I think Dan hits on the most important dilemma in this issue: There's a critical moral responsibility for the mess we've made, but at the same time, our presence in Iraq seems to provide an enabling environment in which the mess continues to foment. Some time ago, I posted something in favor of withdrawal, and my critical argument was that US presence in Iraq was making things worse, not better. It may be possible that the new approach and surge has helped, but, as Dan and Rob point out, helping now is not the same thing as fixing things to a functional (however minimally) end. That raises another moral dilemma--the moral burden of occupation (and i think enough scholarship has shown that this is a serious moral burden) vs. the moral burden of Dan describes.
One question I have is the trade-off with Afghanistan. Much of the military capability Dan calls for in Iraq is also needed in Afghanistan. How does one split that commitment? Is Iraq worth it if the cost is Afghanistan?
This is a very thoughtful post and I share great concern about US moral responsibility.
However, I also believe that the evidence reveals that the US presence in Iraq has caused tremendous harm -- initially by creating targets for violence and by serving as a rallying cry for global recruitment for al Qaeda, but then also by provoking mass migration, by effectively dividing the country into ethnic enclaves, and by empowering dubious armed factions that threaten the Iraqi state.
Thus, I favor a phased withdrawal of US troops that will likely be accompanied by some sort of regional and/or international policy/peace force. The reduction of military support for Iraq likely has to be matched by a diplomatic, development and peace offensive.
The current lull in violence, whatever the cause, may provide an opportunity that won't recur again for some time.
In sum, I would base policy on the scholarship of people like James Fearon, who seems to know a lot about civil war, and Roland Paris, who knows an awful lot about their aftermath.
We aren't restricted to just the two choices of pulling out and washing our hands of it, versus continuing martial law and military occupation. There are other options.
Our military has the problem that we are not supporting any iraqi government, nor can we. We can't let them tell us how to run our strategy -- if we did there's every reason to think our casualties would soar, they don't care about US casualties nearly as much as we do. But the result is that we are an occupation army in all but name and the iraqi government can't control us, so why would our victories lead to support for that government? We can't govern, and in the worst case we prevent anyone else from governing. Continued occupation on those terms is probably not the answer.
One alternative is to pull the troops out but allocate, say, 25 billion dollars a year to give to the iraqi government. If that government is overthrown, the money stops. If they have too many election irregularities, the money stops. For a tenth of what we spend occupying the place we could bribe iraqis not to overthrow the government. It probably has a better chance than what we're doing now.
Another alternative is to accept iraq as a US territory. It's kind of late for that since they officially have a sovereign government now, but given certain promises the iraqi government would probably go along. We would not have an occupation army there, we would be maintaining order in a US territory. We could recruit as many iraqis as we wanted into the US military, at US pay grades. To some extent we'd get US and foreign investment in iraq because as a US territory under US law iraq would be a much safer place to invest. Etc. We could give the iraqis a choice about it, too -- every election they could vote whether to be independent, ask to become a US state, or keep the status quo. As citizens of a US territory iraqis could get US-issued passports and anyone who had the money could visit the USA. If we provided the benefits quickly enough a whole lot of iraqis might get enthusiastic about it. We could guarantee their democracy in ways that they can't do for themselves -- they have to maintain a standing army, and they can't be sure that standing army will support the government. We could protect women and minorities and religions just as we have done in, say, mississippi since the civil war.
We broke it. If we own it, we might as well hold the title and do the cleanup.
There is no dilemma...there is only tragedy.
Welcome to the club, Dan. From a Dec. 5th entry:
"I do not support any sort of withdrawal from Iraq at this point--although I do think some rather radical changes in current policy are necessary, such as tremendous expansion in reconstruction funding, relinquishing of the oil spoils for American and British oil companies contained in the "oil law" that is just about the only thing Republicans and Democrats agree on at this point, and substantial efforts to bring other troops into Iraq under a non-U.S., multilateral "new security mission."
--
I agree with J Thomas. The get in or stay out dichotomy is too stark.
When I look at Iraq, I see a situation that could be much worse and probably would be if a power vaccuum ensured from a US withdrawal. (Think Bosnia-Herzegovina, circa 1992.) If such a situation were underway in any other context, the "international community" would be trying to figure out how to get a peace enforcement operation in there under UN auspices to broker a ceasefire and protect civilians from ethnic cleansing.
I think it's ridiculous to think the US can continue to play this role in the way neutral multi-national forces have sometimes been able to. But it's equally ridiculous to think that the US can withdraw without precipitating the kind of genocidal civil war we've set the stage for.
The resolution to Dan's moral dilemma is probably to foot the bill for someone more neutral to fix what we broke. We have many allies we could offer enough carrots to take the job, and a carefully constructed multinational force could maintain stability without drawing the ire that an American occupation force does.
We can afford it, the reason it's not being considered is that it would mean losing face and admitting our failures. Hopefully this will change with an incoming administration.
