From: Robbie Lindauer (robblin@thetip.org)
Date: Mon Sep 01 2003 - 19:46:41 MDT
Greg:
Thanks for your reply. Let's stick to Iraq for now, talking about two
wars at once is almost as hard for me as watching them.
You allude to a few reasons for attacking Iraq that I will paraphrase
here to make sure I've got a good understanding of what you're saying:
1) Iraq is a threat to the values of liberty and progress.
2) Saddam Hussein's regime had reneged on commitments.
3) It was time for a major social-upheaval in Iraq and we had to be
the catalysts.
4) Our "Enlightenment-based" culture is fundamentally in disagreement
with Iraq's culture.
___________________
Going from our point of agreement, that nations shouldn't bomb other
nations unless "Forced" to and your apparent contention that it was
forced, we need to get some agreement on what is meant by "forced":
A nation is "forced" to do something if all other options would cause
more pain, death and violence to their population than the one in
question.
I know that jumps through quite a few hoops - the concept of
nationhood, the responsibility of the ruling class to its population,
etc. I'm also not taking into account the "Enlightenment" additions
that there should be universal responsibility of people making the
responsibility broader than just the population of the nation in
question. In any case, I think the above definition should be
relatively uncontroversial.
Regarding your reasons (1), (2), (3) and (4), it's pretty clear that
the counterfactual:
(5) "There were other things we could have done to promote those goals
which would have been equally or more likely to cause less pain, harm
and death to Americans."
or the "Enlightenment" and quite stronger version:
(5e) "There were other things we could have done to promote those
goals which would have been equally or more likely to cause less pain,
harm and death to Humans."
Is true barring any a priori determinism which would obviate the whole
moral question. That's assuming for the moment that the goals outlined
above are clear or worthy of pursuit about which I'm not sure.
It wouldn't take a tremendous amount of imagination to review those
alternate scenarios. I believe that the French had a perfectly
reasonable proposal before the UN to step-up the effectiveness of the
(now apparently completely effective) UN inspection regime and the
economic pressure that the US and its (at least prior to the war)
Allies can put on a nation is tremendous (if we're interested in
controlling the economic growth of another country which strikes me as
an illegitimate goal - what we've found is that wealthy people are less
inclined to go to war than the poverty-stricken).
If you like it might be a worthy exercise in international diplomacy to
take a few minutes to rehash those alternate scenarios, or we can just
take that as a given.
In any case, in light of (5) and (6), don't you think it's false that
we were "Forced" to invade Iraq? Or do you really think there was
absolutely no other option? If so, I'm interested in hearing more on
why there really were genuinely no other options. I admit, it sounds a
bit complicated, but I sense we're at least making progress on
identifying the source of our disagreements.
Best,
Robbie
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