March 23, 2003
WE ARE ALL IRAQIS:
-ESSAY: I Am Iraq (MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, March 23, 2003, NY Times Magazine)Recently, 14,000 ''writers, academics and other intellectuals'' -- many of them my friends -- published a petition against the war, at the same time condemning the Iraqi regime for its human rights violations and supporting ''efforts by the Iraqi opposition to create a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious Iraq.'' But since they say that ''the decision to wage war at this time is morally unacceptable,'' I wonder what their support for the Iraqi opposition amounts to. One colleague refused to sign the petition because he said it was guilty of confusion. The problem is not that overthrowing Saddam by force is ''morally unjustified.'' Who seriously believes 25 million Iraqis would not be better off if Saddam were overthrown? The issue is whether it is prudent to do so, whether the risks are worth running.Evaluating risks is not the same thing as making moral choices. It is impossible to be certain that improving the human rights of 25 million people is worth the cost because no one knows what the cost will be. Besides, even if the cost could be known, what the philosophers call ''consequential'' justifications -- that 25 million people will live better -- run smack against ''deontological'' objections, namely that good consequences cannot justify killing people. I think the consequential justifications can override the deontological ones, but only if the gains in human freedom are large and the human costs are low. But let's admit it, the risks are large: the war may be bloody, the peace may be chaotic and what might be good in the long run for Iraqis might not be so good for Americans. Success in Iraq might win America friends or it might increase the anger much of the Muslim world feels toward this country.
It would be great if moral certainty made risk assessment easier, but it doesn't actually do so. What may be desirable from a moral point of view may be so risky that we would be foolish to try. So what do we do? Isaiah Berlin used to say that we just have to ''plump'' for one option or the other in the absence of moral certainty or perfect knowledge of the future. We should also try to decide for ourselves, regardless of the company we keep, and that may include our friends, our family and our loved ones.
During Vietnam, I marched with people who thought America was the incarnation of imperial wickedness, and I marched against people who thought America was the last best hope of mankind. Just as in Vietnam, the debate over Iraq has become a referendum on American power, and what you think about Saddam seems to matter much less than what you think about America. Such positions, now as then, seem hopelessly ideological and, at the same time, narcissistic. The fact is that America is neither the redeemer nation nor the evil empire. Ideology cannot help us here.
In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not going to be about who we are or whose company we keep, or even about what we think America is or should be. The choices are about what risks are worth running when our safety depends on the answer. The real choices are going to be tougher than most of us could have ever imagined.
The title of Mr. Ignatieff's essay reminds us of one of Ronald Reagan's greatest speeches, one that was unfortunately overshadowed by the controversy surrounding it. In May 1985 at Bitburg, he said the following:
Twenty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy went to the Berlin Wall and proclaimed that he, too, was a Berliner. Well, today freedom-loving people around the world must say, I am a Berliner, I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism, I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag, I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam, I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.
Of course Reagan's greatness lay in his refusal to accept, as JFK and others had, the necessity of living with the Wall. Containment of the Soviets made victims of us all and implicated us in the maintenance of totalitarianism. Mr. Reagan instead demanded that we confront totalitarianism and that the Wall be torn down. Today we can truly say that we are all potential victims of terrorism and terror regimes and we must not accept this victimhood either. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2003 8:36 AM
His problem was that he never learned to
understand but one kind of evil, in a world
where there were many kinds.
No moralist could have done what he did
-- sit out the war on Hitlerism. The problem
of Bitberg for Reagan was that it showed
-- what we already knew -- that he did
not have any real problems about Nazism.
You're hilarious, Harry, unbothered by the pro-Soviet FDR but judging Reagan for not wielding a gun against fascism in WWII. If you'll recall, at that point in time Reagan was a liberal Democrat and he too would have been sympathetic to communism, but he learned better and ended its evil. Let he who has accomplished as much throw the first stone.
Posted by: oj at March 23, 2003 2:14 PMTo call FDR pro-Soviet goes beyond evidence.
He was antiimperialist.
Reagan was joining the horse cavalry, not to
joust with panzers but to get free horses.
True, he changed his mind about the obligation
of government to provide free horses to
parasites, but that does not also prove that
he ever found anything distasteful about
Naziism.
Harry:
Reagan served in the miltary during our war with the Nazis and was Commander-in-chief during the pivotal years of our victory over the Soviets. FDR was commander-in-chief for the pivotal years of the victory over the Nazis and did everything in his power to aid Stalin. Reagan's military service in WWII may have been minimal--having never served at all myself I'd not diminish the contribution of anyone who has--but FDR was an accomplice of evil.