Charli,
I'm not sure how possible it is at this point to "foot the bill for someone more neutral" to go into Iraq and "fix" things.
First, who else is willing to go, let alone is capable of doing this job? As the surge makes clear, it will take something on the order of 135,000 - 150,000 troops at a minimum to get anything done. Who has this number of people to send abroad? We do, maybe the Russians, China.... and.... NATO can barely find troops for the 'good war' in Afghanistan, where do these neutral troops come from? The NATO allies are at wits end in Afghanistan, doing essentially the same mission--how would they be any better in Iraq?
Moreover, the US has done such a poor job over the past 5 years in managing the Coalition of the Willing that there is a very very high hurdle to overcome in order to convince an ally to take over. I'm highly skeptical that this is possible.
In addition, could such a force really be neutral? The US would still be paying the bill. The US would still, I'd venture, retain control over the overall policy direction of the mission and country. So, how would these new troops not be labeled as US pawns by the opposition?
I think that it might have been possible to turn the mission into a multinational effort several years ago, but sadly, i think think the necessary bridges have been burned and will require significant reconstruction. The next president would need to make this a #1 priority and invest significant political capital in making it so, and I haven't heard anyone on the campaign trail make the necessary arguments to prepare for such a policy course.
I'm not so convinced you couldn't find the troops. They shouldn't all come from one country. UN Peacekeeping operations routinely enlist troops from multiple developing countries, for a fee per day per head, and yes it's a lot of money but it would be more bang for the buck.
But no, I'm not talking about peacekeeping per se, rather a stability and support operation that would limit massacres of civilians as some durable peace is brokered between the three sides of what is bound to be a bloody secessionist conflict once we withdraw.
Couldn't be worse than the status quo. Lots of things are feasible when the US makes up its mind to throw its weight behind them.
As for the funding, I don't know how to solve the PR aspect of the problem, but in point of fact pledging to provide the money doesn't HAVE to mean having decision-making control. The US can choose to cede this control to an independent entity. The question is whether our government would ever make such a decision. Probably not.
But let's not confuse lack of political will with lack of political power.
The assumption that iraqis must inevitably do further ethnic cleansing is on a par with our earlier idea that they'd just turn into liberal democrats and become our good ally. There's no real evidence.
At one time our military had the idea that iraqis were primarily upset about unemployment, that they had nothing better to do than attack us and attack each other. If we could just do enough reconstruction it would all settle down. However, when we tried to speed the reconstruction we found that there was too much violence, that our reconstruction personnel needed so many bodyguards we couldn't afford to do it. So we mostly gave up on reconstruction and decided to concentrate on security first and reconstruction later.
(Then we found out we couldn't provide security, so we decided the iraqi government forces would provide security instead. Then we found out they couldn't provide security either, so we decided to withdraw into our bases and train iraqis until they *could* provide security. Then when things were falling apart too far we decided that we would work *with* the iraqis who were under our orders to provide security. Only that failed too, and we said we'd use the surge troops plus reliable iraqi troops to provide security in *Baghdad alone*. And we found out that the violence in Anbar mostly went away when we decided we'd let the insurgents restore order in exchange for two promises -- that they wouldn't attack us and that they didn't call themselves Al Qaeda. Which brings us up to today.)
What if our early strategy was correct? What if iraqis generally are ready to stop blowing things up and start working at paying jobs, reconstructing, if only we'd let them? And perhaps the security issue all along was that we insisted they had to let us provide security our way, and we prevented them from doing it....
Unless you have special classified information the rest of us don't, you ought to allow the possibility.
Unfortunately, at the moment the iraqi government represents a minority of shias, plus the kurds have a veto. This sad development was necessary -- last april they were close to voting us out of the country, and we couldn't allow that. So if we get a US government that doesn't mind pulling out our military forces, we could allow the iraqi government to tell us to go away, and then we have a perfect excuse to go away. We have no moral requirement to occupy iraq for the iraqis' own good, when the iraqis tell us we've done quite enough of that already.
"Why did it take 6 boy scouts to help the old lady across the street? Because she didn't want to go."
"First, who else is willing to go, let alone is capable of doing this job? As the surge makes clear, it will take something on the order of 135,000 - 150,000 troops at a minimum to get anything done. Who has this number of people to send abroad?"
I don't necessarily recommend this, but egypt has the people. And they already more-or-less understand the language.
Ten occupation troops that mostly speak the local language are worth a hundred with translators. Mostly having the same religion probably wouldn't hurt either.
There's the problem that a lot of young armed egyptians a long way from home might not particularly improve the situation.
Pay them, say, half what US soldiers get and they'd be overjoyed. Get it established that their function is only to shoot at violent people and not catch dissidents or influence politics, and lots of iraqis might use them as an excuse to quit fighting and start selling things to egyptians.
Without lots of armor (and advanced electronics) they'd have to maintain, they wouldn't be nearly as mobile as our troops and so it would take more of them to do the same job -- assuming it was the same job.
