GIVE WAR A CHANCE:

There's obviously still much that could go wrong in the Second Iraq War and we'll surely lose more men, even if just through mechanical malfunctions or friendly fire, so I don't wish to minimize the task ahead or the risks these brave souls continue to face, but we're rapidly approaching a rather profound moment in American history. The great--and I believe mistaken--lesson of the the first two world wars was that war was too terrible an enterprise--too lethal with modern weaponry, particularly for "non-combatants"--to be contemplated anymore. Thus we got the Cold War for fifty years, with only a very few low grade conflicts between the main parties, as we decided that we'd rather tolerate the most anti-human ideology man's ever come up with, and mass murders from Nicaragua to China to Russia to Ethiopia and beyond, than fight briefly, though brutally, to put a stop to it. The argument--though ultimately specious--that we could not risk killing millions, including our own, in the late 40s to depose the Marxist regime in Russia at least had the advantage that it was likely that many would die. The war would in fact have been terrible and we must therefore have some regard for the moral case against it.

However, at least since the early 80s--and arguably since 1945--it has been obvious that the West's technological, cultural, political, and military superiority over the various "isms" that it finds itself arrayed against from time to time is so great that when we choose to do so we can replace the most brutal and tyrannous regimes with a rather minimal loss of human life. Moreover, where it was initially the case that such warfare merely imposed less suffering on non-combatants than did the dictatorships themselves, it is increasingly the case that our methods of combat inflict almost no direct suffering on civilians. The list continues to grow--Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, soon Iraq--of countries where we deposed despicable rulers at minimal human cost.

So here's the profound question: if it is the case that we can rid peoples of such regimes and manifestly improve their lives, even save their lives, with such minimal impact, has the moral obligation now clearly shifted (assuming the case the anti-war folks made had prevailed) from one where we must try to avoid war because of the suffering it might cause to one where we must embrace war because of the suffering and death it so clearly relieves? In what sense is the moral position that demanded we contain Saddam from 1991 until Wednesday, at the expense of 1.5 million dead Iraqis, superior to that which requires us to liberate Iraq, at a cost of several hundred or several thousand lives? Isn't the hard question that confronts us all today, but the peace party in particular, whether we behaved decently and responsibly towards fellow human beings when we left the Iraqis to Saddam's mercies in 1991? And, going forward, mustn't we reckon with a far different moral calculus than that which has been commonly accepted as we begin to consider what course of action is right and just with regard to N. Korea, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, etc.? May we not be in the midst of an unusual and as yet unrecognized epoch in our affairs where war is not the worst but the best option available to us and to captive peoples? Which do we place a higher value on, as a society, our peace or human freedom? And can we love our society if we choose the former?