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We're Already at War with Iraq As the Bush administration
continues its seemingly inevitable march toward an invasion of Iraq,
large swaths of the
political left and significant
portions of the right have come out in opposition. Those who oppose
such a war argue that a preemptive strike would be both immoral and
destructive to America’s long-term interests. This opposition is all to the good.
But in their fervor for opposing the agenda of the Bush administration,
the critics overlook one very simple fact: We’re already at war with
Iraq. Since
August 6, 1990, the United Nations has imposed a comprehensive regime of
economic sanctions on Iraq in retaliation for its invasion of Kuwait.
After the conclusion of the Gulf War, the sanctions remained in place,
and are now tied to Iraq’s cessation of all programs to develop
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. As the humanitarian cost of
the sanctions became apparent, the UN and Iraq agreed on an
“oil-for-food” program in 1995 that allows Iraq to sell up to $2
billion in oil every six months and import certain goods to meet
emergency humanitarian needs. However important these emergency
goods are, they have been totally insufficient for Iraq to rebuild its
shattered infrastructure, which was targeted by US-led bombing raids
during the Gulf War. This included water treatment and hydro-electrical
plants. Under the current sanctions regime, it is estimated that
anywhere from 500,000 to over a million Iraqi civilians have died due to
lack of access to clean water, food, and medical supplies. In
1919, Woodrow Wilson, America’s apostle of State-worship, said of
economic sanctions: "A
nation boycotted is a nation in sight of surrender. Apply this economic,
peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for
force." Here
is laid bare the nature of economic sanctions as a tool of diplomatic
pressure. They are both “peaceful” and “deadly.” To those of us
naïve enough to believe that governments should be bound by the same
moral rules as individuals, this sounds like an outright contradiction.
How can something be both peaceful and deadly? The
definition of aggression is the initiation of force against a person or
his property. Warfare, therefore, is nothing more than large-scale
aggression carried out by states. Many libertarians and anarchists argue
that states, by their very nature, engage in aggression against those
over whom they rule. Be that as it may, in a world where states exist,
we have a traditional body of moral guidelines for entering into and
conducting war. This “just war” theory was first developed by St.
Augustine, refined by Thomas Aquinas, and further developed by many
philosophers since. The
1990s were sometimes called "the decade of sanctions" because
the use of sanctions as a diplomatic tool became so widespread. The US,
acting unilaterally or with UN approval, imposed sanctions on
Yugoslavia, Libya, Somalia, Liberia and Haiti, among others. Sanctions
seemed to be a good method for the Clinton administration to carry out
its policy of global hegemony while maintaining a patina of
humanitarianism, since sanctions are widely considered less severe than
outright war. But
is this the case? In the just war tradition, economic sanctions, or what
would’ve in medieval times been called a siege, are considered a
clear-cut act of war. To forcibly prevent someone from carrying out
economic activity is indisputably a form of aggression against his
person and property. By any meaningful definition, sanctions are an act
of war. And as such, they could only be justified as a response to some
prior aggression. Originally, the sanctions imposed on Iraq were a
response to its aggressive invasion of Kuwait, and thus could be seen as
justifiable. But since the Iraqis were driven out of Kuwait, they
have been justified on the grounds of Iraq’s alleged refusal to
dismantle its weapons programs. It seems much more dubious that this
refusal can be construed as an act of aggression. Moreover,
sanctions violate other criteria of just conduct during war. These are
the criteria of proportionality
and discrimination. Proportionality
means that the good to be achieved must be proportionate to the evil
that results from the conflict. I can’t shoot someone who steals my
bike because the evil that is prevented (the loss of my bike) is not
proportionate to the evil inflicted (the death of the thief).
Discrimination requires that, as far as possible, civilians not become
targets of military action. One can debate the validity of the notion of
“collateral damage,” but virtually everyone agrees that the intentional
targeting of civilians is despicable. Legitimate military action must
try to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Now,
reasonable people can disagree about what proportionality may require in
a given situation, but it seems fairly clear that the deaths of up to a
million civilians cannot possibly be proportionate to the good (if any)
that has been achieved by the sanctions. And there is the well-known
fact that sanctions disproportionately affect civilians. In fact, often
that is the point of
sanctions: to get an enemy government to change its behavior because of
what philosopher Michael Walzer called the “fearful spectacle of the
civilian dead.” The agents of the state, we can assume, will always be
the last to suffer under any sanctions regime. Judging by these
criteria, economic sanctions may well be worse
than conventional warfare. Just because there aren’t bombs bursting in
the air and infantry storming ridges doesn’t mean that real war
isn’t being waged. Some opponents of the war have told us that we can still “stop this war before it starts,” but given the common definition of war, we are already waging war, and an unjust one at that, against the people of Iraq. |