I don't think it's necessary or partucularly desirable, but it is another option that people generally never mention. Our ally egypt could provide a force to bring order to iraq, if that was our intention.
There is another factor to consider
When it is obvious a US decision to withdraw has been or will be made in a few days the situation in Iraq changes.
My thoughts from a ways back.
In 1975 we did not have so many people in country that they could not be evacuated off the embassy roof. This time we have many more. One of the tragedies of this type of operation is that in a sense our own forces are hostage to obtaining a tolerable solution.
I think Charli is on the right course here. The Project on Defense Alternatives' "New Security Mission" laid out a good starting point back in January 2007. And J. Thomas' point about the U.S. paying the bill (more broadly than for Egyptians) is also a good one. The question is, does the U.S. have the will to provide military assistance to states like Iran and Syria as a means of extricating itself from the catastrophe it's created in Iraq? Surely Dubya will never do this and frankly I can't imagine any of the likely Democratic nominees doing it should they be successful in gaining the White House either.
So, I think ultimately the tragic end game will be drawn-out U.S. withdrawal and increasing chaos in Iraq with the U.S. going back from time to time to bomb more of the country into rubble.
Dan is right that we have a moral responsibility to Iraq, and he may be right that a continued (or, as he seems to imply, an escalated) US military commitment would reduce violence and improve governability. But these don't add up to a complete argument for staying.
Staying in Iraq to fulfill the moral duty and give effective governance a try has an opportunity cost. It means we aren't doing other things, including things that also have plausible moral claims. We have moral duties to borrow less money, both as a responsibility to future Americans and foreigners who depend on the world financial stability. We have moral (and practical) military commitments to South Korea, Kosovo, Taiwan, etc. I don't know if staying in Iraq precludes effective cooperation on climate change, but it might (it certainly hasn't *helped* our moral leadership, soft power, or ability to organize other countries into institutions, or willingness to pour money into renewable energy).
My default is to say that the U.S. has a moral duty to rebuild Iraq, and that we should renege, because as a practical matter we have bigger fish to fry.
Dan: you need to show that staying in Iraq is better than other plausible, next-best uses of scarce resources.
I'm not sure whether Chad's comment deserves simple sarcasm or a more sustained reply. Chad, you don't need to instruct me on the concept of opportunity costs.
If you think that the opportunity costs of staying in Iraq recommend against the policy, and you want to make an actual contribution to this discussion, then you need to point out what those opportunity costs are and why they trump the normative and consequential benefits. Otherwise, you're just arguing significance as a "stock issue."
Okay; sorry if my first comment was lazy. Here goes:
I.
Let's take the easiest way first and assume that the only cost of the war is the direct financial cost. (No long-term spending, no tradeoff between badgering allies to contribute to Iraq versus contribute to any other public goods, etc. Although for the record I still think these are quite large, and I'd be willing to give up a lot of Iraq stability in order to even get a little bit of climate cooperation.)
Congressional Research Service says Iraq is $2 billion per week. Bush's FY2008 request for Iraq and Afghanistan is $190 billion. (Obviously the true costs, including VA bills, replacement parts, lost productivity for soldiers, etc., are more, but let's take $105 billion a year as a baseline.)
There are, it seems to me, two plausible candidates for the next best thing the money would go to:
1. Direct tradeoff with butter. $105 billion, conveniently, is just about what factcheck.org says would be the annual cost of John Edwards health care plan (although 105 is the low end of the range - they do say it might be as high as $145). So, cover all uninsured, all kids up to 250% of poverty line, and subsidize premiums for everyone else. (So this is either a new president willing to continue the war or fund health care, but not both, or an '08 electorate in a position to choose between a pro-stay, anti-health care candidate or a pullout, health care candidate.)
The moral and practical case that health care beats Iraq is pretty good. The good consequences are much more certain. They are more likely to improve national prosperity over the long run. 40 or so million people without insurance, and many of the rest with low quality insurance, is a pretty serious moral failure - insert generic social democracy theory / Christian ethics / value of community here.
Iraq body count says 86k Iraqis dead since April 03 (high end). Divide by 4.75, so annual rate of 18k per year. How many lives does staying in save? Best estimates of surge success say half (which I don't believe, since it's equally likely that violence in urban centers is down because ethnic cleansing is already done, in which case pulling out wouldn't matter, but whatever). So, 9,000 per year.
19,000 Americans per year die of drug-resistant staph infections, trending up. 85-90% are in hospitals, concentrated in emergency room uninsured. Would giving these people better health care make those numbers go down? I have no idea, but I have to think that insuring them is just as plausible a way to save a lot of lives as staying in Iraq.
2. No trade-off with butter. We get a president who funds health care and stays in Iraq by borrowing $105 billion per year. $105 billion per year, plus interest, every year, means that we don't fund the next thing that comes along after we've got health care licked. I don't know what that is, but I'll bet anything that someone with more philosophy degrees that either of us will be able to make a pretty good case that there's a moral imperative to it.
