APRIL 29, 2003
MOVEABLE FEAST
By Thane Peterson
Was the Iraq War Moral? | An ethicist investigates the rationales offered by both the Bush team and its critics and finds questions to ponder on both sides
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The military campaign in Iraq is winding down -- and the occupation beginning. Saddam Hussein's torture and mistreatment of his people appear to be well-documented in the stories of Iraqi citizens and documents left behind by Saddam's henchmen. But where are the weapons of mass destruction that President George W. Bush made the raison d'être of the invasion? Sounds like questions for a philosopher of morality to ponder. So, I spent the last week tracking down a respected professional ethicist with whom I could talk about the war.
That's not so easy. Ethicists and theologians, like everyone else, tend to have political biases, and many of them have come out publicly for or against the war. Also, the ethical debate on the war revolves around the murky "just-war theory," which seeks to distinguish between wars that are justified in moral terms and wars that aren't.
One of the key tenets of just-war theory is that defensive wars -- ones in response to a direct attack or imminent threat of attack -- are just. That's one reason the question of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction is so hotly debated. Unfortunately, just about everybody on every side of the debate seems to use some aspect of the just-war theory to support their arguments.
To help parse out the philosophy of war, I finally settled on Daryl Koehn, director of the Center for Business Ethics at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Although she works for a Catholic university, Koehn grew up in Kansas in the "Amish-Mennonite tradition." She's not a pacifist either. She's a registered Democrat but says she sometimes votes Republican. She studied ethics at the University of Chicago and Oxford, and holds a PhD in the subject as well as an MBA from Northwestern University.
Koehn has spent a lot of time lately thinking about the nature of evil. Indeed, she's just finishing a book on the subject. And here's an interesting thought: She cautions that people can do evil to themselves if they indulge in illusionary thinking about war itself. Here are edited excerpts of our talk:
Q: In his "axis of evil" speech, President Bush justified the war on terrorism as good vs. evil. In your view, is the President's phrase justified in the case of the war with Iraq?
A: The formulation probably obscures more than it clarifies. Rather than seeing Saddam Hussein as a kind of evil seed or demonic spawn, you can see him as someone in the grip of an illusion. He [believed] he was going to be the new Nebuchadnezzar, the new king of the Babylonian Empire. That was a delusion, so he inflicted a kind of lasting suffering upon himself and, I think, [inflicted] that frustration on other people [in the form of torture, repression, etc.].
If you look at evil this way, as a failure to thrive, there's always going to be evil in the world -- as long as people are capable of deluding themselves and becoming frustrated [in the process]. So, when George Bush says he's going to defeat evil, he's perpetrating an illusion. I don't think evil can be eliminated from the world. That, in a way, is to think that human beings are gods, and we're not.
Q: But isn't Saddam indeed a sort of "evil spawn" -- a leader who has tortured, terrorized, and used chemical warfare? Isn't a more traditional view of evil apt in this case?
A: Actually, that isn't the traditional view of evil. If you look back at the history of the Judeo-Christian words for evil, they're all related to suffering rather than to malice or malicious intent.
Q: You've said Saddam had illusions of being the next king of Babylon. What are America's illusions?
A: I don't think we've been very clear about the justification for our attack on Iraq. The claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was the predominant claim used by people in favor of the war. [That's] an attempt to justify the war by appealing to just-war theory. If you can truthfully characterize Saddam as an imminent threat to us, then you can say that the war was justified.
Let's look at that claim. There's certainly evidence that [Saddam] was willing to use weapons. He did it in Kuwait and against the Kurds in his own country. And [the U.S. government] claims it knew he had weapons of mass destruction, as well, because it had intelligence and photos of mobile chemical labs and so forth.
However, if we don't find weapons of mass destruction, I think the argument will shift somewhat. It will become something like, "He had them and destroyed them at the last minute." Or, "even if he never had them, he was an imminent threat because he was always seeking to get them, and it was just a matter of time before he did."
If [that happens] I think it's going to cause some problems for us. How are we going to prove that he had been actively seeking the weapons? Even if we do, it's a tricky argument. If [Saddam] has been seeking these weapons for 15 years and never got them, it shows we were pretty successful at containing him. [In that case,] he wasn't the threat we're claiming he was.
Q: What if the Administration misled the public by saying there was an imminent threat of mass destruction? Would that make this an unjust war, even though a brutal tyrant was deposed?
A: If it turns out that he doesn't have the weapons, we're going to have a problem with credibility.
Q: But the Administration might simply have been mistaken, rather than misleading anyone. I'm asking, in ethical terms does it matter whether the Administration was mistaken or actively misled the public, as apparently happened with the Vietnam War?
A: If they were lying, yes, then we have a problem because then they violated the ethical tenets against lying. The just-war theory can only be justifiably used if you apply it in an honest way. There has to be an honest reckoning. If it turns out that [the public was] knowingly sold a bill of goods, then the use of just-war theory would look suspect.
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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