The Moral Case Against the Iraq War

another good article from The Nation . . .

by Paul Savoy
May 13, 2004

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=savoy

(snip)

Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being "better off" avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war. As the late Robert Nozick cautioned in his classic work on the moral basis of freedom, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, we should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.

There is only one truly serious question about the morality of the war, and that is the question posed more than fifty years ago by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, looking back on two world wars that had slaughtered more than 70 million people: When do we have the right to kill our fellow human beings or let them be killed? What is needed is a national debate in the presidential election campaign that addresses the most important moral issue of our time. It is an issue we are required to face not only as a matter of moral obligation to all those Iraqis killed in the war, but to the 772 American servicemen and -women who, as of May 10, had lost their lives and the more than 4,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq. The debate should begin by moving beyond the narrow factual focus on WMD intelligence to an examination of the broad moral principles and values governing the use of deadly force against other human beings. Those principles are to be found in the basic precepts of our more than 200-year-old constitutional tradition and criminal jurisprudence, and in widely accepted standards of international humanitarian law.

- more . . .

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=savoy

What about the Peace of Westphalia in 1648?

http://www.angelfire.com/oh5/cpr/index42.html

Two other excellent moral perspectives:

http://www.pres-outlook.com/hunsinger012903.html

"The Myth of Preemptive Self-Defense"

http://www.asil.org/taskforce/oconnell.pdf

a brutal RAPE of a country. Brought to you by: P-N-A-C. And now for a word from our sponsors...

From the article:

Human Rights Watch, applying these criteria to the Iraq war in its 2004 World Report, concludes, "That was not the case in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in March 2003.... despite the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule, the invasion cannot be justified as a humanitarian intervention."

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I doubt the pro-war crowd will listen. They'll continue with their "Saddam was a very very bad man. He had rape rooms." mantra for the remainder of their days.