It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified, given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime. I don’t think so, but if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr? If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.
These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s. Moreover, there was no cause at stake that justified a war – the first started when Bremer shut down Sadr’s newspaper and the Sadrists retaliated by taking control of some police stations and mosques. The current outbreak seems to have had even more trivial causes. It’s the willingness of the US government to send in the Marines that’s turned what would normally be noisy disturbances into bloodbaths.
Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.
John Quiggin 
John – The people of Iraq have had it bad for a long time. I’ve posted over at LAN Downunder extracts and links to reports of medical / doctors complicity in torture both post and during Saddam.
To justify things, you also have to be something of a utilitarian so you can balance out the harm done one way against the other. Not everybody buys that by a long chalk.
On the Al Sadr matter, I have heard it plausibly suggested (I merely report, not endorse) that the first round was what you say but that its failure led to outsiders flocking there to pursue their own anti-Americanism (again, not my approach on their agendas, though it is my paraphrase). If so, then this latest round of violence isn’t purely between the US and local resisters with innocent bystanders caught in the middle. Indeed, from an American perspective, I’ve heard justifications of shooting on the grounds that “anybody still there isn’t innocent”. Of course that may be true from a specialised perspective but it moves the problem back one: it abdicates responsibility for the harm done by making people flee as refugees (and denies that they might not have been able to). It’s a Deir Yassin/Tantura sort of justification.
Come on John. You refer to young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Well all these young men, and the others opposing intervention, had to do get rid of the US and the UK was to stop the violence and both countries would happily have left them to their now SH free existence. The fact that they cannot even do this says a lot about the mindset of many in the Middle East.
Also, Iraq was a major source of instability in the region and, with its continued defiance of the US and international law, was a continued inspiration to Islamic fanatics everywhere. SH also did fund suicide bombers in Israel – a fact which many so-called progressive seem to approve of. As the likes of Thomas Friedman and Paul Berman have pointed out the terrorist bubble had to be burst and the starting point needed to be Iraq – although it is also true that Bush is a dimwit and has made major errors, some of which could have been avoided if the likes of France and Germany had played a more constructive role and so-called progressives had participated more rationally in the dialogue.
A final note is that Christopher Hitchens will debate Phillip Adams on this topic on late night live tonight and one does not need to be psychic to guess which participant will base their argument on fact and which on emotion driven by naïve anti-Americanism.
“Well all these young men, and the others opposing intervention, had to do get rid of the US and the UK was to stop the violence and both countries would happily have left them to their now SH free existence”
And what guarantee would these young men have that they would not be the lucky recipients of another US puppet government? You seem to think that the US will invariably install a government that is supported by the people of the country. I don’t have your confidence, and neither do many of those young men.
I don’t want to argue that suicide bombing is right, but I imagine many Palestinians and more broadly Arabs feel exactly the same way about American funding of the Israeli military. Israelis probably have every right to resent Saddam for meddling in their internal affairs but Palestinians and Arabs equally resent American meddling in theirs. It’s that resentment that gives terrorist groups their attraction to some Arabs or Muslims. Invading Iraq did nothing to reduce it.
A final note is that Christopher Hitchens will debate Phillip Adams on this topic on late night live tonight and one does not need to be psychic to guess which participant will base their argument on fact and which on emotion driven by naïve Americanism.
Without American funding of the Israeli military, the country would have been overrun years ago and a significant proportion of the population massacred by Arab governments who don’t quite have the same restraint as successive Israeli governments when it comes to respecting human rights. On support or lack of for the coalition, I will point out again that the vast majority of liberal minded Iraqi’s support intervention. So those liberal/lefties in the west who oppose intervention are essentially spitting in the fact of their colleagues in non-western countries and saying there is one law for us when it comes to freedom and another for you poor suckers.
Another point to ponder is that large numbers of young Iranians are currently accusing the west of hypocrisy because we won’t do the same thing in their country and get rid of awful religious zealots that are ruining their lives.
JQ,
Are you suggesting that the killing of Al-Sadr’s militiamen by US forces is morally equivalent to the torture and execution of Iraqis under SH’s tyranny?
This, despite the fact that Al-Sadr’s men are in violent, armed opposition to both US forces and rival tribal and religious factions in Iraq? Al-Sadr’s men are fighting a civil war to impose their rule on their fellow Iraqis. Should the USA have allowed them violently to impose a Shi’ite theocracy on the rest of the Iraqi population?
