unconvinced that what we actually did and are doing can be clearly justified when the human toll is fully factored in.
Bruce: The later activity ends up framing the earlier.
Fair enough – and a valid point.
G’Kar: I just can’t think of another term other than “broken” when I contemplate the fact that we are asking soldiers to do a fifth tour over there. I could even understand a second tour, after a full 12-18 months back home, but I can’t wrap my head around a fifth tour. As I noted, I personally would spend a few years in Leavenworth first. It is just too much to ask of any one person, and it is a national disgrace that the military has to ask it of anyone.
Our policy for many years was to be prepared to fight two wars concurrently. I’m not aware that policy ever changed, and it seems like that long standing policy is now defunct. If an actual war broke out tomorrow it would have to be handled by the AF and Navy.
The case for targeting Iraq’s infrastructure and imposing draconian sanctions in order to hurt the population and put pressure on Saddam can be “justified” in the same way that torture can be “justified”. It’s the ticking time bomb defense on a bigger scale where we supposedly only have two choices–do something terrible or permit the bad guy to do something worse.
I’m not going to google for links, but by early 2001 the US had s lost the propaganda battle over sanctions and as a result Colin Powell was talking about “smart sanctions”, which is what we should have tried all along. Target the sanctions on imports that might aid in the building of a nuclear weapon and of course don’t let Saddam import any weapons either. That might be doable and in theory it could be done in good faith, without the intent of using fear of WMD’s as an excuse for banning the importation of equipment needed to repair water treatment plants. It’s my understanding that going further isn’t possible without hurting civilians, because you can’t keep a country from having the technical capacity to build bacteriological or chemical weapons unless you bring them down so low their economy is in a state of collapse.
Are you trying to justify the mass slaughter of civilians, Steve? If you think the mass slaughter of civilians can be justified, what then was wrong with the Nazi regime?
I’m asking how you believe we should have defeated the Nazis, and the Japanese. It’s a straightforward question.
I don’t claim to have all the answers to the difficult moral questions; you, on the other hand, do seem to have it all figured out, so I’d appreciate it if you could help me understand.
Steve: I’m asking how you believe we should have defeated the Nazis, and the Japanese. It’s a straightforward question.
Have you stopped beating your wife? That too is just a straightforward question.
I don’t claim to have all the answers to the difficult moral questions; you, on the other hand, do seem to have it all figured out, so I’d appreciate it if you could help me understand.
You know, Socrates did that kind of help-me-I’m-so-pathetic style of argument, too. He was better at it than you, but it all ended in hemlock. Go figure.
Otherwise, what Bruce and Donald said.
Thank heavens; I thought I was the only one she did that sort of thing to.
What sort of thing? Ask yourself: did Steve say anything at all to justify the mass slaughter of civilians? If so, what, exacty?
All this talk about something having a point brings to mind the Banning letter that Truman kept in his desk, along with the enclosed Purple Heart.
Yes, but one that puts forward as a given wrongdoing on the part of the recipient. Not unlike, come to think of it, the question you asked Steve. Completely unlike the question Steve asked you, though.
Slarti, I’m sure you’re really capable of following Steve’s argument for yourself without my having to explain it to you: but if not, do ask Steve for a fuller explanation. Me, I’m going to pretend Taking It Outside is back up and I’m going to pretend I had a rant there about people who try to be Socrates without half his charm.
liberal japonicus: All this talk about something having a point brings to mind the Banning letter that Truman kept in his desk, along with the enclosed Purple Heart.
Thanks for linking to that story. 🙁 Somehow I suspect Bush would hand that letter to someone else to have it filed with all the rest.
Nope, you’re still not very good at haughty condescension. Not for lack of practice, though.
Jes, if you contend that we shouldn’t have fought the Nazis, or the Japanese, that’s a perfectly acceptable position too. I didn’t want to raise that possibility because I think it would have come across the wrong way, but I’ve certainly known people in my life who didn’t believe we should have fought the Nazis.
On the other hand, if you do think we should have fought the Nazis and the Japanese and tried to defeat them, I think it’s reasonable to ask you to explain how you believe we could have done so in a morally acceptable way. Otherwise, you’re simply proclaiming nice-sounding moral absolutes in a way that leaves people in the real world with no available course of action.
You know, Socrates did that kind of help-me-I’m-so-pathetic style of argument, too.
Except I’m not faking it when I say I don’t claim to have all the answers. I happen to think issues of war and peace present tremendously difficult moral choices, and sometimes you have to choose the least horrible option. I’m simply glad I’m not the person who had the responsibility to make those difficult choices.
Just a warning, Steve: She’s capable of going on for several thousand more words without ever answering your question, while simultaneously positioning you as the bad guy for not responding to her answering-a-question-with-a-question. I don’t know what reserves of energy you possess, but I can speculate that it won’t be nearly enough.
That you think such a question can or even should be answered is telling, Phil. Very telling, indeed.
Maybe you’re not history’s greatest monster, but you’re right up there with Steve, Hitler and Socrates.
Let me qualify an earlier comment: I took our regime-change goal as a given, but I’m personally not convinced that, following the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein posed such a threat that we needed regime change. I suspect he could have been contained reasonably well with no-fly zones, nearby garrisons, UN inspectors, and import restrictions. And if he still rebuilt some weaponry, so what? The panic over the confluence of his supposed WMD program and his association with local terrorists failed to take into account the fact that he was a very shrewd, cautious player who worked hard not to get the superpowers too upset with him (Kuwait would not have happened if we had not misled him). IMO, he just was not a threat to us or our allies even if he did break the treaty terms.
That being so, there was no excuse for killing Iraqi children. Indeed, the sanction period is a good example of why we should carefully reexamine our supposed interests when we find ourselves engaged in policies that will kill civilians.
But I still disagree that “You’re not allowed to kill civilians” can WORK. The whole concept that if you kill the whole army but never harm a civilian, the enemy will surely surrender, is Pollyanna-ish. I mean, when has this actually happened? What do you do with an enemy that keeps no standing army to speak of, but arms terrorists (like Afghanistan)? What about a country that disbands its army, waits 15 years until the heat dies down, then rearms (Germany)?
Put it another way: if nobody killed civilians, there would be little need for an army to protect them and the rational thing would be to disband it and make war via proxies (terrorists, pirates, irregulars). Or, if all we do in a war is kill the army, that will seriously harm the enemy only because it then becomes vulnerable to attacks on its commerce and civilian population by a less-scrupulous third party. So we’re doing the equivalent of letting prison rapes happen in order to “really” punish the prisoners, or of sending prisoners off to Syria for someone else to torture. Our moral position is no better than that of the person we’re counting on to do our dirty work for us.
Although it’s more fun to fight amongst ourselves than to … – scratch that, never mind.
Steve, I have no idea how far I’d want to push it, but I know that some of the people responsible for WW2 strategic bombing see it as a mistake in retrospect. (Freeman Dyson is the one I think of first.) I’d have to do Farber-style research (no slam, Gary, this is me complimenting your thoroughness) before I felt confident saying anything much either way about it, but I do know there’s room for multiple perspectives on it. I can certainly imagine it turning out that the limitations of bombing accuracy plus the unwanted/immoral/war crime illegality of civilian damage plus the extra resistance it inspires in appalled targets plus wahtever adds up to it being not worthwhile. The fact that it remains popular among some military planners certainly can’t be proof all by itself that it’s actually a good weapon for the purpose.
The appalling and pointless, unproductive carnage of recent years has really shifted my thinking a lot in the direction of “do nothing until you have a very solid case for a good outcome with the externalities considered”. From what I can tell, the ongoing habit of disregarding and downplaying collateral suffering is one of the prime fuels for terrorism, as well as for less drastic anti-Western views. It’s not just the innocents who suffer at the moment but the ongoing legacy of their suffering and how all sides treat it later, too. It may very well be that more often than not, we should let one evil continue for the moment to avoid two more later. I’m not wild about that, but then I’m not wild about what we’re doing right now, either, as witness the comments above.
Steve, I have no idea how far I’d want to push it, but I know that some of the people responsible for WW2 strategic bombing see it as a mistake in retrospect.
I don’t doubt that. I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that we never could have won the war without firebombing Dresden, for example. But Jes seemed to be articulating an absolute moral standard where we simply never could have bombed Germany, ever, under pain of becoming as bad as them. And I wanted to figure out if I was misunderstanding her or, if not, what her alternative would be.
Back in college, I knew a guy who was a total, uncompromising pacifist. I hadn’t encountered that worldview tomorrow, and I asked him the same sorts of questions. Would you have fought Hitler? No. Would you have fought him if he invaded America? No. What if the Nazis enslaved you and ordered you to work for them or they’d shoot you? Then I’d let them shoot me, and if everyone took the same attitude, then they’d come to realize that violence gained them nothing, and so forth.
Naturally, I felt these were totally unacceptable outcomes; obviously he felt differently. But I was at least impressed that he was willing to grapple with the outcomes of his recommended course of action, and to at least decide they were acceptable to him, rather than simply proclaim “violence is always wrong” and try to just leave it at that.
