More and more nowadays, we’re hearing the idea that we should invade Iraq in order to help the Iraqi people. The International Crisis Group did a study of attitudes about a US invasion among Iraqi people, and found that many Iraqis more-or-less favor such an invasion, although not for the reasons US hawks have suggested:
…the overwhelming sentiment among those interviewed was one of frustration and impatience with the status quo. Perhaps most widespread is a desire to return to “normalcy” and put an end to the abnormal domestic and international situation they have been living through. A significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view that, if such a change required an American-led attack, they would support it. […]
For the Iraqi people, who since 1980 have lived through a devastating conflict with Iran, Desert Storm, a decade of sanctions, international isolation and periodic U.S./UK aerial attacks, a state of war has existed for two decades already. The question is not whether a war will take place. It is whether a state of war finally will be ended.
However, Iraqi hopes for a US invasion might be based on assumptions that I doubt are true:
It should not be assumed from this that such support as might exist for a U.S. operation is unconditional. It appears to be premised on the belief both that any such military action would be quick and clean and that it would be followed by a robust international reconstruction effort. Should either of these prove untrue ““ if the war proved to be bloody and protracted or if Iraq lacked sufficient assistance afterwards ““ the support in question may well not be very long sustained.
How likely is the United States to make a real, long-term commitment to the well-being of the Iraqi people in a post-Saddam Iraq? My opinion hasn’t changed much since early December, when I drew this cartoon.
There’s very little reason to believe that the United States – which has done the very least it could get away with in Afghanistan – has any interest in improving Iraqi human rights. Even Iraqis who have spoken in favor of a US invasion seem to now be experiencing doubts. In an article called “Our Hopes Betrayed,” Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, who is indisputably anti-Saddam, described the Bush plan for a post-Saddam Iraq:
Its driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive institutions of the Baath and the army. Hence its point of departure is, and has got to be, use of direct military rule to deny Iraqis their legitimate right to self-determine their future. In particular it is a plan designed to humiliate the Kurdish people of Iraq and their experiment of self-rule in northern Iraq of the last 10 years, an experiment made possible by the protection granted to the Kurds by the United States itself. That protection is about to be lifted with the entry into northern Iraq of much-feared Turkish troops (apparently not under American command), infamous throughout the region for their decades-long hostility to Kurdish aspirations.
(And regarding our protection of the Kurds – that hasn’t prevented us from allowing Turkey to bomb Kurds in the “no-fly” zone.)
And from another article:
In an interview with The Observer, Kanan Makiya, an adviser to Iraq’s main opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, said America now appeared to have dumped its commitment to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq. Instead, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, Washington was preparing to leave Iraq under the control of President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
‘This would be an unmitigated disaster for the long-term relationship between the US and the Iraqi people,’ he said. ‘The Iraqi opposition is going to become anti-American the day after liberation. It is a great irony.’
As Lying Media Bastards points out, there’s a real danger to the US in supporting true democracy and self-rule; what if they democratically decide to act against our interests? “From the U.S. point of view, democracy could be harmful, as the nation’s large Shi’a population could move Iraqi policy in a more Islamic direction, and independent Kurds in the north would worry Iraqi neighbor Turkey.”
If our goal was genuinely to encourage democracy and protect ordinary Iraqis, the Turks would not be allowed to move even a foot closer to Iraqi Kurdistan.
(For more on the Kurds, be sure to read this post on Body and Soul).
Part 2: About the Sanctions.
And yet….
I had this discussion with Charles the other day. The one reason I might favor war with Iraq, at this point, is the possibility of ending sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions have needlessly killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (the current “best estimate” seems to be that 350,000 Iraqi children under age 5 and an unknown number over age 5 have died due to the Gulf war, mostly due to sanctions). And according to Richard Garfield, the author of that estimate, “excess deaths should…be seen as the tip of the iceberg among damages to occur among under five-year-olds in Iraq in the 1990s….The humanitarian disaster which has occurred in Iraq far exceeds what may be any reasonable level of acceptable damages according to the principles of discrimination and proportionality used in warfare.”
Unfortunately, now that Bush and the American mass-media have convinced most Americans that the loathsome Saddam Hussain is Satan and Hitler rolled into one, there is no chance of ending sanctions without an invasion. Short of a deposed Saddam, suggesting an end to sanctions (or limiting sanctions only to imports of weapons and weapon parts) would get any politician tarred as “soft on Iraq.”
The Iraqi people are the rope in a tug-of-war between the US and Saddam. In that situation, the moral course of action for the US is to drop its end of the rope, but clearly that will never happen unless Saddam drops dead first. (And even Saddam’s death might not be enough, if his son took over). If we don’t want US-led sanctions to injure and kill hundreds and thousands more innocent Iraqis over the next two decades, maybe we should support a war now. As immoral and disgusting as this needless, aggressive invasion of Iraq is, endless sanctions could be worse.
We’ve effectively been continuously at war with Iraq for over a decade. If it takes escalating the war to end it, then so be it.
Of course, no sooner do I type this than I have doubts.
- It’s morally perverse to suggest that the US should invade Iraq to prevent the US from killing more Iraq civilians with sanctions. In effect, my logic rewards attacking civilians with sanctions.
- There’s no guarantee that a war wouldn’t do more damage than even another two decades of sanctions. If the war goes badly, if more nations are drawn in on both sides, if Israel is attacked… the potential harms of war are endless.
- It’s not even clear that war would end the sanctions. If, for example, costs of invasion became too high, the result might be a negotiated surrender leaving both Saddam and sanctions in place. Another, more likely alternative is that after Saddam’s defeat, a local, armed resistance to American and Turkish occupation would convince the US to leave the sanctions in place.
- If sanctions are not ended by war, they will certainly be made worse. The main way sanctions kill is by preventing Iraq from rebuilding a sufficient infrastructure, especially regarding the availability of clean drinking water. As bad as infrastructure in Iraq is now, war would make it much worse.
The more I think about Iraq, the more pounding this headache becomes….
Update: Matthew Yglesias comments..