If these fine young fellows had wished to avoid a violent death, they should not have taken up arms against the occupying power. The US almost certainly over-reacted, but shooting at US marines is an excellent route to martyrdom.
Michael Burgess,
Invading Iraq was NOT a good way to improve the security of Israel, or reduce terrorism. You would be mad to think that escalating the violence in the middle-east does anything to improve the safety of Israel or its people. The Israelis will only have lasting peace when they reach a compromise with the Palestinians. This is blindingly obvious to anybody that doesn’t have an axe to grind in the region.
In a couple of years’ time we will look back at the invasion of Iraq and realise that the lives and money spent by the USA on the war and occupation would have been better spent on the Israel/Palestine issue. Iraq is a side-show compared to this, the true origin of Islamic terrorism.
Unfortunately, it’s politically easier for a Republican (and probably Democrat, for that matter) president to invade a Muslim country than to take a hard line with Israel. Plus ca change.
If it wasn’t morally justifiable to remove Saddam, then it must have been moral to leave him in power. Conversely, if what the US has done with Sadr supporters is comparable to what Saddam did, then the US’s actions must also be moral as well. You can’t have it both ways if you want to assume that what the US has done with Sadr supporters is comparable to what Saddam did.
In my view, taking out Saddam was moral, and the US’s actions against Sadr supporters are *not* comparable to Saddam’s.
As always, George, I am stunned by your logical legerdemain.
Michael Burgess:
Your assertion that Iraq under the Saddam regime was a continued inspiration to Islamic fanatics everywhere is laughable. Islamic extremists tend to see secular dictatorships in the Arab world as their sworn enemy. In opinion polls held this year a majority of Iraqs wanted the US forces to leave immediatley even if they were worse off in the short term. Perhaps these young men arn’t to happy about former Bathists appointed by the US to run their country.
Michael Burgess is up to it again – talking about Iraq violating international law during Saddam’s years whereas the US and Britain have been doing it for years. Who armed Saddam during his war with Iran and continued to support him in full knowledge of his crimes against his own people? Papers like the Telegraph (U.K.) viciously attacked those who dared criticize Saddam even AFTER he had been proven to be gassing Kurds at Halabja. Mrs. Thatcher (1987) even rounded on members of the Labour Party who were criticizing Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds – she said that he was a friend “With whom we can do business”. Only after invading Kuwait did Saddam suddenly become a new Hitler who must be dealt with. Like Noriega, he was a thug who was an ally so long as he did as he was told. Once he exceeded his “authority”, he had to go. In other words, human rights have nix to do with Anglo-American foreign policy, and they never have. Its hypocrisy to think otherwise. That’s why I cringe when self-righteous westerners – like Hitchens – rant on and on about ‘international law’ when our governments use it only as a tool to serve western elite interests. The attack on iraq was pure and simple aggression, of the kind that was condemned at the Nuremburg trials and which violates international law! They stated that “The only aggression worse than that of the individual is that of the state as a whole”. Following the 1990-91 Gulf war, which left some 200,000 dead and the infrastructure of the country in ruins (if you don’t believe this, then discover what the Allied bombers destroyed), an illegal embargo was placed on the country which left hundreds of thousand more dead and which resembled a medieval siege. Bombs continued to rain down from allied aircraft on Iraq every three days, such that by 2002 the country was more of a captive state than a rogue state. Then the U.S. and U.K., in full knowledge that the country was in ruins (but lying to cover their motives), attacked and sent in an invading and occupying army! Read some of the commentaries on Counterpunch.com (in particular those by ex US marine Stan Gott) to see what many intellectuals in the US think of this conflict. Robert Fisk’s latest piece in ZNET (Iraq watch) should also be an eye opener.
To people like MB, international law matters to THEM but is irrelevant when applied to US. Why did ‘international law’ not matter over U.S. intervention in Nicaragua (the U.S. was condemned at the World Court in 1986 for ‘unlawful aggression’ = state terrorism in other words – against Nicaragua that left tens of thousand dead and the country ruined, but which the U.S. refused to accept), the attack on a vaccine plant in Sudan in 1998 which two independent studies estimated have killed tens of thousands, support for many other torturers and mass murderers (Suharto, Pinochet, Marcos, the Shah) and regimes (Turkey, Algeria, Uzbekistan, Colombia) that routinely slaughter their own citizens? This list of litanies barely scratches the surface. Far from being “governments of laws and “supporters of democracy”, the U.S., Britain and their minions have spent the better part of the past 50 years suppressing democracy and indigenous nationalism wherever it has has clashed with the interests of the establishment and the conglømerates that wish to maintain the status quo.