On top of that, $105 billion in annual federal borrowing soaks up credit, crowds out private investment, bleah bleah bleah you went to Harvard. So, our children are poorer are less able to deal with whatever it is they need to deal with.
II.
In truth, I think this is pretty silly. First, I don't know that, as a practical matter, these are the exact tradeoffs we face. Second, I don't know how to evaluate competing moral claims in a way makes my moral judgment equally real to you. My real claim is this: you say that a moral debt to Iraq means we should burn a bunch of energy for uncertain gains, but we have a lot of moral debts out there and we need to choose among them.
Hey Dan - how do you make it do italics? All I have is this little box to write in, and none of the formatting controls seem to work. Also: I like you.
"I'm not sure whether Chad's comment deserves simple sarcasm or a more sustained reply. Chad, you don't need to instruct me on the concept of opportunity costs."
Depends, doesn't it?
If you think that the opportunity costs of staying in Iraq recommend against the policy, and you want to make an actual contribution to this discussion, then you need to point out what those opportunity costs are and why they trump the normative and consequential benefits. Otherwise, you're just arguing significance as a "stock issue."
If you understand about opportunity costs, and you argue that we still have a moral imperative to continue the military occupation of iraq despite our other moral imperatives, don't you have the obligation to explain why this one outranks the others? That obligation falls on everybody who advocates any particular distribution of resources.
J. Thomas' point about the U.S. paying the bill (more broadly than for Egyptians) is also a good one. The question is, does the U.S. have the will to provide military assistance to states like Iran and Syria as a means of extricating itself from the catastrophe it's created in Iraq? Surely Dubya will never do this and frankly I can't imagine any of the likely Democratic nominees doing it should they be successful in gaining the White House either.
Well, if we're going to argue moral imperatives, and we simply don't have the stomach for doing what's needed, why argue moral imperatives at all?
"You robbed this guy. Morally you have to give him his oil back."
"No, I don't have the political will to do that. Instead I say I have a moral obligation to live in his house and keep him from hurting himself until I think he's quit trying to hurt himself or me."
I think Chad's more than risen to my challenge, so my earlier comments should no longer be the basis for this discussion 
. But to clarify why I got annoyed with my friend and former colleague:
Since *any* policy has, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of foregone opportunities, I don't find it particularly compelling to assert that opportunity-cost considerations recommend against a policy unless one specifies what one has in mind. I compared "staying in" to "pulling out" without discussion of what the savings could be used for.
Now, on the substance: I admit that there's a lot we could do with the money, but I also don't think that the value of an American life so vastly outweighs the value of an Iraqi life that, if we conclude the US presence is significantly stabilizing, we should put the costs in such unproblematic terms.
After all, there are other ways we could pay for the war without increasing the debt burden, and there are other policies that might be fruitfully abandon to support pressing domestic needs. So I'm not convinced that universal health care and concerns about debt provide a compelling argument against a continued US presence, although they do provide a compelling argument against our current budgeting priorities and spending strategies.
It strikes me that more needs to be said about all of the comments here and the developing strands of argument. But I'll keep it at this for now.
PS: Chad, haloscan will accept basic html, such as carrot+i+close-carrot blah blah blah carrot+/+i+close-carrot for italics.
Chad, it that was opaque, see basic HTML formatting tutorials, such as http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp.
Ooh! Much better!
You're right that there are other ways to pay for the war, we can do both, etc. My only point is that "moral imperative" doesn't trump opportunity costs, and that my (conflicted) view that we have a moral obligation but that we should pull out anyway is not logically unsustainable.
Also: I don't think that we should count an American life more than an Iraqi life. (If anything, the Americans in Iraq are volunteers and the Iraqis are stuck, so...) I'm just unconvinced on practical grounds that Iraqi deaths averted by staying is greater than the sum of additional American deaths from staying and deaths averted from plausible alternative application of $105 billion per year.
...now if you could only teach me how to do hyperlinks in the comments...
I think there is still one implicit assumption in the argument that I don't think is necessarily accurate. Accurate is probably too strong a word, perhaps I should simply say there's an assumption underneath the moral imperative argument that I'm not sure is any more valid than its opposite.
Dan's argument that we owe a moral obligation to Iraq--we broke it, we bought it--is premised that continued US presence in Iraq can actually make things better in the long term. So, we should stay and realize these results.
I'm not sold that this premise is tenable over the long haul, and I think I'm pretty much back where I was two years ago on this. You might recall that Foreign Affairs did a web debate on this, and Marc Lynch came down on the withdrawal side. I largely agreed with him, and the key reason for my agreement was that, over the long haul, I'm not sure that continued US occupation of Iraq allows for the possibility of the "fix-it" solution in Iraq. While there is a lot of inter-ethnic violence in Iraq and while the surge has tamped down some of it, that's not the whole story. As Rodger has written here before, some of that violence has subsided because its been successful--neighborhoods in Iraq are now 'cleansed' and ethnically homogeneous. Other violence is directed at the US, anti-occupation forces.
