War on Iraq needs rethinking
daily.stanford.edu Dig Deeper By Zachary Haldeman Tuesday, March 4, 2003 last updated March 4, 2003 12:17 AM
Despite President Bush’s claims of moral certainty, he has offered mere platitudes regarding the ethics of attacking Iraq. Not only is an ethical justification necessary, but also it is the single legitimate justification for war.
Why should ethics motivate a decision on war or any other subject? To strive for anything less than the ethical ideal is to compromise one’s values, and to compromise one’s values is to subjugate oneself to the will of others, which is to invite tyranny and mob rule. Without ethics to guide our government in all it does, we are subject to tyranny and mob rule at home and abroad. Thus, the ethical justification for war is the value of freedom.
Most of the world does not understand the value of freedom and why only freedom can justify war.
Many nations stress the necessity of consensus building and multilateralism. However, neither of those involves actually convincing anyone whether war is right or not; instead, consensus-building and multilateralism are praised for their own sake.
According to a recent French memorandum on Iraq, “The unity of the Security Council must be preserved” in order to find a peaceful solution. Why? Is no action right unless everyone agrees with it? And is a peaceful solution necessarily better than anything else?
Unity is good only if it is a consequence of people pursuing the same values and ideals. This is not the case in the Security Council, which has made no ethical case whatsoever. Furthermore, pacifism rewards the most evil people in society. Peace and unity are not unconditionally good.
The ethical norm that should guide nations is freedom. In a social context, freedom consists of individual rights; principally, the right to live, which is the source of all other rights. The right to live is the right to act in accordance with one’s judgment and values, so long as that does not impose upon others any obligation except the obligation not to initiate the threat or use force.
Individual rights are a uniquely American ideal. America was the first nation in which citizens were not servants of a god or a king or the state; instead, Americans established the government in order to secure freedom by protecting the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. In practice, Americans violated all of these rights from the very beginning, and even today our rights are in dire straits, but the ideal of freedom remains all-important.
A government is legitimate only if granted its power by free people. People who do not enjoy freedom are not able to give consent to their government. Nations that neither uphold nor even grant any rights cannot claim a right to non-interference. That opens the door for some action against Iraq, but when is war justified?
The threat and use of force is justified only when in defense of freedom. If America still intends to uphold freedom through individual rights, then we have the right to take any action appropriate to defend ourselves from those who threaten us with force.
In all of this talk about respecting freedom and individual rights, isn’t there a contradiction in violating the rights of foreigners with American military action? Is an American life worth more than an Iraqi life? No, any life is self-valued. Your life is what you make of it.
If you place no value on your life, and you allow dictatorial regimes to control you, then you are responsible for the consequences of that. Thus, those Iraqis who tolerate an oppressive and deadly regime are responsible for defensive strikes by free nations, and in such a strike, the Iraqi regime is solely responsible for the deaths of those Iraqis who resisted the freedom-hating Iraqis.
Your government is not a separate entity: You are responsible for it. You are responsible for changing it or dissociating from it if it threatens to violate individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.
In contrast, the United States of America is not the liberator of the oppressed, and it has no duty or ability to be such.
The United States might find it in its own interest fight a war to end an evil regime, but we can never force anyone to be free. Both liberated and oppressed people must recognize the value of individual rights for themselves.
If some peoples continually produce oppressive regimes, hostile to freedom at home and abroad, then America should defeat them time and time again until they learn for themselves to respect individual rights.
We should do all that we can to support those who demand these rights from their governments, including the students in Iran and the strikers in Venezuela. We cannot force freedom upon anyone, but we should assist those who are working for it already.
Do not let our own government take away the very freedom it is supposed to protect (e.g., through the Patriot Act or through compromises with freedom-hating nations). Reclaim your rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Reclaim your freedom, even if that means war.
Zachary Haldeman is a senior majoring in mathematics. You can reach him at haldeman@stanford.edu.