| I would like to lay out my case, the five points why I think that our military incursion into Iraq is morally justified, and then offer you some tactical concerns about how to deal with objections, generally speaking. I would like to spend my time with this show, or at least the beginning of it, to talk about my thoughts about the war. I have not done this up to now, and part of the reason is that I have been working through the issues myself. As I have often said, it is the ideas that are more important than the details, and part of the reason the details take second place for me is because the details are often hard to get accurate. But sometimes there is enough information to make judgments on the details. I will tell you what is the foil for my conversation with you today on this issue, I talked yesterday with my niece in Washington, D.C. who is a Christian, a Republican, and in favor of this war effort, but is surrounded with her roommates and coworkers who are hotly contesting the war. They think the war is wrong. They think that Bush is a maniac. She hears nothing but contempt for the entire effort. We had a little bit of time to talk, not only about the objections themselves, but about a broader justification for the war, something that I have been working through myself over the last three or four month. Since I had been working through that, I had not spoken up before this on this program. I do not like to give half-baked thoughts and I’d rather wait until I’ve thought through something before I talk with you about it, but now I have some very strong convictions about this, and I offered my niece some counsel on how to proceed in this process. I would like to lay out my case, the five points why I think that our military incursion into Iraq is morally justified, and then offer you what I offered to my niece, some tactical concerns about how to deal with objections, generally speaking. And then speak specifically to a number of objections to the war that have been raised by peace activists. Let me briefly lay out the case as I laid it out for Kirsten, and as I have developed it for my own mind and my own moral satisfaction over the last few months. My first point is that we have every reason to believe that Saddam Hussein is in possession of a massive arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. That is the first thing. Colin Powell quantified this in the UN report on the 5th of February this year, although this material is in a number of other places. Colin Powell said that Saddam Hussain has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry that were known in the late nineties, and then he lists them: 550 artillery shells with mustard gas, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. That would be 550 shells with mustard gas and the ability to have increased it to 500 tons. He said if we consider just one category of missing weaponry - 6500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq war - the UN says that the amount of chemical agent in them would be in the order of 1000 tons. And these quantities of chemical weapons are now unaccounted for. So we know he has had this and there is no accounting for them. Where did they go? Biological weapons: 1995 Iraq declared under pressure from the international community they had 8,500 liters of anthrax. The UN estimates that Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters and Saddam Hussein has not accounted for even one teaspoonful of the deadly material. By the way, it was just a teaspoonful of anthrax that caused all of that trouble in the Post Office on the East Coast in 2001. Yet, we know that he has declared 8,500 liters of anthrax. There is every reason to believe that Hussein has these weapons. We know that he had them and we have no evidence that he has gotten rid of them. Nor do we have reason to expect that he would do so. Second point, we know he has the will to use those weapons. He has done it before, on his own people. In fact, more than 250 Iraqi towns in 1987 and 1988 were the object of chemical attacks by Saddam Hussein, who used a combination of chemical weapons, cocktails they called them, including mixtures of mustard gas and VX gas. It makes it harder to trace exactly what he used. I have seen, as many of you have on TV, video footage of the Kurdish villages littered with the bodies of the victims of this massacre. So, we know he has them, and we know he will use them. Third, in addition to genocide, which I have just described, Hussein’s regime is characterized by repression, torture, execution, mass murder, and systematic rape. Rape is used not only for intimidation, but also for sport. Now, some of you might have seen the ABC 20/20 program two nights ago with Barbara Walters. I went to their web site to get their summary in text of what I saw that evening... (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/World/2020_iraqiwomen030321.html) (Link is no longer active) Four women, Iraqi women who have escaped Iraq, had first-hand knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s brutality. They were interviewed on that show. They told us in first person accounts what human rights organizations have been reporting for years. Even though they are in the United States, they still were a bit terrified to speak frankly about Saddam Hussein’s regime because of the reprisals they had experienced in the past. Here are just a couple of excerpts from the summary page on the web of this TV program from two nights ago on 20/20. It says "Human rights groups estimate that at least 290,000 Iraqis have disappeared since Saddam took power 34 years ago….Saddam’s reign of terror extended far beyond public executions. He established a strategy of brutalizing women in order to control their men. Although the stories these women tell are horrific and difficult to substantiate, they are consistent with a pattern of cruelty toward women documented by various human rights groups.