I think the Iraq war was a big mistake, for example. And while I think it’s a cheap rhetorical jibe to say “Would you have preferred that Saddam remain in power?” when it comes right down to it, yes, of course I would have preferred leaving Saddam in power. As a logical matter, that’s what it MEANS when I say the war was a big mistake. And in so doing, I’m making the judgment call that the consequences of leaving Saddam in power would have been better than the consequences of starting the war. Or, as you allude to in your last paragraph, at a minimum it’s unclear which would work out better and so we should default to no war. (In truth, it doesn’t strike me as a particularly close call!)
Maybe you’re not history’s greatest monster, but you’re right up there with Steve, Hitler and Socrates.
Thanks for a good laugh, Slarti.
Thank goodness I amused someone other than myself, this time.
Steve: We seem to be occupying some pretty similar territory (and, I hope, treating the noetic natives well).
Steve: But Jes seemed to be articulating an absolute moral standard where we simply never could have bombed Germany, ever, under pain of becoming as bad as them.
Actually, that’s your conclusion, Steve. I just pointed out that you’re not allowed to kill civilians – it’s not just a moral standard, it’s the law – and you said “But what about Dresden!” as if the mass killing of civilians in Dresden somehow proved that the law that forbids killing civilians even in wartime is somehow wrong or pointless.
Killing civilians is wrong. And, as Fred at Slacktivist notes, pointing this out tends to get people very, very upset. Because there’s always going to be people who really want to justify killing civilians to accomplish a military goal.
I wonder whether we might actually end up making more progress by setting aside Dresden and Tokyo as benchmarks. I think it unlikely that in, oh, the next 20-40 years we’re actually going to have to deal with tyrannical regimes controlling the assets of major industrial powers who are vigorously expansion-minded and just that evil when it comes to basic human rights. The closest approximation this side of the end of the Soviet Union is, um, us right now. Assuming that we do get regime change here at home before we get the endless global war and mass internment at home and all that other stuff going, it just seems very unlikely to me that anyone else will make a bid to be Nazi Germany Part II or Imperial Japan For The New Era.
The choices that actually do face us with regard to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and are likely to face us in any conflict for the rest of this generation, are constrained in wildly different ways. Imbalance of power, cultural knowledge of enemies available but not taken up, prior histories of engagement for good and (usually) bad in the country and region, all this stuff puts the question “Just how many bystanders is it okay to waste?” in a different light, one that has precious little to do with the exigencies of 60 years ago.
By all means, let’s set aside Dresden and Tokyo. That still leaves a rather significant gap between ‘you cannot kill civilians ever’ and some acceptable level of collateral damage based on the level of the threat. Is it ever acceptable to conduct an attack that will kill civilians in addition to your intended target, or can the enemy ensure his own survival by secreting himself among civilians? This is where we are now, of course: people complain that killing civilians is always wrong, so they grant terrorists carte blanche to do what they will because striking back at them would harm civilians. I have a hard time understanding a moral calculus that says it is ok for them to kill civilians with impunity and we can never, ever, strike back. That is a recipe for suicide.
Having said that, on a more practical matter I stand with Jim Henley’s argument that the U.S. needs to get out of the business of going great distances to kill people.
I wonder whether we might actually end up making more progress by setting aside Dresden and Tokyo as benchmarks. I think it unlikely that in, oh, the next 20-40 years we’re actually going to have to deal with tyrannical regimes controlling the assets of major industrial powers who are vigorously expansion-minded and just that evil when it comes to basic human rights.
The rules of the game have changed.
When wars were fought with railroads and coal, it meant you could concentrate more men in a small area quicker than ever before. So the men dug trenches so they wouldn’t be such targets — unimportant-looking trenches so their defenses wouldn’t be such targets — and it played out from there.
When wars were fought with trucks and oil, they could spread out. Get behind the other guy’s line and you can destroy his supplies. Why even have a narrow line for the enemy to get behind? Defend in depth and when he penetrates your line you can hit him from all sides. OK, Fly over his line and you can destroy the factories that make the supplies.
Airpower won at sea. It didn’t make as much difference on land in WWII, or korea, or vietnam, but we thought it would. When two navies fight at sea, if there are innocent civilians they don’t belong on the ships of either navy. And innocent ships also belong somewhere else. On land civilians are in the way and can’t get out of the way. They should cower in their bomb shelters or their basements until the fighting is over.
Now the rules are changing again. Oil will soon cost $100/bbl. An up-armored HUMV gets somewhere between 2 mpg and 0.5 mpg. An F22 has 3? 8? internal fuel tanks that combined hold 25,000+ gallons, it can carry 4 external tanks to give it another 24,000 gallons. Its mean time between maintenance is 3 hours. How many F22 missions will be worth 25,000 gallons of fuel?
Big wars are fought in the middle east now. Not only because oil is a vital resource we want to control. Also, the logistics of providing long-distance oil for a big war far from the refineries is turning into a problem. We fought Gulf War I on saudi oil. They donated it although maybe japan or somebody paid for some of it. We fought the iraq war on kuwaiti oil, and we paid for it. We ran an aluminum fuel pipeline into southern iraq and hoped Saddam’s guys wouldn’t notice it, and we ran fuel trucks from there. As the insurgency got hotter those trucks became important targets until at one point Halliburton charged us $100/gallon for fuel. That may have been out of line but surely $25/gallon wasn’t out of line. We built our own refineries in iraq — we pumped crude oil and pulled out the fractions we wanted and then we pumped the rest back into the ground. When we put big bases there it wasn’t just to protect the oilfields and it wasn’t just to protect the refineries. Everything that needs fuel that *can* be done beside the refinery *should* be done there so you don’t have to transport that fuel. Ah, what are we paying the iraqi government for that fuel? Who measures how much of it we use? I don’t know.
Our style of warfare is getting increasingly impractical. We are the only nation in the world that practices it on a large scale. We know there is no substitute for victory and we don’t count the cost. Everybody else looks at the cost of building the second-best professional army and settles for a show force. (Except the israelis, who do it on our dime.)
Nowadays when there’s a war, at least one side depends on cheap soldiers who’re informally trained and who use cheap weapons and cheap transportation. Maybe the other side controls the air, or maybe they don’t bother either. Conventional armies are very very expensive and the main thing they’re good for is beating other conventional armies. However, nukes are cheap to build once you have sufficient nuclear power plants.
Sorry for the rant. There’s no substitute for victory. When people could think of no better way to win a war than to concentrate men and supplies into a small area and kill them until one side ran out, they did it that way. Civilians were mostly protected, by accident.
When people needed warplanes anyway for their navies and then developed a belief in strategic bombing, the civilians were in the way but nothing could be done about it except tell them to build bomb shelters.
Now we’re reaching a point where the difference between a civilian and a poorly-trained soldier is only whether he’s holding a weapon. Why bankrupt yourself for an expensive professional army when winning that kind of war is increasingly irrelevant?
And if you are going to fight, and you don’t need a particular city that’s full of inconvenient foreigners mixed with cheap part-time enemy soldiers — nukes are cheap too.
The rules of the game have changed, and we won’t see the new rules clearly until the USA is bankrupt from winning by the old rules.
FIrst part of this is meta, and then I get to the issue.
Trilobite is the one who brought up Dresden, with this statement—
“Children died in Dresden, too. As General Sherman said, “War is Hell.” I suggest that there is no nice way to wage war, no way to coerce a country without hurting innocent civilians. ”
Sounds like a clear defense of the bombing of Dresden. Jes then objects and quotes Slactivist on the immorality of killing civilians. It sounds absolutist, possibly ruling out any collateral damage at all.
Steve then jumps in with–
“How should we have defeated the Nazis, Jes? How should we have defeated Japan? What would have been the humane way?”
Since the way we actually beat Germany and Japan involved firebomb raids on their cities, and since Jes was reacting to a defense of the bombing of Dresden, it was natural for Jes to assume Steve was siding with Trilobite. If Steve wanted to ask Jes about her position without appearing to defend Dresden, he could have said–
“Yeah, bombing Dresden went too far, but how would you defeat Hitler without killing civilians? Do you mean intentional killing is outlawed, or is all collateral damage forbidden? And how do you fight a war without at least some innocents being killed?”
I sometimes think Jes shoots from the hip. In this case her interpretation was the natural one to make. But rather than a recognition of the context, we get the usual chorus of IT’S ALL JES’S FAULT.
So that’s my reading of the tedious meta crap.
Attempt at substance follows–
I’m not sure, but I thought Fred (at Slacktivist) meant the intentional killing of civilians. Collateral damage is probably unavoidable in a war and I don’t think Fred, as a just war advocate (I think) is unaware of this. I think though, that we Westerners use that collateral damage loophole as an excuse to do whatever we think we can get away with. Or we pretend something is collateral damage when civilians were in fact the target. Sometimes people do both–with the sanctions there were occasional admissions that they were meant to impose pressure on Saddam, but if pressed obviously any US government official would swear they weren’t targeting civilians and all their suffering was all Saddam’s fault.
I’m citing Fisk’s book “The Great War for Civilization” for the following story, but I remember reading it myself. It was (according to Fisk) in the July 20, 2003 NYT. Rumsfeld was required to give his personal approval to any airstrike that was thought likely to kill 30 or more civilians. That procedure shows some attempt to limit civilian deaths. There were 50 such strikes proposed and Rumsfeld approved all of them. No doubt every single one of them met the just war criteria of proportionality. Snark aside, I think this probably shows how US government officials use the collateral damage excuse as a loophole to do whatever they want.
