War and Peace
The moral problem of holding a gun to someone’s head to get them to do what you want becomes significantly more serious once you pull the trigger. It’s especially problematic if you never intended to do anything but pull the trigger.
This morning my fellow Americans and I woke up, for the first time in our country’s history, as citizens of an aggressor nation. As a result, in the days and weeks ahead, a fairly large number of innocent Iraqis, with whom even our President admits we have no quarrel, will not wake up at all. The lives of Iraqis are no longer just hostage to a situation beyond their control – they will be forfeit to prove a point about American might and American will.
It is true that America lost a lot of innocent lives on September 11. No Iraqi was responsible for that. In fact, I can think of no case where an Iraqi, either acting alone or as an agent of his government, has done any harm to any American civilian (outside of a few support personnel and press who may have been in the war zone during the first Gulf War). Nevertheless, the Iraqi people are now victims of circumstance – caught between their indigenous tyrant and a foreign invader. Every day, any number of them could be engulfed by a catastrophe just as sudden and horrible as September 11. Perhaps it will soften the blow to know that they are being liberated rather than terrorized. Perhaps it will ease the loss of loved ones to know that the bombs were delivered by brave, professional American soldiers acting in a just cause, rather than by pathological extremists bent on nihilistic destruction. Perhaps.
It is said that wars are a part of diplomacy. Even at the start of World War I, many statesmen anticipated the outbreak of hostilities as a chance to prove the quality of the nation’s manhood and adjudicate outstanding disputes between nations with some finality. The horrors of war in the 20th century disabused many of those illusions, although the unique brutality of many 20th century regimes made it necessary to retain both the means and the threat of force to keep dictators in check. Violence, unfortunately, remains the last resort of free people to protect themselves from oppression. As much as we wish for peace as a universal principle, pacifism that preserves an unacceptable status quo can be in its way nearly as destructive as the use of force.
The line between a “just” war and one fought for reasons of profit, revenge or national aggrandizement can be blurry, but no principle is more critical to the maintenance of international order. It is a principle whose definition cannot be left to the aggressor state alone. After all, everyone who takes life wants to see their cause as just. Even the Al Qaeda terrorists believed they were doing God’s will against an evil nation. That’s why discussions of good and evil – as important as those concepts may be on a personal level – are senseless in and of themselves as justifications for war. That’s why the world demands a higher standard of proof if the cause of self-defense or imminent threat is not self-evident.
As a citizen of a democracy whose government acts in all of our names, it is distressing that our leadership could not, and in the end would not, agree to be bound to any principle that could potentially limit its actions. Even policemen have to obey the law – even (or perhaps especially) when they know there’s no one around that can challenge their authority. This applies no matter how vile the criminal they are pursuing, because without the law, justice becomes but a whim of the powerful. Maybe that’s all it is anyway, but it’s crushing to the human spirit to see it demonstrated.
As a person proud of my American heritage of freedom and of the great accomplishments of our civilization, I want to believe our President when he says the use of force was his last choice. I’d like to believe that the threat posed by Iraq was clear, present and imminent, and that the world is opposing us for short-sighted and petty reasons. I’d like to believe that the swift success of our courageous troops will, in the end, make the world a better, safer, freer place, and that Iraqis will line the streets singing our praises.
Most of all, I’d like to believe this will all be over soon.
8:42:23 AM 
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