"Al-Suwalj [one of the women] knows first hand how even young girls were imprisoned for what seemed to be trivial offenses. Al-Suwalj says she had a 16-year-old cousin who was beaten and tortured with electrical shocks for having written something against the government in her school notebook." Now, on the TV she explained this in more detail. Electrodes were attached to sensitive parts of this 16-year-old girl’s body and she was tortured in that way and beaten mercilessly. Her parents and family were arrested and forced to watch these beatings and tortures. Why? Because she had written something objectionable in her notebook about the Hussein regime. The piece continues. "And if a man is dissident or if a man writes a letter or makes a joke about Saddam, these women said, authorities would rape his wife or female relatives in front of him." Quoting now from one of the women, "’Rape is used as a tool to humiliate the woman, but to also bring men into submission,’ Hussain said. To compound the humiliation, authorities would videotape the torture and rape and send the tape to family members." "Saddam’s contempt for human rights extended to his well-documented use of poison gas against his own people. The horror of one of those chemical attacks still haunts Michael 16 years later." Quoting her, "'Children, women, men…vomiting, screaming, crying with swollen eyes. Everybody was…screaming. "We are blind. We cannot see," Michael said. She said she still has difficulty breathing, because of her exposure to the gas.'" "Al-Suwalj has seen the inside of an Iraqi prison, and she describes horrific scenes. She said she was shown ‘human meat grinders’ in which people were shredded and disposed of in a septic tank, (she said on TV, by the way, that this was done when they were still alive) and chemical baths in which people were literally dissolved." "'You cannot exaggerate about these things. People were slaughtered,' she said."
And then they reflect on the anti-war demonstrations happening all over the world, which were disturbing for these women. "Rasool believes that the protestors are missing the point. 'Knowing what we’ve been through, knowing what the people in Iraq are going through up to now, and then when we see protesters, that they don’t know the reality of the people who are suffering right now,' she said. 'They don’t know about torture, they don’t know about rape.'" Then this piece also cites that "Just two weeks ago, a Kurdish mother of eight was splashed with gasoline and set ablaze by military police for no reason, she told Kurdish television." This I saw on that piece, the woman herself in bandages. This is a brutal regime, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, I heard of one news report in which Hussein himself held out a two-year-old child in front of her father and crushed the babies’ feet with his hands in order to get the father to comply. Right in front of him. Hussein himself. So, he has the weapons, he has used them in the past, and we have no reason to think that he won’t use them in the future. In addition to the genocide, his regime is characterized by repression, torture, execution, murder, and systematic rape. There is a fourth reason why I think this war is justified. He has not responded in the slightest to diplomatic pressure following 12 years of sanctions, including the threat of repeated UN resolutions, the last one in the fall, passing the United Nations Security Council unanimously. Diplomacy was tried and it failed for a very simple reason. It takes two to tango. That is all you need to know about that. This is not fancy. That is very simple. Then add to it the final rational. We have every reason to believe that a military strike will remove this threat to the Iraqi people and the threat to the rest of the world with a minimum of collateral damage. It seems to me when you take all of those things into consideration, we have an imminent threat by a crazy person, not out of his mind, but morally crazy. He is not constrained by either moral concerns or threats from the international community. People like that simply have to be stopped. He has given us no alternative but to use force. It seems to me that we have more than adequate justification for this action. Given that as my case, other objections come up. Part of what I told my niece is that, in this circumstance, especially when you are outgunned (pardon the pun) by people who are against you, it is better to adopt a tactical approach in which you don’t make any claims, but let them make the claims and let them defend them. In other words, you employ the Colombo tactic. This is where the first two of our main questions come in. Those two questions are: What do you mean by that? How did you come to that conclusion? Of course, those