TOO LEGIT TO QUIT:

Eyes Abroad: Bamboozled by legitimacy (Bret Stephens, Mar. 18, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

Today, the great claim against the war is that it was waged on a false pretext. But the deeper claim is that the war was illegitimate, launched without the consent of the international community; and that the occupation that followed also lacks legitimacy.

This last claim is especially bizarre, not just because the US-led occupation is broadly based and sanctioned by the UN, but also because Iraq's Governing Council is among the most representative bodies anywhere. But put that aside. The larger question, almost never addressed, is what precisely is meant by the word "legitimacy." Can someone tell me? I doubt it. Like art and pornography, legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder, and therein lies its problem as a standard for national conduct.

TO GET a sense of the difficulty here, consider how "legitimacy" differs from the terms with which it is frequently confused: legality, democracy, and justice. [...]

What is legitimacy? It's what I, or you, or this country, or that, say it is. Naturally, any given deed becomes "more legitimate" as more people agree that it is, in fact, legitimate. But one might as easily say such a deed is popular. The Iraq war was popular in the US and unpopular elsewhere. To argue that it was either legitimate or not is irrelevant and usually disingenuous.

Still, a powerful argument can be made that legitimacy does matter in international affairs. The point is made by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman in a column called "You gotta have friends." To succeed in Iraq, he writes,
"We Americans need partners – not only to help, but to provide legitimacy so we can sustain it.

Right now, though, we are operating in a context of enormous global animosity. We are dancing alone. We can't let this stop us. We can't cater to every whim – but we can't just ignore it all, especially when it comes from our friends. Because there is no country in the world we can't smash alone, and there is not country in the world we can rebuild alone – certainly not one as big and complex as Iraq."

The argument here is almost interesting. No doubt, America could stand to benefit from the international community's financial, technical and logistical assistance in its efforts to rebuild Iraq. Indeed, to a large extent it's already got it, chiefly in the form of debt relief or forgiveness for Iraq's new government. But to suggest America lacks the resources to rebuild Iraq by itself is false.

The $87 billion Bush appropriated for Iraqi reconstruction amounts to less that five percent of the US federal budget, and less than one percent of America's annual gross domestic product. If the US wants to rebuild Iraq, if it wants to stay there for another decade or two, it easily can.

A more serious point is raised by the essayist Robert Kagan. America, he notes, has always seen itself as fighting not just for its national interest, but "for all mankind."

That means, first, that its perception of itself rests, at least to some degree, on the perception of others towards it; and second, that its fight for mankind must rest on the consent of mankind. In other words, the US can't repeat the mistake of post-Revolutionary France, forcibly exporting the rights of man against the will of those it sought to liberate.

This is the sense in which the US might credibly be said to need legitimacy. Its actions can only be sustained in the long-run by the popularity of its actions. If the American public senses the world doesn't approve of a given administration's policy, it will probably eventually withdraw its political support for that policy.

This is quite wrong. In fact, the notion that only those regimes are legitimate which conform to the liberal democratic standards enunciated in our Founding means that the opinions of others are insignificant. This was most clearly displayed when we walked away from the UN and went to war against the wishes of most of its member nations. Too few of them are legitimate in their own right for us to pay them any heed.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2004 7:39 AM