Jes,
“I just pointed out that you’re not allowed to kill civilians – it’s not just a moral standard, it’s the law – and you said “But what about Dresden!””
No, he didn’t. His response to you quoting Slacktivist was “How should we have defeated the Nazis, Jes? How should we have defeated Japan?”
to which you answered “Are you trying to justify the mass slaughter of civilians, Steve? If you think the mass slaughter of civilians can be justified, what then was wrong with the Nazi regime?”
In fact, in response to a comment by Bruce Baugh, he specifically declined to justify Dresden, saying “I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that we never could have won the war without firebombing Dresden, for example. But Jes seemed to be articulating an absolute moral standard where we simply never could have bombed Germany, ever, under pain of becoming as bad as them. And I wanted to figure out if I was misunderstanding her or, if not, what her alternative would be.”
In other words, you are simply distorting Steve’s comments to avoid answering his straightforward question about the implications of your beliefs.
“Killing civilians is wrong. And, as Fred at Slacktivist notes, pointing this out tends to get people very, very upset. Because there’s always going to be people who really want to justify killing civilians to accomplish a military goal.”
And allowing totalitarians to control the world is also wrong. And apparently, that cannot be pointed out to you without getting you very, very upset. Telling.
I wondered, after reading Donald’s comment, if the thread would go to meta or to substance: I see Dantheman prefers meta.
Nice to meta, Dan.
Nice to see Jes continues to prefer not to respond to anyone noting her distortions of what other people say. Why spoil a perfect record? 🙂
Doubtless I’m dating myself, but suddenly this thread reminds me of an old Doonesbury cartoon. The basic premise was then Vice President Bush’s tearing into Dan Rather for asking what his role in Iran-Contra was. The strip related the excitement that came from Bush tearing into Rather, and then ended with a final panel noting that only one question remained after all the shouting: “What was your role in Iran-Contra, Mr. Vice President?”
Meta it is, I guess.
Steve didn’t (partially) clarify his beliefs on Dresden until several posts into the discussion. I almost wrote that down in my previous post, but thought that Jes’s inability to read posts not-yet-typed was something we could all sympathize with, not realizing that there were people in the thread who transcend the normal human limitations involving time and causality.
The substantive issue would be sorta interesting to discuss, but having plunged into the meta sewer myself I can’t complain too much if we avoid doing so. Given the temporary absence of Taking it Outside, it’d be nice if the thread could physically split into two separate parallel columns, one for meta and one for substance.
Is it ever acceptable to conduct an attack that will kill civilians in addition to your intended target, or can the enemy ensure his own survival by secreting himself among civilians?
When there’s a fighting war, the usual rules of conduct have already broken down. People can agree to rules for how to break the rules, when they choose to.
If they thought the new rules would result in them losing a war they’d otherwise win, they wouldn’t agree. Why agree to rules for how to lose, when you can surrender instead?
People might agree to rules that make victory more expensive for them, when they think the result is better for humanity or something. But not when it puts the victory in doubt.
There’s no substitute for victory.
This is a particularly american point of view. Many nations are ready to negotiate an inconclusive end to a war when that looks good for both sides. They can have an armed truce, maybe negotiate some of their differences, work together against a mutual enemy, etc. They don’t have to get the whole thing resolved right now.
But americans are unusual, our national survival has never been seriously threatened in a war. Sure, the british burned DC but they wouldn’t deign to occupy us again. We have never ever fought for our national survival. Every war we’ve ever fought, we could have walked away from and been reasonably sure there would still be a USA in 20 years. We don’t fight for national survival, we fight for other purposes. If we start a war for some noble purpose and we quit before it’s done, there’s a good chance we’ll never come back and finish the job.
Oh well. An opponent who has to hide among civilians to survive is not that much of an opponent. If the civilians are friendly to you, get the civilians to tell you where the enemy is and then come arrest him. If the civilians *harbor* the enemy, then they’re enemies too and it’s OK to kill them. We ran into that during the official iraqi war. There would be soldiers or guerrillas or whoever holed up in some city and we’d be shooting at them, and women would walk around in plain sight unarmed, and once we realised they were serving as spotters — watching our positions and telling the fighters where to shoot — we shot them on sight. And little kids would come out in plain sight and carry off unexploded munitions. We figured they were carrying the things to the enemy so he could shoot at us with them, so we shot the kids too. Civilians really ought to stay in their basements until all the fighting is over. Provided of course we don’t do a bake-and-shake.
I heard a libertarian approach to civilians that I kind of liked. If civilians are getting oppressed by a government or by terrorists or whatever, dump a whole lot of weapons and ammo on them and let them sort it out themselves. Saddam isn’t going to dominate towns full of well-armed people, unless they’re willing to be dominated. Likewise al qaeda. It’s a very attractive idea but now that it’s been tried once I have to admit there’s somthing wrong with it.
The problem is, G’Kar, that it’s so much more fun to blame me for “distortion” than to discuss why it’s not right to kill civilians, not even if you can claim that you had a military or strategic objective in mind when you set out to kill civilians to achieve it. Killing civilians, or even talking about killing civilians, is hellishly depressing, but yelling at me is good fun.
I’d respond to the substantive comments made on this thread, but I’ve already said I agree with Bruce and I agree with Donald.
Donald,
“Steve didn’t (partially) clarify his beliefs on Dresden until several posts into the discussion.”
Partially? What is partially about “I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that we never could have won the war without firebombing Dresden, for example.”
“I almost wrote that down in my previous post, but thought that Jes’s inability to read posts not-yet-typed was something we could all sympathize with, not realizing that there were people in the thread who transcend the normal human limitations involving time and causality.”
It’s not Jes’s inability to read posts not yet typed that is the issue, but rather her ability to read a post that is typed, and somehow divine an intent nowhere to be found or implied in it, ascribe that intent to the poster, and beat the poster over the head with her views of the poster’s intent.
But how can one discuss why it’s not right to kill civilians (I should note that if there are appropriate times, they are extremely limited) when only one side is discussing the issue? I am not a linguist, but I am reasonably sure that the ‘di’ in discussion comes from there needing to be two sides (or more, perhaps…as I said, I am not a linguist).
And, he said, tongue firmly in cheek, if you think that people consider yelling at you good sport, perhaps you should be asking why they hate you so much. (And if you took that seriously, please don’t, it is meant strictly as dark humor.)
Resolved: that Ugh thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to eat kittens.
Discuss.
If the rumors are true, Rummy originally planned to Tokyo/Dresden Baghdad on the first day of the war (estimated casualties 1.5 million) to shock and awe Saddam Hussein into unconditional surrender and abandoned it only after someone leaked the draft to the media (and later denied that this had ever been seriously considered).
Hartmut – do you have a link to the media reports of that (if you’re willing to provide one to a kitten-devourer).
OK, I’ll take the “It’s sometimes OK to kill civilians” side and if anybody else who takes that side disagrees with me they’re welcome to say how.
First, nations *will* do whatever they can to survive when national survival is at issue. What good is it to do the right thing when it means you lose and die? If it’s a choice between mass deaths of enemy civilians versus surrender to an implacable foe, better them than us.
Second, soldiers will often do whatever they can to survive. If it’s a choice between killing civilians and coming home with a successful mission, versus not killing civilians and failing the mission and getting captured or more probably killed, usually it seems better to complete the mission. Once you’re home you can confess to war crimes and see whether your court martial decides you’re OK, or you might figure you do more for the war effort if you don’t report it but accept the consequences if somebody else does.
Third, elite units are elite because they get results consistently, not because they follow rules. Here’s a story which I remember as a navy submariner telling to a news guy — but it might have been in a novel, I don’t vouch for it. Think of it as Friend Of A Friend, FOAF. He was supposed to pick up a bunch of SEALs from the coast of, ah, call it north vietnam. He approached the beach, and he saw them running in in groups of 2 SEALs, each with a prisoner. As they got closer one by one each group snapped their prisoner’s neck and ran on. After they got back to the sub he asked why they killed all those people. “Our orders were to bring in one prisoner, mister.”
Of course if you’re patrolling behind enemy lines and civilians see you, it isn’t safe to let them report you unless you can move so fast that the report does no good. So it makes tactical sense to kill them. There’s a slippery slope here, and at the bottom you have “Do whatever it takes to complete the mission.”
So, do you need to patrol behind enemy lines? Do you really need that north vietnamese prisoner? Is this particular war one you really need to win? Somebody has to make those decisions, and the people who make those decisions need all the background information they can get. Since that background must be classified to keep it from the enemy, US civilians can’t know enough to second-guess it. We should obey the duly-constituted authorities and pray for victory.
But wait, what about democracy? Sorry, you can’t run a war like a town meeting. Wars are anomalies, the rules don’t apply. Wait until the war is over and then you can have a democracy again. I don’t like it, particularly since we haven’t really been at peace since 1941.
But that does give us the definitive answers. It isn’t your business to decide how many civilians our soldiers should kill. The legitimate chain of command will decide that, and it will enforce it with court martials for soldiers who kill civilians when they shouldn’t. It’s entirely their decision, not ours. We gave up those rights when we agreed to go to war, and we’ll get them back when there is peace.