Lets consider the anti-occupation and Al Qaeda in Iraq violence for a minute, because that's an important issue for Dan's argument. Continuing the surge, staying in Iraq, only increases this violence and prolongs it. Withdrawal eliminates it, and eliminates a key source of instability in Iraq.
Now, Dan's premise is that the US troop surge tamps down on the inter-ethnic violence, and this may be the case.
But, here's the moral trade-off and a real conundrum: Does the good we do from staying outweigh the bad we do from being there in greater numbers for a longer time? I don't know that there is a definite answer to that question.
Moreover, there's the larger issue and longer term question--does the damage and moral price of long term occupation weigh heavier than the damage and moral price of some post-withdrawal chaos in Iraq?
Again, I don't know that there's a definite answer to that question.
So, Dan makes a wager (as he likes to put it) that staying is the right thing to do, but there's an equally plausible wager that leaving is the right thing to do. I honestly can't say which is the better bet right now, as each seems highly problematic right now.
(and i don't mean just withdrawal as dropping everything and going home, it will take a long time to get out of Iraq, extricating ourselves from this is going to be more complicated than getting it)
and see, there is yet another hyperlink in a comment that just doesn't work.
I was trying to link to:
http://sis382.blogspot.com/
2006_...351996934372284
Something was bothering me about this argument, and I just noticed what it was.
The argument presented here for why we shouldn't withdraw from iraq can be said very shortly:
We must win this war and not lose it, because we are the good guys.
When I put it that way a whole collection of assumptions show up to be examined.
"We must win this war and not lose it, because we are the good guys."
You'll need to explain yourself a bit better, since the argument I make depends on neither of these clauses.
Those (of us) who favor or lean toward a (phased) U.S. withdrawal also seem to want a multinational "stability" force of some kind to prevent large-scale atrocities during what could be a long transition period. Trouble is that it's not exactly clear where the force would come from. (Egypt? The other regional states? Maybe. S. Asia? Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan are already contributing a fair number to other multinational missions.) Consider that the largest multinational force currently operating is, I believe, the UN mission in the Dem Rep of Congo, which is about 17,000 and has been far from completely effective in maintaining stability, esp in eastern Congo (where, among other things, mass rapes and other atrocities vs women occurred earlier this year and where fighting betw. Congo govt forces and various rebel groups continues). Of course no two situations are exactly the same, but the experience of the Congo mission does give one a certain pause. True, there have been other (more) successful multinational 'stability forces' and I think one might be called for in Iraq, but more thought shd be given to the potential problems. This is not an argument for the U.S. staying, just a cautionary note about being clear-eyed about what may happen.
Peter,
". . . over the long haul, I'm not sure that continued US occupation of Iraq allows for the possibility of the "fix-it" solution in Iraq."
I think you're right on this point so a solution is needed that can continue to provide security while removing the sparks to violence caused by occupation. That means either an international peacekeeping force--that the U.S. should pay for on the same order of what it costs us to maintain U.S. forces in Iraq now--or an Iraqi force--also subsidized by the U.S., of course--which requires "strong" leadership, most likely meaning dumping any notion of popular government and turning to some U.S.-friendly general to be "son of Saddam."
"But, here's the moral trade-off and a real conundrum: Does the good we do from staying outweigh the bad we do from being there in greater numbers for a longer time?"
"Moreover, there's the larger issue and longer term question--does the damage and moral price of long term occupation weigh heavier than the damage and moral price of some post-withdrawal chaos in Iraq?"
This sort of utilitarian moral calculus, which characterizes much of the commentary here, is pretty simplistic. Sometimes moral obligations are not just a matter of weighing "costs" and "benefits." (Indeed, it is just this sort of economistic thinking that has so impoverished American moral philosophy.) Sometimes moral obligations exist which ought to be upheld regardless of the "costs" involved in meeting them because, simply, it is the right thing to do. (I understand this sort of thinking is alien to most of us disciplined in contemporary international relations.)
We have moral obligations to bring the occupation to conditions somewhat better than the status quo ante in Iraq because we invaded preemptively and unilaterally and, we recognize now, on entirely false or mistaken grounds. Americans (not just the Bush Administration because 70+% of us were behind it at the start) have made a tremendous moral error in Iraq that we should therefore rectify if at all possible, not merely because the "benefits" of doing so might outweigh the "costs" in some abstract, arm-chair philosophizing.
--
"We must win this war and not lose it, because we are the good guys."
You'll need to explain yourself a bit better, since the argument I make depends on neither of these clauses.
OK. If we aren't the good guys then we have no moral obligation in iraq, any more than the germans had to help russians (and particularly ukrainians) who collaborated with them, or yugoslavs (particularly serbians) who collaborated with them, etc. It's only because we think we're the good guys that we feel a moral obligation to give our victims a good outcome.