are model questions. You can change the details, but the whole point is that you want to make them clarify their view. What do you mean by that? And then make them defend their view. This is a good policy on any issue. The challenge is to get past the slogans and the broad generalizations that are characteristic of peace movements in general and figure out what the specific claims are. Once you can force people to make specific claims, that is, clarify exactly what it is that they mean and why they hold the view, then you have something specific to work with. The problem with a lot of these ideologies is they are so general, there is nothing to dispute. That is, there is no particular idea to get at. What exactly is it they are claiming, so you can speak to it and respond to it. You want to get past the slogans and you do that by asking clarifying questions. What I would like to do now is just quickly respond to the catalog of challenges that Kirsten offered me from her liberal friends. The first is actually the most common objection and it is potentially the most principled, but it needs work to get there. War is evil, war is wrong. The problem with this claim is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. Do you mean all war is wrong? That war taken in isolation is an ugly thing? That this war is wrong? What is it that you exactly mean? You cannot respond to it, nor is it really a coherent statement unless it is clear what the person has in mind. Taken in isolation, war is terrible. There is no question about that. Robert E. Lee once said that it is good that war is so terrible, lest we become too fond of it. But given that we all acknowledge that the details of war are terrible, there seems to be a sense that some wars are justified because greater harm results when the war is not undertaken. That is what needs to be flushed out here in this objection. Is the person saying that all war is wrong? In which case they are going to have to say why all war is wrong and why there can be no moral justification for using lethal force against another. And if their claim is that this war is wrong, now they need to talk some more and explain what in particular about this war makes it an immoral war when other wars might be justified and what would it take to make this war a justified enterprise. You see, these are all questions that can be asked without showing one’s own hand and therefore, without taking any responsibility to defend one’s own view. Tactically, this is a good way to go, especially if you are not too clever at defending your view, you ask these questions. You force others to make sense out of what might be the ambiguous claims they are making. Narrow it down a little bit using these questions. The material I have just covered is, I think, enough to demonstrate that certainly it is not obvious that this war is evil or wrong. In other words, even though in the final analysis it might come out that way, this is not a frivolous military effort for which there is no conceivable moral justification. A strong case can be made. It also goes to show that inaction in the face of evil may be the position that is morally culpable, making the anti-war position the evil and immoral one. When they make these kinds of claims, that this war is evil and in the face of the rationale I have just offered, it may be the case that it is evil not to act against these things. Anyway, that is what you need to force them to answer. Let’s move on to the second most common objection, which I think is the least defensible, frankly, or one of the least defensible. That is the position that former President Jimmy Carter took that this war would be right if the United Nations said so. For many in the world, the moral legitimacy of a U.S. military incursion into Iraq hinges on this one issue — UN support. Former President Jimmy Carter made it clear that armed invasion would be indefensible unless a single detail changed — UN approval. Now, friends, I don’t know what you think about this, but it strikes me as rather odd that for a former President the final question of morality is determined by, in this case, what France, Germany, Russia, and China think. By the way, Russia and China represent repressive and despotic regimes, and I have no conviction that France and Germany are reliable moral compasses on this issue. So, why is it so significant to the former President that the decisions these four countries make on the issue is the thing that tips the moral balance? At the heart of this view is the conviction that morality is a result of community consensus. In this case, moral legitimacy comes from corporate consent. The guiding ethical principle is simple: Don’t buck the system. I have talked about this is the past in a concept that I call "Society Does Relativism." You can read more about this in my book Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air or a tape by the same name. This view that morality is determined by the group, the larger cultural unit, is really what is at work here in this objection. In some cases, the ruling social unit is a consortium of cultures like the United Nations, but the basic principle is the same, the majority rules. Now, here is the biggest problem with the moral point of view that undergirds this conviction that our actions in Iraq would be moral if the United Nations says it