I notice that nobody has cited any laws or treaties to refute the claim that Jes and Slacktivist make: you’re not allowed to kill civilians. Our governments go ahead and do it anyway, of course, but then they do a lot of other things that law and treaty do not allow.
G’kar, I think that principles that impose serious constraints on our freedom of initiative and response are most important precisely when the other side isn’t being gentlemen and ladies about it. That’s when moral authority can actually matter, along with basic intelligence.
I happened to be re-reading Cordwainer Smith stories last night. Smith was the pen name of Col. Paul Linebarger, godson of Sun Yat-sen and author of Psychological Warfare, the definitive textbook on the subject for many decades. Among other things, he’s credited with saving the lives of many thousands of soldiers in World War II and Korea by the simple expedient of replacing exhortations to “surrender” with ones to “cease honorable resistance”. It was easier for Japanese and Chinese soldiers to find it within themselves to do the latter, and they did, and lives on both sides were spared because of it.
I find the following quote from Psychological Warfare on the site for him and his works that his daughter maintains:
In other terms, it is tough to be modern; the difficulty of being modern makes it easy for individuals to be restless and anxious; restlessness and anxiety lead to fear; fear converts freely into hate; hate very easily takes on political form; political hate assists in the creation of real threats such as the atomic bomb and guided missiles, which are not imaginary threats at all; the reality of the threats seems to confirm the reality of the hate which led to it, thus perpetuating a cycle of insecurity, fear, hate, armament, insecurity, fear, and on around the circle again and again.
It is possible, but by no means probable, that the rapid development of psychological and related sciences in the Western world may provide whole new answers to the threats which surround modern Americans, including the supreme answer of peace as an alternative to war or the secondary answer of victory in the event of war….
Too specific a concentration on the problem of winning a war may cause a leader or his expert consultants to concentrate on solutions derived from past experience, therewith leading him to miss new and different solutions which might be offered by his own time.
That man was looking at places I would like to be going to. Whenever the question becomes “how much bad stuff can we get away with before we really ought to hate ourselves as much as we’re giving others excuse to hate us?”, I think, we’re looking towards the wrong goal. I want to win our struggles, really win them, not just set ourselves up for the next round of the same damn thing.
Ugh: Resolved: that Ugh thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to eat kittens.
I not only think it’s perfectly acceptable to eat these kittens, I’ll eat bears and puppies, too. And bunnies. And deer.
G’Kar: And, he said, tongue firmly in cheek, if you think that people consider yelling at you good sport, perhaps you should be asking why they hate you so much.
It’s a Centauri thing, you wouldn’t understand. 😉
Dammit, just as I conclude the thread has gone completely meta, Bruce speaks to the substance of it. Sorry, Bruce. I did preview, first, but you must have been typing as I did…
These things happen sometimes. I hadn’t really planned to add more, but then was hunting up Cordwainer Smith quotes for a friend who turned out not to know his work, and that bit from Psychological Warfare was just too good not to share, and, well, there you go. 🙂
Quickly googled…
Might as well join in. It isn’t illegal to kill civilians, it is just illegal to intentionally target/kill civilians.
“Not all civilian deaths in wartime are unlawful. In military terms, ‘collateral damage’, including civilian casualties, is to be expected in war. But there are clear rules that set limits on the conduct of hostilities.” (Human Rights Resource Center)
Since the way we actually beat Germany and Japan involved firebomb raids on their cities, and since Jes was reacting to a defense of the bombing of Dresden, it was natural for Jes to assume Steve was siding with Trilobite. If Steve wanted to ask Jes about her position without appearing to defend Dresden, he could have said…
Yeah, I could have said. The problem with the theory that Jes only jumped down my throat because I appeared to be defending Dresden is that I’ve long since clarified, and we still know nothing about how Jes believes a moral nation would have dealt with Germany and Japan. And why I would have brought up Japan if my sole purpose was to defend trilobite’s position is beyond me.
I think the temptation is to conclude that I’m playing some kind of rhetorical trick because Hitler was such a one-off, or whatever. But I think these questions are even more relevant today, as war constantly becomes less and less like a battle between uniformed armies.
Once upon a time, people built military installations away from populated areas, because, shockingly, they didn’t want their population to get bombed. Today we fight against people who have no problem locating their missile silos in a school, reasoning that once the other side blows up the school, they’ll be able to score a massive propaganda victory. I mean, that’s unimaginably monstrous.
But when people do monstrous things, you still have to decide what to do about it. If you choose the course of action that kills civilians, you have to live with that. If you choose the course of action that lets the bad guys get away whenever they manage to hide among civilians, you have to live with that too. These are difficult questions and I don’t think they are made less difficult by declaring moral absolutes and then refusing to engage in any further discussion.
Bruce,
I don’t have any issues whatsoever with placing limits on our own forces. Indeed, I suspect the U.S. would be better off if it placed more, rather than fewer, limits on what it permits its armed forces to do, although I suspect we would need a far more well-disciplined force than we currently have to accomplish this task.
Further, I’ll note that I cannot imagine many people arguing that it is in any way good to kill civilians. My question, which remains unanswered, is are there circumstances in which killing some civilians in order to accomplish an objective is permissible.
Oh, and Jesurgislac?
Well played.
Bravo, Steve.
G’kar, I think it’s true that very few people champion killing civilians as a positive good in itself – even the amoral blood-seekers say things like how it’ll lead to good stuff later. Nonetheless, since we are now in a situation where mass slaughter could and did become policy without anything like sufficient opposition, I think it’s worth going back and looking at first principles, assumptions, and the very early steps in chains of reasoning. Not that I think we can always forestall bad people from doing terrible thing, but we can make it harder, slow it down, provide more opportunities for sanity to return…good practice doesn’t guarantee virtue, but it helps.
I can’t help noticing that
a) Nobody seems to question that by approving the firebombing of Dresden I –tho not Steve — am beyond the pale; and
b) nobody has said why firebombing Dresden was unacceptable. My recollection was that the Allies were trying to take out a railroad hub and munitions factories. Wikipedia agrees, but says they also wanted to remove a likely restaging area for the Wehrmacht.
I don’t know much about the pros and cons of the decision to destroy Dresden, so I’m open to persuasion. Mostly, I just wanted an example that I thought would be less controversial than, say, Hiroshima. Steve took it a few rhetorical steps further down and got across the point I was originally trying to make. Still, I find it surprising that so many people seem to take for granted that there was no excuse for taking out a major industrial center after almost a decade of excruciating war.
“You’re not allowed to kill civilians.”
This isn’t an accurate statement of the rules of war at all.
If you wanted to come close to accurate it would be something like–you are not allowed to conduct operations which would largely serve to kill civilians unless they military objective is sufficiently strong to justify it. That’s off the top of my head, I’ll go look up the exact words now.
trilobite,
“Still, I find it surprising that so many people seem to take for granted that there was no excuse for taking out a major industrial center after almost a decade of excruciating war.”
Because there is a non-trivial difference in my mind (and likely many others) between taking out a major industrial center while minimizing civilian deaths, and taking out a major industrial center while not caring about the number of civilians killed in the process.
Still, I find it surprising that so many people seem to take for granted that there was no excuse for taking out a major industrial center after almost a decade of excruciating war.
I think conventional wisdom hasn’t really acknowledged that there was a case for Dresden’s necessity comparable to, say, Hiroshima. As a slave to conventional wisdom myself, I’ve always pretty much assumed that there was probably a better way, but I certainly haven’t studied it.
Just because I’m not defending your point, though, doesn’t mean I’ve concluded you’re a moral monster.
Well, I’m not sure I really want to debate this, but: I think it’s wrong to target civilians intentionally (i.e., to make killing them one’s purpose, rather than an incidental result of doing something else), and that for it to be justifiable to cause foreseeable civilian deaths, what you’re trying to do has to be important enough to justify them. “Important enough” being the term desperately in need of interpretation, which I am not going to try to provide. (Defeating Hitler: yes. Blowing up the earth in order to kill bin Laden: No.)
I also am not up on the history here, but I recall, back when the sanctions were in place, hearing someone from the UN, whom I trust, say that a significant chunk of the problem was that Saddam was not letting the oil for food money get spent on people’s actual needs, and contrasting this with the situation in the north, where the money wasn’t getting siphoned off and the various bad effects of sanctions on the general populace didn’t happen.
Fwiw.
Supposing there might be somebody here who doesn’t have me killfiled,
A major purpose of the Dresden attack was to test our methods. We had some idea how to make firestorms but we weren’t completely clear on it. Some attempts had failed. Dresden was a good choice because it was such an unimportant target that the germans had no antiaircraft defenses there. So the bombs could be placed precisely without german interference.
The experiment was a success. We did get a firestorm. The firestorm killed a whole lot of people. It also damaged or destroyed about 100,000 wooden buildings. If there had been military targets there and we had specifically attacked them we probably would not have killed most of the civilians. But that’s the point of making a firestorm — burn everything that will burn and kill all the people. If you don’t want to kill lots of civilians then you won’t try to make a firestorm someplace where there are a lot of civilians.
Hiroshima is very similar. We wanted to test the effects of nuclear weapons on a city. We picked a city that was unimportant enough that it hadn’t been bombed before, so we could get a better idea what the results were. We didn’t want to attack a military target because the military targets were small and we might miss. We couldn’t miss a whole city.