We believe we can still win. If we didn't think that then we again would not have a moral obligation. If iraq is merely a rathole we can pour a quarter trillion dollars a year into for the indefinite future, we wouldn't feel an obligation. We aren't obligated to do things we cannot do.
In case there is a disagreement about the meaning, to me "win" means "We use military force to coerce those who disagree with us, until they give up using violence to oppose our will". When they give up opposition to our will we have won. It doesn't particularly matter what we say it is that they have to stop opposing us about -- operationally, the things we consider opposition are the things that we retaliate for plus the things we prevent by military force.
We think we're the good guys so we have an obligation to our victims. We must continue to occupy them for their own good, and stop them from doing things we don't want them to do by killing them if we catch them doing what we don't want. We believe we *can* do this effectively, and so we must do so.
HTH!
J Thomas:
1) If what you mean is that "we don't have to be 'good'" then I guess I see your point; but if you mean that ethical obligations only obtain for angels, then I think you're wrong. All of the occupying entities you list had, in consequence of their aggression, ethical obligations to those they occupied. Indeed, aspects of the post-war settlements followed directly from that presumption.
2) I think you're drawing too stark a distinction between "win" and "lose." I say that, on balance, a continued US presence contributes to stability. If I'm wrong, it obviously follows that my warrant for staying goes away. If that changes in the future, then we should also leave.
David Johnson:
I don't agree that the moral calculus that people (like me) are applying in the comments is simplistic. You say that we wrecked Iraq and that we have an ethical obligation to fix it. I agree with that statement on its own terms.
However, the world isn't that simple, because actions we take to try to fulfill one ethical obligation can preclude us from fulfilling other ethical obligations. Recognizing this is not to deny that we have any ethical obligations at all; rather, it's to accept that there are tradeoffs.
It's like that silly moral philosophy survey that was circulating around a few months ago, with a bunch of contrived situations like "you are driving a boat and you see 3 swimmers drowning, but the only way for you to drive your boat to reach them in time to rescue them is to drive so fast that your boat's water-skier will be killed" or something like that. A person might say "you have an ethical obligation not to kill your water-skier" but that doesn't really help us much unless you provide a framework to evaluate the ethical consequences of killing the water-skier versus the ethical consequences of letting the swimmers drown.
To say that staying in Iraq would do more good than harm and that it would help to fulfill an ethical obligation is a necessary first step in a argument for staying, but it doesn't end the argument. If pulling out of Iraq enhances our ability to use force to achieve other security goals or participate in other peacekeeping or humanitarian missions, then that isn't just a utilitarian benefit but a moral one as well, since defending some allies (Taiwan, say) or providing some peacekeeping support (Liberia) discharges an ethical responsibility. If refraining from using up our carrots bribing allies to contribute to an Iraqi stabilization force means we have more carrots to use liberalizing trade or closing a climate deal, that's not merely a crass utilitarian calculation since we have an ethical obligation to promote development and curb global warming. If saving the money on Iraq means we have more money to spend on health care, that fulfills an ethical obligation too.
Lots of things are ethical imperatives. One of the reasons running an empire is hard is that sometimes we have to choose among them.
Also, David Johnson's argument about moral culpability is probably better than he makes it out. He says 70% supported the war and so that makes it America's responsibility. As much as I would like to think that I don't have an ethical duty to help pay for fixing the mess just because I wasn't in the 70%, I don't think that's right. No "good Germans" here.
"Lots of things are ethical imperatives. One of the reasons running an empire is hard is that sometimes we have to choose among them."
Couldn't agree more, although I'd say that this is characteristic of all politics, not just imperial politics. This raises the question of how those choices are to be made, and I must confess some discomfort with the largely utilitarian framework within which this discussion has largely been conducted. Costs and benefits are unlikely ways to think about fulfilling ethical obligations precisely because, as David Johnson of Chandler AZ points out (somewhat unintentionally, I think), ethical claims are absolute in character. There's no halfway about an ethical obligation, and Max Weber's famous comment about ethics not being like a cab that one can hop into and out of at will seems to be wholly applicable here.
That being said, the tragedy of politics is that we can't simply govern ethically, so we have to make these tough choices. I'm not convinced that we ought to make those tough choices in a utilitarian manner, however, inasmuch as this lets us off of the hook too easily since we can absolve ourselves of ethical obligation and discharge its categorical or absolute character by incorporating it into a cost-benefit calculus. In fact, by weighing an ethical obligation to the Iraqi people incurred by a senseless invasion of their country against the cost in American lives and dollars of a continued military occupation we are, I think, dodging the real dilemma here, which is not ethics-vs.-practicalities as much as it is ethics-vs.-ethics. What we actually have here is ethical imperative #1: the pottery barn rule, squaring off against ethical obligation #2: the defense of the United States (taking "defense" broadly here to include the fight against terrorism abroad). And that's not resolvable through any cost-benefit calculus I can imagine, since both claims are categorical rather than situational.