is. The biggest problem is, on this view, the majority can never be wrong. There can be no majority of one. If morality is determined principally by the international court, then the international court, by definition is moral. When any human court, even a de facto court like the United Nations, is the highest authority, then morality is reduced to mere power, either the power of the government or the power of the majority. And if the courts and the laws define what is moral, then neither laws nor governments can ever be immoral. They are the ones who define what moral is apart from community assent. And therefore, compliance would be the highest good and breaking ranks, the greatest evil, regardless of the issue. What the former President should have been arguing is the merits of the case before him, not whether or not a bunch of other nations agree. Star Trek morality might sound plausible in a TV script, but real life is more complex. This view of ethics leaves individual nations beholden to the collective will of morally misguided governments and brutal regimes. That is our objection. When we have good moral justification, we do not need the vote of approval of others in order to increase the morality of the action. It is the fact that other people don’t vote in favor of this is morally questionable on their part. Sometimes we are compelled to ignore the consensus of the international community. That is why, by the way, even Captain Kirk ignored the Prime Directive so often. It wasn’t just good TV, and it is good moral thinking. The next offered objection is, I think, just plain silly but it is heard every single day. "I support our troops, but not the war." This is not just silly, it is disingenuous. Think about it. The only purpose of our troops is to do just what they are doing that the protesters object to so much. Troops have only two functions. One, to destroy life or property. Two, to threaten to destroy either life or property. Since the second, the threat, is non-viable without the actual intent to follow through, then both functions are effectively reduced to one: death and destruction. If you don’t support death and destruction, at least the particular death and destruction at hand in this war, then you don’t support the troops. It is that simple. I think this is a vacuous attempt to link arms with a nation, largely unified in our support for the troops, all the while aggressively opposing all that our troops do and stand for in this conflict. This is why the claim is disingenuous. They don’t really mean that they support the troops. It is just political double-speak for them. I think these people should just screw up their moral courage and simply say what they mean. "I do not support the troops. I am against this war, therefore, I am against those troops that prosecute this war on the field." That’s what they believe. They should simply say it. When someone says they support the troops but not the war, you can ask for a clarification. This is what you do. "What do you mean?" What is it about the troops that they are in support of that is in the least bit relevant to this issue? What does support for the troops mean if the only things that the troops are good for are doing the things that they don’t support. Here are some more objections. "We don’t know Hussein has any weapons of mass destruction." I heard that this morning. "We don’t know." Well, here is what we do know. Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction in the past. He can’t use them unless he has them. I suspect he did not use them all up against the Kurds. Second, in 1995, Saddam admitted to the UN under duress that Iraq possessed massive amounts of biological weapons and the UN has also cataloged massive amounts of chemical weapons. Third, there is no evidence these weapons have been destroyed. I don’t know about you, but that is good enough for me. I think it is reasonable to conclude he still has them. This is not rocket science. By the way, on the issue of nuclear threats, I just learned this two days ago. I was actually stunned to hear it on one of the major news broadcasts. I don’t think we have any direct evidence of nuclear weapons. That I wasn’t stunned to hear. That seems to be the case. But note this: After the first Gulf war, when UN inspectors went in to the country, guess what they found? They found a nuclear production facility the size of Washington, D.C. I mean the whole District of Columbia. And we did not know about it. Now, we knew something was there. We did not know that was what it was for, but this is what we discovered. It just goes to show that there could be lots of things there that we don’t know about until we get on site, in situ, as it were. Incidentally, it may take a long time for us to find those. If months pass and we have not found the chemical weaponry, just keep in mind it is a big country and just the 8,500 liters of anthrax that we know that he had in 1995, that amount of anthrax could fit on my lot in Carson, California. So, if you are looking for 8,500 liters of anthrax even stacked in plain view, it is going to be hard to find it quickly in a country as large as Iraq, the size of the country of France or the state of California. Should we take and consider the history of the government’s actions before this? Actually, the history of the United States and what we have been