I have said for a long time that many of the people in Iraq in mass graves belonged there,the country is a hotbed of crime fuelled by a gun culture.
The right don’t criticise the numbers of people exectuted and imprisoned in the US,they believe that this is the only way.
Iraq a country with many fundamentalists with guns-remind you of somewhere else?
And what do you make of this?
“The incident, the first known case of human rights abuses in newly sovereign Iraq, is at the heart of the American dilemma here.”
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/1091880082213032.xml
The idea that the debate is about who is right or wrong? who is the terrorist or the freedom fighter? is naive. Neither side has a monopoly on morality. The only reason such a monopoly is sought is to justify the continuation of the conflict.
Recently the Asian Times ran a series of articles on Fallujah
from the ‘other side’. The picture they painted of a fundamentalist future in Iraq is pretty grim but is also the reality.
The important thing to understand is that the resistance is not just a matter of the extremists but is a popular nationalist movement. The defence of Fallujah united Shiite and Sunni resistance. Since then the Iraqui resistance has been much more widespread and organised. Witness the campaign against the supply chains of the US command targeted at trucking companies in neighbouring countries.
I made a rash prediction at the beginning of the year that the US would be ousted by the end of August. The current puppet regime is nothing more than a reinstallation of the previous Baathist regime – hence the moral quagmire highlighted by kosh.
As Juan Cole (easily the best source for news on Iraq) makes clear. It was the movement of the new governor of Najaf against Sadr’s militia that triggered the current violence breaking the previous peace. The number who have died in Najaf to date will pale into insignificance compared to the bloodshed that seems inevitable to follow. Najaf is the holiest city of the Shiite branch of Islam. It’s as if the war was happening around the Vatican and it’s a fight that will bring Iran into the war not to mention the rest of the Islamic world. The regime in Pakistan is hanging by the thinnest of threads – Musharraf is being isolated by defections from all sides.
What this all demonstrates is that the thing that matters is not who is right or wrong but whether we are on the winning side. The answer to the latter is no. The war on Iraq is wrong because it was incompetently decided upon and is being incompetently prosecuted. Surely, as Steve Sewell called it years ago, the blind giant is dancing.
I’d like to think that the war will be over by the end of August but it’s probably a bit like wanting the troops home by Xmas – a faint hope. What the US will do faced with being overrun is anybodies guess. But no matter how they forestall the inevitable defeat the economic disaster of the Bush administration will force their hand.
Could somebody please turn the lights out.
So I am at it again am I Mark (who hasn’t the courage to put his own name). Like many extreme lefties you provide the usual long list of US support for oppressive regimes. Well I have also criticised the US in the past for supporting oppressive regimes. Unlike you, who seem to think that evil stop and starts with the US, I criticse all wrongdoings.
However, the fact that the US supported SH in the past does not mean that they should not seek to put things right now. Secondly, the fact that the US is now overwhelmingly the dominant power in the world, means that US power needs to be analysed intelligently and not in the simplistic and emotive way many currently do.
Paul Berman is correct to draw parallels to the current appeasers of Islamic fashion in its various forms and many naive individuals prior to the Second World War and often after who played the evils of the Soviet Union and Hitler. The views of many French socialists on Hitler prior to the invasion of France would be a source of great amusement if the consequences were not so tragic. Again, it is about time many of you got over Vietnam and acted more maturely when analysing US power. Moreover, on the likes of Nicaragua and Chile, it would also help if you referred to the oppressive nature of left wing governments when in power and in the case of Chile the stupid economic policies they followed which lead to their downfall. Allende would have gone with or without US intervention.
“So I am at it again am I Mark (who hasn’t the courage to put his own name).”
This comment was by Jeff Harvey, who did put his own name.
Bastard son of Keating
The strategic release of a statement by 40 very senior retired military, diplomatic and public service heads calling for enhanced standards of truthfulness and accountability in government should by rights be a significant political development. These …