So how ought we to decide? Discussions of opportunity costs and the like leave the underlying ethical dilemma untouched, although they implicitly reference it when we look at other purposes to which $105 billion and a whole slew of American military personnel and equipment could be put. Chad references global warming and development, a partial list to be sure but adequate for the point, since there is no way to decide in a strictly utilitarian way between these ethical imperatives. So I think that what we ought to do is to more explicitly embrace what we actually do in practice, which is to make decisions like this with reference to the kind of country that we are or want to be. In other words, this is ultimately an identity question, as signaled through the kind of justifications that we end up tossing around in an effort to legitimate some courses of action and to delegitimate others. Whether we can accomplish aim X is, to my mind, a secondary consideration; the primary consideration is whether we want to be the kind of social actor that sets out to accomplish aim X.
Okay, enough wind-up. I disagree that we ought to remain in Iraq any longer than necessary to ensure a smooth hand-off to a multinational peacekeeping force, and I think that we ought to be expending effort to bring that multinational force about as soon as possible. Why? Because if we want to be the beacon of civilization that we often claim to be, we need to stand at the center of a global coalition agreed on basic principles like "terrorism is a bad thing no matter who perpetrates it" and "unilateral uses of force before all other conceivable options have been exhausted are to be avoided." And there's no way to do that unless we give up this habit of tossing our military weight around whenever and wherever we feel like it.
There was another alternative to invading Iraq, after all: a global coalition working to bring about positive changes more gradually and in a more multilateral manner. Despite the short-term pain that might cause to the people of Iraq, I really think that we have to get ourselves back onto that pathway sooner rather than later. And I am very grateful that I am not the politician who is going to have to actually make that decision and live with the consequences; I don't have the stomach for it, even though I really think that this is what we ought to do. And sooner rather than later.
Dan, your post is pretty consistent with my view: although I opposed the invasion I think that both the moral and prudent thing to do is to keep working to pacify Iraq and doing what we can to promote decent government there.
BTW, note that all of the first-tier Democratic presidential aspirants take basically this view. Even Sen. Clinton's most recent position envisions some sizeable number of U. S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future. She's been pretty cagey about estimating the size of the residual force she's proposing. I suspect it will be something in the vicinity of 80,000 which is pretty much the pragmatic necessity without a substantial increase in the size of our military.
For nearly two years I've been actively soliciting suggestions from those who favor immediate withdrawal (defined as withdrawal without recourse to conditions on the ground in Iraq) for how, in the absence of U. S. forces in Iraq, we can ensure U. S. interests in the region. Mostly I've gotten silence or snark but the positive responses I've received tend to depend on acts of faith or counter-factuals.
I also note that the U. S. military stationed at home in peacetime experiences roughly 75 fatalities per 100,000. That means that, with the size force that's in Iraq now, we should expect something like 120 fatalities per year or 10 per month. We're approaching that now.
ProfPTJ: "Max Weber's famous comment about ethics not being like a cab that one can hop into and out of at will seems to be wholly applicable here."
The trouble is that ethics is like a cab that we do hop into and out of at will. We start thinking about our ethical obligations when there's an action we want to persuade people to do and we can't think of any better argument. It's only politics. Then we abandon our ethics whenever it gets inconvenient.
Our obligation to iraqi civilians has always been secondary to whatever we wanted to do. Always. We think about what we owe them as an excuse to do whatever we wanted to do anyway but weren't sure we could be convincing about.
I think there are some american citizens who do care about national ethics. All of them were against invading iraq in the first place. If you did not oppose the original invasion, but you have developed a set of ethics since then, great! However, with so little experience, perhaps you should be cautious about getting all certain what our obligations are.
The Hippocratic oath suggests "First, do no harm". If you aren't sure what you're doing, don't do something drastic. All along many of us have been sure that we can best serve iraqi civilians by running a military occupation whose primary method to help iraqi civilians is to shoot people and to threaten to shoot people, that is, mostly to shoot and threaten iraqi civilians. Most of us still aren't that good at speaking or reading their language. I want to suggest that military occupation is not very close to "do no harm".
OK, how about this possibility. The last I heard, an income of $300/month was pretty good for an iraqi. That's $3600/year. There are around 25 million iraqis, and we are spending somewhere between $125 billion and $250 billion per year for our occupation, depending on how you count. 125 billion / 25 million = 5000. For what we spend threatening and shooting iraqi civilians, we could give every iraqi between $5,000 and $10,000 per year, better than doubling their incomes. Some of them would invest the money to go into business. Jobs. $20,000 for a family of four, that otherwise might be living on less than $3600.
Which would be better for iraqis?
Well, but there is no chance that our politicians would agree to give the money to the iraqis. None at all. Even if it was obviously a much better approach to meet our ethical obligation. Silly to even think of it. Just bring up the possibility and americans jump out of the ethics cab right then.