In both cases, killing civilians was a central aim. In both cases, the main reason we wanted to kill civilians was to find out how effectively these weapons killed civilians. Once we found out how to use the weapons, we mostly quit. So for example, I believe we made no serious attempt to start firestorms at Hanoi or Haiphong, even though we might have managed it at the right season. We didn’t really want to. Nor have we used nukes since we figured out what to expect from them.
My conclusion is that each time we develop a new weapon which *can* kill lots of civilians, we can expect to use it a few times while we calibrate its use. Once we know how to use it, we’re likely not to use it again because we don’t like to kill lots of civilians.
J Thomas: see, that’s something I think is just wrong.
I’ll note that I cannot imagine many people arguing that it is in any way good to kill civilians.
G’Kar, many people who are desperately scared of islamofascists say that — while it isn’t good in principle — it may or probably will or definitely will be necessary to kill a whole lot of muslims. Probably most of them. The possibility of nuking most of the middle east comes up rather often. Also the value of encouraging muslims to kill each other in large numbers. For example, the argument is made that civil war in iraq is a *good* think and we’re crazy to try to oppose it.
As a minor example:
trash talk
“WHY should American troops be used to prevent a full scale civil war if they are the only thing preventing one?”
We shouldn’t. Red on red attrition is our only chance. We must allow it.
These are our enemies, and we need to be their enemies. They are not our friends. Their welfare is not our concern, except in a negative sense.
At the moment there are no arab armies that are particularly dangerous to anybody but other arab armies, so if we’re going to beat the islamofascist threat we pretty much have to attack civilians.
italicide!
Hilzoy: say that a significant chunk of the problem was that Saddam was not letting the oil for food money get spent on people’s actual needs, and contrasting this with the situation in the north, where the money wasn’t getting siphoned off and the various bad effects of sanctions on the general populace didn’t happen.
In 1998, Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, then working as as humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned from the UN in protest over the way the Security Council (primarily, he blamed the US and the UK) were strangling the Oil for Food program. In 2000, Hans von Sponeck, who had succeeded him, also resigned in protest. Shortly after von Sponeck had resigned, Jutta Burghardt, who was then head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, also resigned in protest.
They were protesting the deliberate starvation of the Iraqi people by the sanctions enforced by the Security Council, and Denis Halliday at least has said explicitly and publicly that the problems did not arise because Saddam Hussein was diverting resources from Oil for Food for his own benefit, but because the resources provided by Oil for Food were insufficient, and were intended to be insufficient. Blaming Saddam Hussein for this was a convenient scapegoat.
There’s an interview with Denis Halliday, available online here, where he spells this out: he points out that the food and medicines brought in by Oil for Food were tracked by the UN, there was no systematic diversion: about $7bn was spent on “UN expenses” (such as reparations to Kuwait), leaving $130bn over three years to be spent on the Iraqi people, or about $190 per person. This wasn’t enough: three leading figures in the program struggled with it and resigned in protest: and there was absolutely no way that the US and UK governments who were responsible for the sanctions didn’t know that it wasn’t enough.
An article written by both Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday on the genocidal impact of the sanctions on Iraq was published in the UK on 29th November 2001.
(And one straightforward reason the north of Iraq was better off may have been the borders were leakier and sanctions were less enforceable: for obvious reasons, the Kuwait and Saudi borders with Iraq were solid.)
“leaving $130bn over three years to be spent on the Iraqi people, or about $190 per person.”
Was it contemplated that the UN should be responsible for feeding every single person in Iraq? That is a rather surprising way of looking at it.
“there was no systematic diversion”
That ‘conclusion’ calls into question his analysis, considering the fruit of the investigations later. See for example the GAO investigation which found about 20% taken by Saddam’s government. Or see the Volcker Commission reports which show a very systematic diversion. Or see the investigations in France.
Sebastian: See for example the GAO investigation which found about 20% taken by Saddam’s government. Or see the Volcker Commission reports which show a very systematic diversion. Or see the investigations in France.
…none of which, it seems, you know enough about to be able to make your point credible by linking to them.
Please allow me to remedy your omission:
See for example the GAO investigation which found about 20% taken by Saddam’s government. Or see the Volcker Commission reports which show a very systematic diversion. Or see the investigations in France.
(I can’t help with the last one, Sebastian: too vague for my google-fu.)
Was it contemplated that the UN should be responsible for feeding every single person in Iraq?
Which Iraqis do you think the UN should have left to starve? Can you give me their names and your reasons why they didn’t deserve to live? And some kind of outline about how you reconcile your support for starving Iraqi civilians with your claims to be pro-life?
Oh, never mind.
BBC, 2004:
That’s also the conclusion of the Volcker report: which also points out that the vast majority of Saddam Hussein’s illicit income came from oil smuggling outside the Oil for Food program: oil smuggling which was ignored by the US and the UK while favored nations and corporations benefited.
Which Iraqis do you think the UN should have left to starve? Can you give me their names and your reasons why they didn’t deserve to live? And some kind of outline about how you reconcile your support for starving Iraqi civilians with your claims to be pro-life?
It’s stuff like this that makes it hard for me to believe that Jes isn’t at least a little bit into self-parody.
I’ll go look it up if I feel it worthwhile, but Barton Gellman in the June 23 1991 issue of the Washington Post found several Pentagon targeting planners (one of whom gave his name) who said that we hit Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in part to hurt the civilian population. So the evil intent on our part was there. And the category of “dual use” was used to bring Iraq’s economy crashing down.
I take for granted that if Saddam Hussein suddenly decided to become a Swedish social democrat he probably could have cut down on the death rate during the 90’s even under sanctions and even with a collapsing economy. Spend less on weapons and palaces, more on people’s needs. That’s true of a lot of governments. It doesn’t get us off the hook and what was so morally disgusting during the glorious Clinton era was the way moderate liberals would squirm away from acknowledging our share of responsibility for Iraqi suffering.
As for Dresden, I’ve only given the thread a quick skimming since I got back and am glad the metaness has died down, but I think just war theory is what Sebastian said and what I implied in one of my earlier posts–you are allowed to kill civilians in a nonintentional sort of way, but there has to be a darn good reason to do it. The military end has to be important enough to justify the unfortunate side consequence of having civilians die. This obviously has nothing to do with air raids deliberately meant to destroy cities, as at Dresden.
In WWII, according to Paul Fussell, there were all sorts of occasions when bombing unintentionally killed civilians or even troops on one’s own side. He cites a figure of 12,000 for French and Belgium civilians killed by Allied airpower during the Normandy invasion. (I think.) And then there were some horrifying friendly fire incidents when planes bombed their own troops. So obviously we couldn’t defeat Hitler without killing civilians when we couldn’t even defeat Hitler without bombing our own troops and friendly civilians we were attempting to liberate. My objection is to deliberate civilian slaughter, and also to the use of collateral damage as a loophole allowing one to do whatever one wishes, while piously proclaiming no evil intent. It’s not impossible for a government to fight according to just war rules in good faith, but in practice I think human rights organizations and others should look at actual warfighting practices with a very cynical eye and assume guilt until innocence is proved.
too vague for my google-fu
I assume Seb is referring to the criminal investigations of ex-officials of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Which Iraqis do you think the UN should have left to starve?
At the same link, Wikipedia has the figure as 60% of the population being dependent on “oil for food” and that meshes with what I recall at the time. I assume that the 40% not dependent on it were more tightly connected to the regime, or Kurds in the north. I think that the “$190 per person” is incorrect as it does seem to be based on the entire population of Iraq, 40% of who were not dependent on the program.
“there was no systematic diversion”
I hate to think then what they could have done had they really worked at it!
italics off
Off now?
Wikipedia has the figure as 60% of the population being dependent on “oil for food” and that meshes with what I recall at the time. I assume that the 40% not dependent on it were more tightly connected to the regime, or Kurds in the north.
At last the other shoe drops. Iraq can’t produce nearly enough food for iraqis. (For that matter neither can saudi arabia.) But we talked like we weren’t going to let them import food. If we did enforce an embargo that extreme presumably iraqis would try their level best to grow more food. Supposing they could double food production from 25% of their needs to 50%, half of them would die. Memories of cambodia….
But we didn’t do it that way. We let them import specific amounts of specific foods, and pay for it with oil. Lots and lots of food coming in at one port. Grain, beans, cooking oil. People had to get their vegetables locally.
(Of course Saddam tried to sell extra oil. Since it was smuggling he’d get a low price for it, and the smugglers could pocket the difference. A lot of smuggling to jordan, which could sell it to — israel?)
Saddam had censuses and gave every family a ration card. You’re dependent on the ration if you’d starve without it. That is, basicly, the 70% poorest part of the population not including some farmers and some people who could smuggle food. Why was it only 70% and not more? Because the excess population did starve. And children who get much malnutrition below the age of 6 or so get measurable brain damage, they grow up kind of stupid and impulsive. They’ll be another burden on iraqi society as they grow up and vote and such.
Presumably if Saddam didn’t like you he could cut your family’s ration. If you were in trouble but you didn’t show up to get your ration card renewed….
And this was supposed to get people so upset they’d revolt against Saddam!