involved in in the past might be a relevant thing to analyze to assess whether the United States is a moral nation on the whole, but it is not necessary at all to know whether this action itself is a moral action. Whether or not the United States acted properly in the past, does not tell us anything about whether this particular action is an appropriate action. This is why I have gone to great detail to give, not the party line, but my thinking and my reasons why I think this is appropriate. Even if it were the party line it is not enough to dismiss it as this is the government’s rationale that I am accepting, unless you can show that the government’s rationale as I have just described it is morally insufficient. It is not enough to show that an action is morally unjustified by saying that we have not acted justly in other ways in other places at other times. That might show that we are inconsistent in applying the moral principles that we offer, but that does not show us that the circumstance that we are now in is one of the circumstances that we should not be morally involved in. The United States might be guilty of being inconsistent. That is not relevant to the question of whether this war is a moral war. We are asking a question right now about the morality of armed conflict. We are not asking questions about the morality of the United States of America taken as a whole when we look at all of its actions or inaction over history. Another objection is that North Korea (an possibly other countries) is a bigger threat than Iraq and we are ignoring that threat for Iraq that is not a threat. There is a very simple answer to this question. The answer is that we are not attacking any of these other countries right now because the same circumstances that justify attacking Iraq do not apply to those other countries. There is a constellation of reasons this military action seems to be justified; these are not the case in these other countries, Rwanda, the Sudan, North Korea. It is precisely because we are being very careful to have a wide array of moral reasons to justify such a serious incursion into the affairs of a sovereign nation that we don’t act this way in those other ones right now. By the way, even if we are acting inconsistently by not attacking these other places, what does this prove? This doesn’t mean that our action in Iraq in wrong. It may mean that we are equally justified to go to North Korea and Sudan and those other places, if we had the time and opportunity to do so. It has been said that the United States is an imperialistic nation that is just after its own interests and we want to colonize the world, or something along that line. This is where it is required of that person to give facts and details that support this view of the United States taken as a whole. I say taken as a whole because it is certainly possible, I am sure, to find things that look like we are illicitly intruding ourselves into the internal affairs of other nations. But this is meant to be a characterization of the United States taken as a whole historically, and the historical picture is actually quite different. No country in the world gives more aid than we do. Not only that, when you look at the involvement the United States has had militarily in other countries without exception after their victories, they have given the countries back to the people who they defeated and paid to have it rebuilt. Have you ever heard of the Marshall Plan? We rebuilt Europe and Japan and gave it back to them. And we rebuilt it with our money. So, if we were a domineering nation and our goal was just to go in and control and take over and rape that country for its resources, where is the evidence of that when we have had the opportunity to do that very thing? I have no reason to believe that that will happen this time, since it has never happened in the past. For goodness sake, we gave away the Panama Canal! Some people say the inspections are working. A thing is working if it accomplishes what it was intended to do. What was the intention of the UN inspections? The UN inspections were not intended to contain Saddam Hussein or to find weapons. How could 100 people find weapons in a country as large as Iraq? This is foolish. Their job was not to find weapons, but to verify that Hussein had destroyed these weapons as he had claimed. So the onus is not on the inspectors to find them. It is not a search for a needle in a haystack. The onus is upon Saddam Hussein to demonstrate that he has destroyed these things that we know he had, and that in many cases, he admitted to having. In one sense, inspections have been working to show that Hussein has been hiding contraband. We have found some things. What has that shown us? That he is hiding stuff. Am I correct in saying that there have been missile attacks already that exceed the limit the UN set? That is contraband. That is illegal stuff he said he did not have. We have found things that he has been hiding and that does not encourage me. You know, if you have a neighbor that you have good reason to believe has a huge arsenal in his house, machine guns, bombs, mortars, hand grenades, and you are demanding that he surrender those and disarm, it is not progress when he hands you a BB gun. Or a handful of bullets. Or a couple of pieces of a hand grenade. This is not progress. Here is another