About Iraq

[NOTE: I support the "Listen for Peace" proposal.]

The Bush administration wants to invade Iraq, they want it quickly, and they don’t care that much what anyone else thinks. Since so many people, including many very distinguished people, have already offered their opinion, I will restrict myself to a few questions which I don’t see discussed quite as much.

The United States suffered a terrible tragedy on September 11, 2001; the desire to smash the Iraqi state is an outgrowth of the anger felt in response. What the U. S. is failing to realize is that there are a lot of tragedies in the world, some of them considerably more serious than the September 11 events or the rather nebulous threat of an Iraqi attack on the U. S. Because we are the most powerful country in the world, our tragedy has gotten all the attention. The rest of the world has become resentful of this, and the initial outgrowth of world sympathy for the U. S. after the September 11 events is now almost completely gone. This is what the country, fundamentally, has to come to terms with.

The case for a unilateral attack Iraq on the basis of Iraqi foreign policy is quite flimsy. While Iraq has done a lot of bad things, these bad things do not constitute any sort of credible threat specifically to the U. S. or provide a basis for unilateral war. Iraq has done very little that’s threatening to the U. S. since the Gulf War, and was evidently not involved in the September 11 attacks. They have violated the peace treaty, but this in itself would not seem to be cause for war; the United States made thousands of treaties with the native peoples and broke every one of them. This is probably an affront to the United Nations, but that is something the U. N. needs to address.

The fact that Saddam Hussein is a bloody tyrant and possesses weapons of mass destruction also does not add up as a credible rationale for war. The world is filled with bloody tyrants with powerful weapons. Are we now going to war with all of the bloody tyrants of the world? Are Iran and North Korea next? What about Zimbabwe, China’s oppression of Tibet, and Russia in Chechnya? Are we also going to launch preemptive attacks on them?

International law suggests that one should not go to war merely because a nation is doing bad things, but only if these "bad things" threaten your vital interests. It is not merely Iraq’s foreign policy but their domestic policy which provokes widespread revulsion. It is this revulsion which explains why there is no more outrage at the U. S. "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq; the relative lack of outrage is due not to the strength of the U. S. case, but the almost complete isolation of Iraq.

"Aggressive war" is one of the things for which the Nazis were prosecuted for at the Nuremberg trials. "Aggressive war" is attacking a country merely because you don’t like them — before they attack or threaten you. It is technically a war crime. If the unilateral and pre-emptive invasion of Iraq is not an aggressive war, it comes dangerously close.

All right, let’s suppose that the U. S. invades Iraq and that in a week, it’s all over. Now what?

This is actually the same dilemma which faced the U. S. in the Gulf War: whether to topple the Iraqi regime or to content ourselves with chasing them out of Kuwait and dealing devastating blows to their military. The decision was made not to occupy Iraq, because there was awareness that this would mean a U. S. presence in Iraq for a very long time, possibly 10 or 20 years. This prompts a whole series of practical questions. Would U. S. troops be welcomed as liberators, and provide a benevolent presence for a grateful population, or would they become targets, enemies, oppressors, a continual goad to renewed attempts at terrorism? What are the diplomatic consequences of a unilateral long-term occupation of Iraq for our relationship with those countries whose advice we spurned when going in?

Do we have an exit strategy from Iraq? I don’t think so. But until this is done, we cannot even guess what the true costs of invading Iraq are.

Attacking Iraq is not a straightforward case of good versus evil. Iraq is pretty evil, but the U. S. is not universally admired, either. This is pretty much invisible to other Americans, but it is quite visible to other Arab countries. They see over a half century of American opposition to Palestinian aspirations. As former President Carter says, "Our apparent policy is to support almost every Israeli action in the occupied territories and to condemn and isolate the Palestinians as blanket targets of our war on terrorism, while Israeli settlements expand and Palestinian enclaves shrink." What are Arab countries supposed to think when the U. S. announces its intention to seize unilaterally the Middle Eastern country with the second-largest oil reserves in the world? They are more afraid of the U. S. than they are of Iraq.