After the war the CPA wanted to get rid of that system. But they didn’t know how. If they didn’t buy many thousands of tons of wheat to distribute to the population, who would? Ideally they’d have a dozen iraqi private corporations that each looked for the best bid on the international market and competed with each other, but there was no way to get there from here. Ideally they’d take the food they bought with international iraqi funds that had been frozen before and were now available for them to spend, and they’d sell it to the highest bidders in each town. But tbat would take a whole lot of organisation they didn’t know how to do.
They estimated that 80+% of the population depended on the subsidised food. They had to keep the system going, even though it was socialism.
This looks to me like a great plug for PW Bridgman’s operationism. When people use words like “Oil For Food” with the claimed intentions of humanitarian aid to the iraqi people and weakening Saddam, we need to look at exactly what the words refer to. What actions are we talking about actually doing. What the words “really” mean are the real-world actions they’re connected to, not our fantasies about what ought happen.
I’ll look for links to any specific parts of the above anyone asks for. Some of it might be wrong.
I often disagree with you, JThomas, but I think your 8:21 post agrees with most of what I’d read over the years about the sanctions. Not that I can vouch for the accuracy of every word, but in general I think you’re right. One of the ironies of the sanctions, from my understanding, is that they turned Iraq into a massive economic wreck of a welfare state dependent on foreign charity, with impoverished and poorly educated kids who would be ripe targets for religious demagogues. Makes me proud to be an American.
Yes, exactly! A welfare state administered by Saddam!
Lets get the iraqi people to overthrow their hated ruler! Lets get it so 80% of them will starve unless he feeds them!
And I haven’t found any good detailed informtion, but it’s plausible that anbar will starve unless the shia government feeds them.
Another irony–the insurgent tactic of destroying Iraq’s infrastructure in order to discredit the ruling powers is the same strategy we used.
but we’re bringing freedom and the American way, so they’ll love us and spread the good word about America all throughout their land. and then nobody will ever hate us again.
let’s all join hands and sing.
oops… i should’ve written : but we’re bringing freedom and The American Way.
Bruce,
Well, if you want to go back to first principles, that’s fine and dandy, but I’m afraid I’m not philosophically capable enough to get beyond ‘killing civilians is wrong’ and move on to discussions about when, if ever, the killing of civilians can be justified. Much like going to war, I think that providing the power to do so invites abuse, so I actually lean towards Jesurgislac’s definition if only because the current leadership in Washington has made it very clear they will take any loophole and drive through it at extremely high speed.
G’kar, you misunderstood me, I think. I don’t want civilians getting killed. I really don’t want them being targeted for killing. I want the means of war to aim away from them and to reduce their risks. I think something’s gone ghastly horribly wrong in the way people with authority and scholarship talk about fighting war, that we could end up in this sort of calamity, and would like to back up and see how to set up better walls so that it doesn’t happen again.
Does that help clarify anything I wrote earlier?
What the words “really” mean are the real-world actions they’re connected to, not our fantasies about what ought happen.
I’m curious what stick should be employed then. When war is discussed, we hear that sanctions are working, or would work. Now it seems that sanctions are just too dastardly as well. So what stick does the UN then actually have?
661 passed 13-0 with Cuba and Yemen abstaining. Pretty clearly then it was the unanimous will of the world body. Oil for food was introduced by the US under Clinton, and its intent was humanitarian (at least in part). The UN ran the program. But now the US is supposed to feel guilty about how it all worked out.
What credibility does the UNSC have left if it has no stick at all? Honest question…
Famine has killed millions in NK – many of them children. Heck there were reports of children being killed for food. Children who survive are growing up severely malnourished, with all that implies.
Based on this thread, all sanctions against NK should immediately be lifted, and aid with no conditions attached should pour in from all over the world. I don’t disagree with that.
But how do you disconnect a country’s people from its political entity on the world stage? Whether its war or sanctions, isn’t holding a country’s people at risk the only real stick available to a world political body? When carrots don’t work what remains?
The sanctions on Iraq destroyed their economy, OCSteve. That’s why, in the last few years before 9/11, people were talking about “smart sanctions”, which (if imposed by people working in good faith) would prevent or at least put big obstacles in the way of Saddam starting up a nuclear program. One could also try and target the leadership class specifically, though I don’t know how well that’d work. But anyway, sanctions are not an all or nothing affair, any more than war has to either be fought with nukes or alternatively with water pistols. That’s what got the earlier “meta” argument going–it’s not as if firebombing Dresden or Gandhian pacifism were our only two choices in fighting Hitler.
Some sanctions opponents also opposed “smart sanctions”, on the grounds that the US had already shown so much bad faith in how it kept material out of Iraq on dual use grounds that it would continue to do something like this with the smart sanctions. To me that’s an argument for imposing the sanctions honestly–if it turned out that we continued to act in bad faith then I’d oppose smart sanctions as well, but in theory they don’t have to be murderous.
If we have contributed to famine deaths in North Korea, then we should stop doing that. I’m not familiar with that issue enough to say whether we’ve done this. I don’t think food supplies contribute very much to nuclear weapons programs. That doesn’t mean that aid to North Korea should be unlimited. Why do things have to be all or nothing?
Bruce,
I did not intend to imply you were in favor of killing civilians; my apologies. More to follow, I hope.
OCSteve: Whether its war or sanctions, isn’t holding a country’s people at risk the only real stick available to a world political body?
And so, if the US won’t get out of Saudi Arabia, attack US civilians (for example, by flying planes into the WTC) to make clear to the US government that their country’s people are at risk unless they do as al-Qaeda demands?
Seriously, OCSteve: nothing you have said before this has indicated you think it proper to have American civilians die for what the US government/military are doing. Yet that is the thrust of your argument here.
G’Kar: Much like going to war, I think that providing the power to do so invites abuse, so I actually lean towards Jesurgislac’s definition if only because the current leadership in Washington has made it very clear they will take any loophole and drive through it at extremely high speed.
Exactly. Treat killing civilians – even in wartime – as a crime, just as torture is a crime. If you allow just a little bit of killing civilians to be legal, the loopholes will open up and more and more civilians will be killed: just as when the US decided that some torture, sometimes, ought to be legal and acceptable, the use of torture became widespread.
What the words “really” mean are the real-world actions they’re connected to, not our fantasies about what ought happen.
I’m curious what stick should be employed then. When war is discussed, we hear that sanctions are working, or would work. Now it seems that sanctions are just too dastardly as well. So what stick does the UN then actually have?
My point is that it’s important to notice what we’re actually doing as opposed to our slogans.
It looks to me like what some sanctions actually did was to make Saddam more powerful in iraq. We said we were going to make his citizens suffer so they’d blame him for it, and they’d overthrow him or something. And the result was that his people got fed only because Saddam handed them food. So the way it weakend *Saddam* was that his people were malnourished and some of them starved. If he’d had more people and better-fed people he could have used them for more. We weakened him by starving civilians.
Similarly with some of the dual-use stuff. We wouldn’t let him import chlorine gas because he could use it for poison gas. So his cities didn’t get their water treated and some large number of babies and children died of diarrheal diseases. But it did make it harder for Saddam to make poison gas! Some american cities use ozonation instead which might possibly be better, but which is more expensive. It wasn’t obvious that iraq had the money to switch.
Various people point out that Saddam built “palaces”. They say “He built palaces while his people starved!” But see, construction didn’t take imports. They could make cement — that takes limestone and a heat source — oil maybe — and a lime kiln. They could make concrete with cement and sand and water. Etc. Given a labor surplus (more people than he had jobs for that needed importado) he lost nothing by putting the spare people to work using the spare cement made with spare oil. He could even pay them for honest work. In albania in the old days, facing a similar problem, they built lots and lots of bunkers and pillboxes. People called them “government mushrooms” because they sprang up everywhere. In a way they were wasted because nobody invaded, but maybe they discouraged invasion. Saddam’s government buildings gave him places to put his hired government workers. And we’re using them today for firebases.
I’m not sure what “stick” we should have used to beat Saddam. Sanctions helped keep Saddam from re-arming. (That’s a specific real-world goal, not a punishment.) But then he made himself a whole lot of artillery shells and RPGs and AK47 copies, didn’t he? Because he could. We made a big deal about Saddam having something like the fourth largest army in the world, but they weren’t the least bit of a challenge when we invaded them. And notice — any of Saddam’s neighbors could have invaded iraq and probably gotten away with it pretty easy, and they didn’t. Are they really more likely to invade if we pull out, than they were before we got Saddam?
So, what could we have done better? We could probably have done smarter sanctions and gotten just as good results for weakening Saddam militarily. But iraq’s population would be larger now. I’ve met zionists who say the only good iraqi is a dead iraqi, and to them that would be a bad thing.
I think if we wanted to get rid of Saddam we’d have done better to buy iraq from him. That has lots of advantages. Much cheaper, we buy an intact country instead of one we’ve bombed, etc. Of course maybe he wouldn’t sell at a reasonable price, but we at least should have asked.
I am pretty sure that OCSteve said “a world political body,” which describes the UN but not al Qaeda. But then English is only my first language.
I am pretty sure that OCSteve said “a world political body,” which describes the UN but not al Qaeda.
Depends who you ask.Okay, that was moderate, for you. But you’re right.
So, if killing half a million children was appropriate behavior for the UN Security Council in Iraq, how many American children should die for the actions of the Bush administration? (The US has never let UN inspectors ensure that the US is not producing WMD: and, unlike in Iraq, we can be confident that the US has the power to do so.) OCSteve, your contention is that it’s only right to punish American civilians for this behavior. How many Americans are you willing to have die for this?
