The second Iraq war elicits powerful emotions on both sides, justifiably, for it is a war that should never have happened. The Bush administration, an embarrassment to the U.S., piggybacked on the anti-Muslim fervor of 9/11 to forward its agenda against Saddam Hussein, and lied to garner support for an unjust war. The two key falsehoods that formed the basis of the second Iraq invasion were as follows: one, the so-called evidence of the production of weapons of mass destruction, which never materialized; and two, the link between Hussein and Bin Laden, which did not exist. To this day, no conclusive proof has come to light definitively linking Hussein to Al Qaeda1. The second Iraq war defines an unjust war, in that its perpetrators – the second Bush administration – ignored the long-standing and critical distinction between attempts to modify the threatening or deplorable behavior of a foreign government, and attempts to supplant a foreign regime through military action (Statement on Iraq 1).
In his book Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer offers the example of the Second World War as the epitome of a just war, in that the Allied forces came together to resist the aggression demonstrated by Hitler, and to unseat the Nazis from the position of power they built between 1918 and 1939. The Nazis, aside from their then-unknown final solution, actively invaded numerous countries – Poland, France, for example – and possessed a chillingly precise, well-orchestrated, and ambitious plan to remake the world in their own image. The Nazis exhibited ruthless commitment and unabashed entitlement. When the Allies engaged them, lies were unnecessary. The threat was clear and implicit in each one of Hitler’s frantic and terrifying speeches. Even so, in Walzer’s words, “regime change was the consequence, not the cause, of the war fought by the Allies. It wasn’t the aim of the wars declared in 1939 by Poland, France and Britain to transform the German state…their cause was resistance to armed aggression. And according to the just war paradigm, resistance to aggression stops with the military defeat of the aggressor” (Walzer ix). Concerning the second Iraq war, however, no clear threat ever existed, and no military action on the part of Saddam Hussein precipitated the declaration of war by the Bush administration. The connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein remained nebulous. The search for weapons of mass destruction resulted in nothing but supposition and the tragic death of British UN weapons inspector David Kelly. Suspicion and double-speak abounded. Though Saddam Hussein and his regime did cruelly persecute the Iraqi people, unlike the first Iraq war, Saddam Hussein did not invade a foreign country when the Bush administration declared war. As Walzer aptly concludes, “regime change, by itself, can[not] be a just cause of war. When we act in the world, and especially when we act militarily, we must respond to “the evil that men do,” which is best read as “the evil that they are doing,” and not to the evil that they are capable of doing or that they have done in the past” (Walzer xiii). The aggression, in the case of the second Iraq war, came entirely from the United States.
The Statement on Iraq from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, though by far the gentlest reprimand in the source material, points to the unjust nature of the second war in Iraq on the grounds that the military action occurred without cause. In 2002, the bishops expressed grave concern regarding “recent proposals to expand dramatically traditional limits on the just cause to include preventative uses of military force to overthrow threatening regimes or to deal with weapons of mass destruction” (Statement on Iraq 1). The precedent that the second Iraq war set clearly alarmed the bishops, and eight years later, we now understand the prescient nature of their fears. The bishops took a moral stance towards war, and explained that “just war teaching has evolved…as an effort to prevent war…It does this by establishing a set of rigorous conditions which must be met if the decision to go to war is to be morally permissible” (Statement on Iraq 2). When the Bush administration declared war without just cause, it immediately rendered the notion of just war – not to mention the moral foundation for war – irrelevant and obsolete. Why? By virtue of its power. The United States is the most powerful country on the planet. They have the largest, most well-funded, and well-maintained army in the world. In essence, the second Iraq war told the world in no uncertain terms that if the United States disagrees with the running of a foreign country – and, the cynical amongst us will say, if the United States also maintains “interests” in that country – it will deploy military action to ensure that things run its way, moral permissibility be damned. The second Iraq war shows the world that the United States – at least the United States as managed by the Bush administration – expects obedience, and will exact whatever measures necessary to acquire it.
The documentary No End in Sight offers a disturbing critique of the second Iraq
war and posits that the Bush administration pushed through its war agenda despite overwhelming concerns from senior military advisors and personnel to supplant Saddam Hussein and oversee the regime change and ensuing reconstruction of Iraq would be, in a word, impossible. Director Charles Ferguson uses interviews with senior analysts to paint the Bush administration as naïve and hostile to any facts that countered its rosy belief that Iraq would open its doors to the United States joyfully. Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, compiled the first national estimate on the state of the insurgency in Iraq, a document rife with bad news – meaning – the report provided a clear delineation of how difficult to would be to affect regime change in Iraq. According to Hutchings, “the President called it guesswork, and his press spokesperson called it hand wringing and naysaying. What was really revealing to me was that the President hadn’t read it” (Ferguson 2007).
Despite top analysts’ inability to locate any connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, almost at the moment that the plane hit the Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks, senior Bush administration personnel, including Colin Powell, warned of the “sinister nexus” between Iraq and Al Qaeda (Ferguson 2007). The Bush administration jettisoned careful planning and dedicated analysis in favor of a fantasy. The result: an estimated 600,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, three million Iraqis displaced from their homes, and the remaining millions lacking access to drinking water, sewage treatment, and electricity (Ferguson 2007). According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a just war focused on regime change provides a high “probability of success and proportionality. The use of force must have “serious prospects for success” and “must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated…The use of force might…impose terrible new burdens on an already long-suffering civilian population (Statement on Iraq 1). Again, the bishops appear prophetic. Eight years later, we now know that Bush administration-style regime change rained catastrophe upon the heads of the Iraqi people.
Works Cited
No End in Sight. Dir. Charles Ferguson. Perf. Campbell Scott. Magnolia Pictures, 2007. DVD.
“Statement on Iraq.” Usccb.org. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2002.
Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 4th ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Print.
Footnotes
- A 2008 a Pentagon-sponsored study of more than 600,000 documents captured in Iraq after the American invasion found nothing to link Saddam Hussein with the Al Qaeda terrorist network, according to the New York Times. Web.