objection. "We should have tried diplomacy." I have a simple answer to that. "Been there. Done that." Twelve years of it. Saddam won't cooperate. How about this one? Violence never solves anything. Nonsense. This is what mothers tell their children to keep them from fighting but it is patently false. A fact so obvious, it is a wonder that grownups still say this to other grownups. Here is one that mystifies me. "This is a racist war." I have no idea what this means. First, the person who offers such a claim must define "racist." Any time this charge is brought up, demand a definition. Next, they must show how this conflict fits that definition. I cannot imagine how this could be the case. I heard another objection last evening. "We should not be playing God." I guess that means the person believes in God and that we have to answer to God for our behaviors. I have a question for that person. Do you think God would approve of us standing by idle while innocent people are massacred when we have the ability to stop it? You see, this God thing cuts both ways. No, we don’t need permission from God to do this. We only have to ask ourselves the question, given the moral understanding we have about right and wrong, especially in light of what we know about God and Scripture, that this is a justifiable action. That’s all we have to answer. We don’t need God’s permission when he has already commanded us to protect the innocent in the Bible. "But civilians will die!" How many times have I heard that? My answer to that is very simple. Yes, they will. That is always the case. But civilians will die if no action is taken. Peace, defined according to the activists, is the view that we don’t suffer any casualties, not that people won’t die. Conditions of so-called peace by that definition have lasted for the last 12 years and peace has cost tens of thousands of lives in the hands of Saddam Hussein. For the time of his power, estimates range from 250,000 to over 1,000,000 dead through torture, execution, mass murder, and genocide - not even counting all the Iraqis that died in his war against Iran, estimate at a million. Even at the lower estimates, that is 8,500 per year. 164 per week. If it hasn’t been 34 years, if it has been less than that, then the numbers are much higher. That is 100,000 dead during the "peace" over the last 12 years since the first Gulf war. Incidentally, in that war, there were about 1,000 civilians casualties. Though tragic, this is less than the two-month average toll based on the lowest estimates of Hussein’s brutal campaign against his own people. What did the first Gulf war take? About two months. So, no more people were killed than Saddam would have killed anyway. By the way, this time our aim is much better. So I suspect the civilian casualties will be much lower proportionally to the time we have to fight. The sooner we win this war the fewer people will die. This brings me to the final point. How we go about a war is just as important morally as whether we should go to war or not. It is one thing to go to war, but how we do it is another issue. There is one word that I think properly describes every action we have taken as a country in the unfortunate history of this brutal regime. And that one word is "restraint." Restraint in the first Gulf war. That is a complaint of many people, by the way, who think we should have finished off Saddam then. Restraint in 12 years of diplomatic relations since then. Restraint in dealing with the United Nations. Restraint in a decision to escalate to armed conflict. And amazing restraint in the prosecution of this war. Our soldiers are doing every single thing they can possibly do to minimize the loss of life and property. These are not the actions of a cowboy out of control. That is a silly charicature. This is not Bush’s unilateral action. It is an action approved by Congress. It is an action supported by a coalition of 40+ nations, the second largest wartime coalition in history. Bested only by the Allied coalition of World War II. There are some people who are against anything Bush does. That is a different issue. What this shows is that their objection to the war is not principled, but rather flows from a prejudice against a particular person. This is where good questioning Colombo-style comes in. One last thought and that is, don’t be surprised, given all of this rationale why it is proper to topple Saddam, if Iraqis do not rejoice immediately. I will tell you why. This is their country we are attacking. They may have no love for Hussein, but I am sure they love their country. And I am also sure that they do not all of them see our attack on Saddam Hussein as merely an attack on a man and a regime. It would be very, very difficult for them not to see this as an attack on their homeland. This is why they will fight. Our ultimate moral justification for this war is not that the people thank us for doing what we have done. I don’t expect that they will do that, en masse, at least not initially. Their homeland is under attack. The moral justification is adequate without that. This is a transcript of a commentary from the radio show "Stand to Reason," with Gregory Koukl. It is made available to you at no charge through the faithful giving of those who support Stand to Reason. Reproduction permitted for non-commercial use only. ©2002 Gregory Koukl |
Index To 