I am also not entirely sure al Qaeda has any right to make demands of anyone vis a vis Saudi Arabia.
Wait, which UNSC resolutions about the US are we discussing here?
(comments from you about what is “moderate”=ROFLZ)
“I’m curious what stick should be employed then. When war is discussed, we hear that sanctions are working, or would work. Now it seems that sanctions are just too dastardly as well.”
Right, this is part of the left-wing two-step. When you are talking about war, sanctions are working, Saddam is being restrained from pursuing a nuclear program by the sanctions, etc. But stop talking about war for half a second, and suddenly we should be removing the sanctions, they don’t really do anything other than hurt the innocent people, etc.
“Treat killing civilians – even in wartime – as a crime, just as torture is a crime. If you allow just a little bit of killing civilians to be legal, the loopholes will open up and more and more civilians will be killed”
Good point. Can we talk about the responsibility to separate yourself from civilians if you want to make war on someone? Ohh, I remember now, you don’t care about that either.
Illustration of left-wing two step again.
Sebastian, you’re confusing about three different lefties there. The center-left Clinton types defended sanctions. The somewhat further left could acknowledge that sanctions had contained Saddam while still thinking he could have been contained with “smart sanctions” which wouldn’t have caused so much misery in Iraq. The furthest left could have said sanctions contained Saddam, but might not really have cared whether he was contained or not, and felt that smart sanctions would have been abused by the US.
I fall into the middle group. There was a moderate anti-sanctions activist named David Cortwright (or something close to that) who I thought was reasonable on this. He favored smart sanctions.
Your post is an illustration of the rightwing two-step, or if we can just dispense with dance analogies, it’s an illustration yet again in this thread of how to polarize an issue beyond all reason. It’s like you’re frustrated that people keep pointing out moral constraints on possible actions we could take, so you pretend that every critic on the left would put so many constraints on that no action could be taken at all. I’d take your frustration a little more seriously if there was any chance that high-ranking US officials would face war crimes charges when they cross the line. Meanwhile, in the real world leftist moralizing doesn’t seem to be a very serious constraint on US actions.
As for responsibilities to separate yourself from civilians, far too often the cry of human shields is used by people when human shields weren’t being used, or when the side crying about human shields has been using them itself. (I’m talking about Israel there.)
In the case of Iraq, we invaded them for no just cause, so it’s hard to see any justification for any civilian death we cause. Suppose insurgents got inside the Green Zone or better yet, came over here and took over part of DC. (The part where the politicians and bureaucrats are.) Would we use air strikes if important American lives were at stake?
Bruce,
To return to the earlier topic of how to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, I fear I am strongly pessimistic. There is little evidence the American people care about this stuff enough to make our politicians make the necessary changes. I take your point regarding the shift in public opinion on Iraq and the VP, but I’ll wager a lot of that would shift yet again if, for example, the House were to take up impeachment proceedings against Cheney.
In any case, I believe that much of the problem stems from a Congress that has abandoned its responsibilities over the past 30 years (or more). From abortion to campaign finance reform to war, Congress does its very best to sidestep any issue that might be at all contentious. They’ll pass an AUMF, but they won’t take any responsibility for the conduct of the war, not even bothering to investigate the war in any way shape or form. Consider Congress during the U.S. Civil War or WWII, where much of Congress was investigating various aspects of the war to ensure it was being fought and resourced appropriately. We have none of that today, not even with the Democrats back at the helm.
Ultimately, the Constitution is nothing but a piece of paper. Because Congress has refused to exert its own prerogatives, the President has been able to push into realms that should not be permitted to him. Until that changes, any changes we make to the document itself would be cosmetic.
“Meanwhile, in the real world leftist moralizing doesn’t seem to be a very serious constraint on US actions.”
It isn’t a good restraint on Saddam’s action or Al Qaeda’s action either, so I suppose you shouldn’t worry too much.
“It’s like you’re frustrated that people keep pointing out moral constraints on possible actions we could take, so you pretend that every critic on the left would put so many constraints on that no action could be taken at all.”
You could make the discussion process easier by arguing with Jesurgislac yourself instead of leaving all the line-drawing to people like me. You could be the one saying “Your ‘no civilians should ever be damaged by our side in a war’ stance isn’t realistic. We should try to be careful, but we can’t guarantee that no civilian gets hurt without rolling over to any tin-pot dictator who wants to take over anyone near him. Sebastian goes too far in thinking ‘X’ but that doesn’t mean that ‘no civilian ever gets hurt’ is a workable way of doing things.”
That almost never happens here. (Not absolutely never, just almost never).
However, on my end, I should be careful to name each person in a post about multiple people instead of just quoting them. I knew it was two people, but I can see how you would think I was conflating everyone.
Treat killing civilians – even in wartime – as a crime, just as torture is a crime.
Things tend to get disorganised in wars, and also lots of things get kept secret for decades afterward. The main thing that stops armies from doing bad things is military tradition.
So for example the US army has a tradition that we don’t rape people. The number of french women raped by US soldiers during WWII was likely less than 10,000, and less than 50,000 german women. (There’s a scholarly estimate of 3,620 such rapes in france in the first year of occupation, with 116 soldiers convicted. This is a very small number for a large army.) The reason the numbers are so small is that the US army has a tradition we don’t do that kind of thing. Certainly not that it’s illegal.
When military tradition changes to something we don’t like, I’m real unclear what to do about it. Tell the soldiers that their new traditions are bad and all they hear is that we don’t like our military, which after all is the only thing protecting us from foreign armies whose traditions are much worse.
I’m not sure where Jes stands–I think she might be a pacifist. I respect pacifists, but feel like I don’t have the courage to be one. That is, if I were to be one I’d have to be willing to be martyred and facing that sort of situation, I think I’d rather shoot someone.
So I generally agree with most of Jes’s criticisms of US foreign policy because in the world as it actually exists, we’re so far from practicing just war theory in our actions that just war types and pacifists will agree most of the time about US actions. If Jes is a pacifist, it’s not worth my time picking fights with her. I have gotten into fights with JThomas about Cambodia, which I don’t want to rehash here, but mention it to say that I will jump on a fellow lefty (or I tend to read JThomas that way) sometimes. With pacifists I think they’re wrong, but I admire the stance.
Donald Johnson: Why do things have to be all or nothing?
They don’t. I’m really talking about coercive sanctions though.
UN 660 – Saddam, get out of Kuwait right now.
Saddam – Bite me.
UN 661 – Heavy sanctions, get out now.
Saddam – Bite me.
UN 662 – Please?
Saddam – No.
UN 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, 677 – Pretty please?
Saddam – Bite me.
UN 678 – War.
Even the harshest sanctions did not help here. It came to war, but the harsh sanctions were left in place for years after that to continue to try to get Saddam to toe the line.
I submit that coercive sanctions are going to disproportionately impact the civilians of a country, more so than the political entity of that country. And even harsh sanctions may not be enough to make a country bow to the will of the UN.
Jes: Yet that is the thrust of your argument here.
OCSteve, your contention is that it’s only right to punish American civilians for this behavior. How many Americans are you willing to have die for this?
You are mind reading and putting words in my mouth again.
But how do you disconnect a country’s people from its political entity on the world stage? Whether its war or sanctions, isn’t holding a country’s people at risk the only real stick available to a world political body? When carrots don’t work what remains?
I’m not making much of any argument – I raised the above question. And as Phil noted, I’m specifically talking about the UN (or whatever succeeds it). If war is out, and coercive sanctions are out, then what tool does the UN have left to enforce its decisions?
The reason the numbers [of military rapes] are so small is that the US army has a tradition we don’t do that kind of thing. Certainly not that it’s illegal.
Apparently a lot changed between the post-1945 occupation of Germany and the current moment, when a tradition of raping female U.S. soldiers is becoming well established.
In between are the Korean and Viet Nam/Southeast Asia wars, during which this ‘tradition’ didn’t hold up so well either.
OCSteve: Maybe it doesn’t actually have any good tools…though we haven’t really given more focused sanctions nearly so much workout…and if it doesn’t, maybe it should refrain from demands that can only lead to war. I certainly can’t rule that out as an option.
In terms of sanctions that work, Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine opens with a scene where Libya is trying to negotiate out from under its sanctions regime by becoming a law-abiding member of the world community. In Suskind’s account, Qadafi (like Saddam, no angel, as I’m sure you’ll agree) ultimately got sick of things like the Libyan political elite not being able to send their kids to study at US colleges. He might not have cared about the little people, but when people whose opinions actually mattered started complaining to him, he finally relented and said “enough already.”
Of course, in the propaganda version of the story, Qadafi actually got scared straight once he looked into George Bush’s eyes or something like that, but let’s deal in reality for a minute.
Each country is different. You need to understand where the levers of influence are and what sanctions you can impose to actually impact the people who have a chance to manipulate those levers.
If you starve the population at large, they have only two choices: violent revolution or continued suffering. You can hope for the revolution, but unless you have solid grounds to believe you’re on the cusp of one, it’s nothing but a hope.
But if you can find a way to make the elite suffer, now you have a chance of accomplishing something, because the dictator listens to the elite and their grievances. He maintains power by making life comfortable for his inner circle, after all.
