Justification for War

Since well before our invasion of Iraq, I have been torn between two
opposing feelings concerning the war. On the one hand, throughout my
adult life, I have supported the actions of the U.S., the U.N., and
other individual nations to conduct humanitarian missions, and even
more broadly, to "liberate oppressed peoples."

On the other hand, any war will inevitably lead to casualties,
military and civilian, intended and unintended. I believe that when
you are asking others to put themselves in harm's way, you owe a duty
of "good faith and fair dealing" (spoken like a true lawyer!) both to
those who will die for your cause as well as to those who they will
make dead. War should only be conducted when it is absolute
necessary, i.e., force should only be used as a last resort, when
other reasonable options have failed or cannot be effective in a
reasonable period of time.

There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam was a brutal dictator, who
preferred the rule of fear to the rule of law.

Yet before and during the Iraq war I have felt that this war is wrong,
for I do not trust that we have entered this war with proper
justification. Several justifications have been offered: (1) Saddam
was close to gaining nuclear weapons, and already possessed other
WMD's, all of which he was willing and able to supply to al-Qaeda and
other terrorist organizations; (2) Saddam had "connections" to
al-Qaeda and therefore was in some way responsible for 9/11; and (3)
the people of Iraq will be better off as a "democracy" than they were
under Saddam.

As justifications (1) and (2) have been knocked away like so many legs
on a barstool, all that is left is the recently popular "the people of
Iraq are better off without Saddam" --- and maybe they are, or someday
soon will be. But if that is to be the leg left that we stand on, it
is a wobbly one indeed, for it constitutes a dramatic shift in U.S.
policy with respect to world security. It abandons the paradigm that
has been put into place by the U.S. and its allies after WWII to
foster peace without resolution to armed conflict (the U.N.).

It is reasonable for people to differ on whether we should act not
only as the world's police force, but also its social worker. If,
however, we are to play social worker to the world by imposing
democracy by force on those nations, it must be a decision made in an
open forum, after an open and honest debate. If the ends are just,
and after being "fully informed" the people of the United States are
truly to send their sons and daughters to kill and to die 15 time
zones away, there should be no need to mislead or offer false
justifications. And if the people, after a full accounting of the
truth, are not willing to sacrifice for the cause, then perhaps the
cause is not as worthwhile as it might seem.

This is ultimately where I come down on the war. If it was worth
doing, it needed to be given a full and honest consideration by the
American people. Not decided in backrooms by those with questionable
agendas or unrealistic expections. And this did not happen. The
arguments against the war --- the cost in dollars and troops, the
difficulties of winning the peace, the diversion of resources away
from other more pressing security concerns (i.e., Afghanistan, North
Korea) --- were dismissed much too lightly during the "march to war".