The tremendous flurry of international support and sympathy for the United States in the aftermath of the bloody and brutal September 11 attacks is gone: it is history, even before having commemorated the first anniversary. Everyone sees the persistent U. S. rejection of international cooperation. Again, former President Carter puts it well: "We have thrown down counterproductive gauntlets to the rest of the world, disavowing U.S. commitments to laboriously negotiated international accords. Peremptory rejections of nuclear arms agreements, the biological weapons convention, environmental protection, anti-torture proposals, and punishment of war criminals have sometimes been combined with economic threats against those who might disagree with us." Even granting that Iraq threatens our vital national interests, we would need to proceed with caution, or we will find ourselves at odds not just with Iraq but with the rest of the world as well.

Isn’t it obvious that the most explosive of all Middle Eastern conflicts is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Isn’t it the Middle East conflict which is largely driving the presence of terrorism? Don’t we need to first deal with (or at least have a plan for dealing with) the Israeli-Palestinian question? How is everyone, besides the Israelis, going to react to our unilateral occupation of Iraq? Realistically, a unilateral attack on Iraq will make a lot of people very angry with the U. S., and give a fresh legitimacy to those who counsel that continued acts of terrorism are the only thing that will bring the United States to its senses. This continually reinforced resentment is bound to result in further anti-American action at some time or other.

There’s a lot of oil in the Middle East, about 2/3 of the world’s reserves. Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia in the entire world in oil reserves.

We need to ask: suppose there were no oil in all of these disputes? Would we be so very concerned about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of Iraq? Would we be concerned if there was even actual mass destruction? Both India and Pakistan recently acquired nuclear weapons. We didn’t preemptively attack them. In recent decades there has been actual massive deaths in Rwanda (about 800,000) and in Cambodia (about a million). The world, and the United States, stood by and wrung its hands in response. Indeed, when Vietnam finally intervened to topple the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, they were generally condemned.

This war is about oil. Our own actions have demonstrated that it could not be about either the threat or the fact of mass destruction. The question then arises, whether it is worth shedding any more blood to sustain our wasteful lifestyle. Since I believe it is wrong for the country to be so wasteful in the first place, I certainly do not believe that it is worth shedding any blood over this issue.

From a moral point of view, should we invade Iraq, or not?

The country is in a state of shock. Neither the country nor its leadership has really come to terms with September 11. It’s been a bad year, which even the quick victory in Afghanistan does not really temper. The economy is in shambles and everyone is nervous. The message seems to be this: blood has to flow, and it’s not going to be our blood, at least for the most part. Even though no one is claiming that Iraq is abetting the September 11 terrorists, invading Iraq is really about September 11. Bush is just "lashing out" at the nearest convenient target.

The entire moral focus is on how we feel. We should instead remember how others feel, and what is going on in the world outside of the narrow boundaries of the U. S. political scene. Terrorism and political instability are just symptoms of a larger problem. There is a Middle East conflict which has been simmering for over fifty years, which has never been resolved, and which now appears to be decisively worsening. The earth’s environment is disintegrating just at the moment when the divisions between the rich and the poor are the greatest and are actually increasing.

Our real enemy is not terrorists who plot to kill us. It is our own historical, political, and environmental attitudes. I grieve for the people killed in the September 11 tragedy. But the main difference between this tragedy and other tragedies around the world — many of them much more serious in terms of human life than September 11 — is that the events of September 11 affected us, and we are the most powerful country in the world. It is our tragedy, and since we are so powerful, everyone else’s tragedy can just wait. That is why September 11 has been moved to the center of the stage, and the world’s perception of this obvious egoism is why the tremendous sympathy for the United States which flowed out in the first weeks following September 11 has completely evaporated. We need to understand that, however much September 11 hurt us, that there are other people in the world who are also suffering, and we need to pay some attention to their needs as well.

Our cause is this war is not just. We are going to war to protect our oil supply and to protect a consumptive lifestyle. That is what has the rest of the world, and many Americans as well, worried. It is a cause which I will not support. It is a cause, in fact, which I must oppose, with every peaceful means at my disposal. Stating the truth is the necessary starting point.

Keith Akers
September 21, 2002

UPDATE February 5, 2011: reading this over eight years later, the first surprising thing is that there were no weapons of mass destruction at all.  This was evidently completely manufactured by the Bush administration.  The second surprise is that there is so little realization of the criminal nature of the Bush administration by the American people.  Bush was a war criminal.  I do not favor the death penalty in this or any other case, but I just point out that after the Nuremberg trials the victorious allies (which included the United States) executed Germans for doing exactly and precisely what Bush has done.