Of course, the power of sanctions is dependent upon how many countries you can enlist to support them. If you work as a team with the world community, you have a lot of options. If you go about it unilaterally (for example, our Cuba policy), there are pretty severe limits on how much deprivation you can actually bring about. Again we see the importance of building alliances and remaining a member in good standing of the world community.
What we should have done about Saddam is an academic question at this point. But we can certainly try to learn something for when the next dictator came along. If the sanctions against Saddam’s regime didn’t work, starved a lot of people, and left us having to invade anyway at the end of the day, that’s probably not a model we want to follow again. If the sanctions against Libya worked, then we want to see if that model can be successfully adapted to other situations. That’s what we mean when we talk about “smart sanctions.”
OCSteve:Even the harshest sanctions did not help here.
I seem to recall that the sanctions put in place on Saddam prior to GWI were there for less than six months, which seems to me to provide not much evidence that they were of any help (or at most that they don’t work within a six month period).
Nell: when a tradition of raping female U.S. soldiers is becoming well established.
Is there stats or a story or something similar on this that you can link to? Just curious.
Oh, if sanctions are meant to enforce decisions then I wouldn’t count on them much. It depends on what the leadership of the country is willing to endure. I think sanctions on South Africa are supposed to have worked, but in that case the targeted country was one where white people with the vote were oppressing blacks without the vote. Even then the sanctions hurt the blacks too, but anti-apartheid activists from South Africa claimed the people were willing to endure it, or so I’ve read. Under those circumstances I might support them. I wasn’t following the issue closely enough at the time to have had a firm opinion then. I’m writing all this from memory.
“Smart” sanctions would have made it more difficult for Saddam to acquire weapons. They wouldn’t have been coercive enough to do anything else, I suspect.
UN 660 – Saddam, get out of Kuwait right now.
Saddam – Bite me.
UN 661 – Heavy sanctions, get out now.
Saddam – Bite me.
UN 662 – Please?
Saddam – No.
UN 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, 677 – Pretty please?
Saddam – Bite me.
UN 678 – War.
Even the harshest sanctions did not help here.
Maybe part of the trouble was that Saddam and many iraqis felt that kuwait was part of iraq, cut away by the british. They thought they were right so they stuck to their guns.
I didn’t think of it at the time, but looking back I’d have liked to see the following compromise suggested:
We tell Saddam that we’ll respect kuwait as part of iraq if the kuwaiti people vote for it in a free election. Three choices. Let Saddam stay, bring back the Emir, or start a democracy. Pick first and second choices, unless only one is acceptable.
Say that Saddam negotiates and wants all the palestinian guest-workers to be able to vote too. That’s fine with me. They don’t have any better place to go, they’re doing the work that full-citizen kuwaitis won’t do because they’re too rich on oil money, the citizens didn’t fight for their country — their mercenary army didn’t do much good either. Why should the british get to decide a few people are rich and others have no country at all? So give up on that point and Saddam might think he has a pretty good chance of winning.
While we’re setting up for the vote Saddam has every reason to treat the kuwaitis kindly. They’re better off in the short run. Since it took a year before we were ready to attack, a vote wouldn’t actually delay the attack if one needed to come.
We stage a vote. If it goes against Saddam and he pulls out, he can save face some, particularly if they choose a democracy instead. “Thank you for liberating us, Saddam, but it’s time for us to go our own way.” If he doesn’t pull out he has even less justification for staying. The vote doesn’t delay our attack. And if the voters choose not to bring back the Emir we wind up with an arab democracy, an example to the rest and a harbinger of freedom for the whole area.
It looks like it would have cost us nothing to try, though of course results were not guaranteed. The only possible bad outcome I see is that Saddam might possibly have won in a free election. I wouldn’t like that but I’d accept it.
Relevant to the discussion of civilian casualties caused by U.S. military action, whether targeted or “collateral”:
a new article by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, basis of a forthcoming book, in which Iraq vets talk about their experiences with same.
@Ugh: This Salon article by Helen Benedict, also part of a forthcoming book. A story that probably won’t be fully told anytime soon unless the deployments really end. Not looking good for that right now.
Thanks Nell.
You’re welcome. I’ll stipulate right off that the Karpinski story about deaths from dehydration is highly dubious. That does not, for me, discredit the tons of other evidence that rape of women military is at a high frequency in Iraq and out of control in the military in general — including the service academies, where there isn’t a shred of a mitigating factor.
Steve @ 1:43: Excellent response, just what I was hoping for. Sanctions focused to pressure the elite is not something I had ever considered. The obvious upside is that you don’t have to starve thousands of children to death. The first downside I can think of is that it may take more time than you think is available. OTOH, ‘elites’ do like their comforts so it may not take long to set them screaming. I think I can see that working if as you suggest sanctions are targeted correctly and widely supported.
Works for me, too.
Acting smart and learning from our failures and successes is what we should be doing.
Ugh: I seem to recall that the sanctions put in place on Saddam prior to GWI were there for less than six months, which seems to me to provide not much evidence that they were of any help (or at most that they don’t work within a six month period).
True, that. But working in this context includes thousands of civilians starving to death. I know that’s not what you meant by it. I think another point I’m circling around here is that harsh sanctions are just as bad (almost as bad) for civilians as war is. Either one is likely to have a larger impact on innocent civilians than on the guy in charge, who will always get enough to eat on one hand, and have a nice bunker to hide out in on the other hand. If those are the only two arrows in the quiver and the UN is (understandably) reluctant to use either, then they really have little or no enforcement power. I was looking for a way around that, and I think Steve hit on at least a start.
In case it’s not clear, OCSteve, I would really like there to be useful means of leverage well short of war, because I don’t want a lot of wars, and I don’t want a lot of evil going unresponded to.
Bruce: Then count me on your side.
I think we mostly differ only when we get down to really ripping things apart and looking at motivations etc. I think that on outcome we can agree 95% of the time.
“If the sanctions against Libya worked, then we want to see if that model can be successfully adapted to other situations.”
The timeline doesn’t make it clear that the Libya situation was a success for sanctions. He held out for almost 2 decades and then gave up right after Afghanistan and on the ramp up to the Iraq war.
The timeline doesn’t make it clear that the Libya situation was a success for sanctions.
No, but the facts as reported by Suskind sure do. The idea that we scared Qadafi into immediate submission by our post-9/11 actions is a “pleasing tale,” as Bob Somerby would say. Strange that Iran, et al. aren’t so easily cowed, if it worked on Qadafi.
Sebastian: Can we talk about the responsibility to separate yourself from civilians if you want to make war on someone?
Certainly. So, the US government has a responsibility, in your eyes, to move the Pentagon out of Washington DC to somewhere where there are no civilians, before making war on someone? As this hasn’t happened, do you feel that the US government is being irresponsible? Or is this something that just applies to other nations?
OCSteve: But working in this context includes thousands of civilians starving to death. I know that’s not what you meant by it. I think another point I’m circling around here is that harsh sanctions are just as bad (almost as bad) for civilians as war is. Either one is likely to have a larger impact on innocent civilians than on the guy in charge, who will always get enough to eat on one hand, and have a nice bunker to hide out in on the other hand.
Yep. On the other hand, setting economic incentives for change creates, well… change. (See Turkey and the European Union.)
But, for all Iraq’s human rights problems (prior to the US invasion) Saudi Arabia, right next door, has almost as many, if of a slightly different kind.
Rather than building up Saddam Hussein as an uniquely evil dictator who had to be stopped, enforcing human rights agreements already in place might have worked – but would not have been an acceptable solution if it had meant enforcing human rights agreements globally.
J Thomas: We tell Saddam that we’ll respect kuwait as part of iraq if the kuwaiti people vote for it in a free election. Three choices. Let Saddam stay, bring back the Emir, or start a democracy. Pick first and second choices, unless only one is acceptable.
Say that Saddam negotiates and wants all the palestinian guest-workers to be able to vote too.
And the women.
Women weren’t entitled to vote in Kuwaiti elections until a few years ago – well after the Gulf War. A free election including women would never have been accepted by Kuwaiti men…
On the other hand, setting economic incentives for change creates, well… change.
I saw an interesting claim about syria.
A number of people have claimed that syria’s economy is hamstrung by government bureaucrats. Syrians who get significant money prefer to invest it elsewhere because it brings in a higher return elsewhere. So syria has been strapped for investment money.
But we got sanctions put on syria. Syrians are no longer allowed to invest elsewhere, and their money isn’t safe in foreign hands. So that money has come home and syria is getting more investment than before.
There are things about this story that don’t quite make sense to me, but I find it fascinating if true.
“So, the US government has a responsibility, in your eyes, to move the Pentagon out of Washington DC to somewhere where there are no civilians, before making war on someone?”
If we weren’t already the US, we could bomb the Pentagon without hitting nearby civilian buildings. It is close to civilian buildings, but it is a separate entity. (Now if they were to nuke it there would be other issues).
Of course we would only be so lucky to have non-civilian targets as separate as the Pentagon.
Jes: But, for all Iraq’s human rights problems (prior to the US invasion) Saudi Arabia, right next door, has almost as many, if of a slightly different kind.
I’ve long been in favor of doing something about SA. Invading them and stealing all their oil comes to mind first…
😉