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SPEAKING
FREELY
Bush and Blair on the rationalization
trail
By Tibor R Machan
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are
interested in contributing.
There would
be few people who could claim to hate tyranny as much as
I do. But the mark of civilization is that your actions
are guided not by even the strongest and most
understandable emotions, but by sound, principled
judgment.
In the case of Saddam Hussein, one
cannot dispute the validity of hating him. He admired
Joseph Stalin and seemed to share Adolf Hitler's
virulent anti-Semitism. He was a mass murderer. Certain
actions that would have brought him down, destroyed his
rule in Iraq, could even be championed - within limits.
The limits are those contained in the proper
role of the military of a free society. The military,
which is an arm of a country's legal authority or
government, has a specific function to perform, derived
from the purpose government is supposed to have. This
purpose is to secure the rights of the citizenry, plain
and simple. The military is supposed to go into action
when these rights are about to be or have actually been
violated by foreign armies. Only when the citizenry is
being aggressed upon by such armies may military force
be deployed.
There are thousands of morally and
politically objectionable policies practiced across the
globe, but these are not what the military of a free
country is supposed to attend to. Just as body or
security guards are sworn to protect the client for whom
they work, and just as they would be derelict in the
performance of their duties if they left their post to
embark on various operations unrelated to that purpose,
so the military of a free society is supposed to take a
strictly defensive posture.
Oddly enough, all
that talk about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) gave
powerful indication that many officials of the US and UK
governments had a strong inkling of this defensive
military philosophy. For when it can be shown to be
true, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the government of
a country that has a history of hostility toward one's
own is in possession of or building WMD, then this may
be treated as a threat, just as it would be rational to
treat as a threat your mortal enemy's packing of a gun
in your vicinity. The details would be different in each
case, of course, but all the talk of WMD intimated that
Saddam was nearly ready to go after the United States.
Moreover, there was that United Nations resolution that
suggested, also, that Saddam's was a hostile regime, set
to embark on aggression (as he did against Kuwait). With
all of that, the invasion could be made to look
plausible.
Without the credibility of WMD,
however, the rationale for the US and UK militaries
going after Iraq completely evaporates. Saddam's leading
a tyrannical regime will not cut it, however much that
would be reason to have some private party, not a member
of our military forces, assassinate him.
So the
talk about the WMD was vital to prop up George W Bush's
and Tony Blair's military stance. Now, as some of us had
argued all along, that talk has been officially
established to be utterly groundless. More important, it
was never given sufficient support in the first place.
Blair said the other day that he sticks to his
guns about the justice of invading Iraq because no one
can deny that it was a good thing to bring down Saddam.
As Blair put it, echoing Bush, when he authorized an
inquiry into the intelligence snafu that he claims lay
at the source of the invasion: "Whatever is discovered
as a result of that inquiry, I do not accept that it was
wrong to remove Saddam Hussein or the world is not a
safer or better place for that."
But this will
not wash, because from the fact that Saddam's demise is
a good thing, it doesn't follow at all that US and
British military forces were justified in bringing him
down. No, it would not have been wrong for some people
to remove Saddam, but it was wrong for the US and
British military to invade Iraq.
Now that may
seem a trivial technicality to some. But, just as in
law, in international affairs such technicalities are
anything but trivial. (Nor has it been trivial for all
the families who lost loved ones - and still do - in
Iraq.) Civilized societies do not make use of what
amounts to a defensive military force for the sake of
repairing the ills of the world. Not only does it amount
to taking the bulk of our defensive forces away, but the
policy would be utterly fruitless, given all the bad
regimes the United States and the United Kingdom would
have to chase down around the globe in this role of
"removing" rotten leaders. It is wrong for the military
of a free society to strive to become "the 911 of the
world" (as one morally obscene bumper sticker tells it
of the US Marine Corps, 911 being the emergency-services
telephone number used in much of North America).
At this point many will bring up Hitler, yet
that would be misguided. Hitler's ally, Japan, attacked
the US, and that was an open invitation to go after him
- at least if that's how it actually played itself out.
If your best friend comes at me, and you urge him on and
support him, you become fair game in my attempt to
defend myself.
Nothing like that happened in the
case of Iraq.
Tibor R Machan is a
professor of business ethics and Western civilization at
Chapman University in Orange, California, a research
fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University,
California, and author of Putting Humans First
(Rowman & Littlefield). His e-mail address is Machan@chapman.edu.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing.
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