We weren't really interested in helping iraqi civilians. We were interested in continuing the occupation of iraq.
Here's Dave Shuler: "For nearly two years I've been actively soliciting suggestions [....] for how, in the absence of U. S. forces in Iraq, we can ensure U. S. interests in the region."
That's the absolute fundamental ethical question that tops all others. What good is it to be ethical to other people if we harm our own interests doing so? If we can't ensure US interests in the region without continuing the occupation, then how can we possibly end the occupation? Sure, we'll say we need our soldiers to keep pointing guns at the iraqis to save the iraqis, but ethically our own interests come first. If we don't take care of ourselves how can we take care of anybody else?
J Thomas:
The problem here is that "What good is it to be ethical to other people if we harm our own interests doing so?" is itself an ethical position. It's not like there are these things called "interests" that exist in some sphere divorced from ethical and moral considerations. "Ethics versus interests" is a category mistake, since what that actually means in practice is "principles I disagree with ("ethics") versus principles I agree with to the point where I don't want to call them principles any longer ("interests")." My point is that one does not dodge the question of ethics by introducing interests; rather, one confuses things further.
I don't think that taking ethics (and morality, and identity) seriously means always acting in ways that other people, or even we ourselves, would consider to be ethical or moral or in line with our community values. Rather, taking ethics etc. seriously means that our decisions have to be made meaningful in ethical terms. The fact that we often tend to prioritize one set of ethical considerations (those concerned with homeland/domestic/state security) over others does not invalidate those other considerations, although it does say something very interesting about how we understand our role in the world. Among other things, it says that perhaps we don't take those other considerations particularly seriously, that we don't feel their moral force acting on us -- or perhaps that we are just deploying the language of those other considerations quite cynically.
But this is one side of the precise problem Weber warned us about: an unchecked instrumentalism leads to a politics devoid of any sort of ethical purpose. The other side of the Weberian coin is marked by unchecked idealism, which subsumes politics completely under ethical ideals and leads to a different species of disaster: atrocities justified in the name of Truth (or Reason or God or whatever), incapable of being opposed or questioned because they appear to have Right on their side. Against both of these, Weber proposed an ethics of responsibility for politicians: taking ethical claims seriously as ethical claims, but not allowing those claims to override the complexities of specific empirical situations. That's a hard course to steer, but I'd argue it's the only one worth steering in politics.
What I like the most about Dan's original post, even though I disagree with his conclusion, is the place where he starts: with a genuine ethical obligation. This also means that he has to remain acutely aware of the tragic character of the situation: some ideals are going to have to be sacrificed for others. It's a responsible stance. I may not agree with all of it, but I respect it.
ProfPTJ, I personally agree with you right down the line. However, in practice I don't think your ideas apply to US politics. A relatively small proportion of voters care about ethics, and in result a smaller proportion of politicians. A mostly-unexamined view of our interests is most of what matters for our decisions, with some effort devoted to making our choices look good after the fact.
So if you believe that the ethical thing is to stop having our soldiers kill and threaten to kill people in iraq, practically it will work a lot better to persuade americans that it is in our best short-term interests to do that. Because that's what the large majority of americans care about most.
It's OK to talk about what's the really ethical thing to do. It's vaguely possible you might convince somebody who cares. And it's a pleasant discussion topic on a winter afternoon with the fire blazing and sifters of brandy and all. But it's unlikely to have much effect on the world unless your ideas get incorporated into a religion that over the next decades or centuries gets a big presence.
Now, how can you persuade people that withdrawing our troops from iraq improves our ability to ensure our interests in the middle east? Here's the philosophy you're competing with, in a nutshell that was provided to us during vietnam: Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.
If we're nice guys and we use gentle persuasion and superb logic, we might get the other guys to notice that it's in their own long-term best interest to be nice guys too. But if we use main force we can make them do what we want in the short run -- all we have to do is be strong enough. While the nice-guy approach might fail all the time.
The fundamental problem we have arguing ethics is that our enemies have no ethics. They are implacable. They will do anything they can to hurt the USA even if it hurts them more. The only possible solution is to kill them all, and we cannot tolerate anyone supporting them. There can be no neutrals in this war, either you are for us or you are against us. We can restore civil liberties after the terrorists are gone. The nation can tolerate fuzzy-minded intellectuals (like you or me) as long as they are ineffective, but if they actually become powerful enough to threaten the war effort they must be dealt with. Because there is no possible compromise. There is no substitute for victory.
You can't get people thinking hard about their ethical duties toward the enemy, not while the enemy is a serious threat. And they won't have much interest in ethics toward people who support the enemy either. And neutrals who hamper the war effort aren't really neutrals, they're enemies too. And somehow as we went from being the nation that had big oceans to protect us from most of the world to the world's only superpower, we stopped believing we had allies and started to look at the whole world as potential enemies.
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