In
this thread, George discusses his seven year old daughter's extremely negative reaction to George Bush. This in turn sparked a discussion of the morality of the Iraq war, with jjayson repeatedly making the argument that however illegal the war was, saving people from Saddam Hussein should let us give Bush some credit. In his own words:
I see the poster, who has probably been instilling partisanship since his daughter was born, being happy about what she wrote. I know he sat there with a grin on his face far greater than if she would have wrote something about how the President prevented the future killings of Iraqi children.
Regardless of correctness of George's way of spreading his memes to his daughter, this is a matter that deserves serious consideration. I made some responses to his argument, and I thought that this issue was important enough to be made into a diary entry.
I responded:
The problem with jjayson's analysis throughout his comments on this thread is that the attitude he expresses is precisely the one that is going to cause even more torture and murder in the future. What accepting the war legitimizes is a policy of setting up brutal dictators when convenient and tearing them down when convenient---with the excuse that they were brutal dictators.
If Bush II were to go to war with Iraq after publicly announcing trials for his father, Rumsfeld, etc, etc, then maybe we would be able to view this as real correction to injustices encouraged by US foreign policy. Otherwise, it's just offering the Bushies carte blanche, or rather a carte plus blanche than they have now. We are seeing this carte blanche in operation right now in Haiti. Let's not make it worse. Let's follow the law. Dictators do topple on their own, despite our best efforts to keep them.
He responded with an attack on alleged pacifism of mine:
And the problem with total pacifism, saying that we shouldn't knock off murderous dictators is that it fails the "Hitler Test". Could this argument have been used to prevent action against Hitler? Yes.
We can always say, "Let's not take out this dictator because another will just take his place" or "Let the Jews topple Hitler themselves."
At some point you have to take a stand for the ones being stepped on and step back on those who seek to oppress. I never thought a group of people who are so proud of their wanting to help others would have such a huge problem ridding the world of another dictator.
Granted, I wouldn't have gone after Saddam first, but this is all after the fact.
But that's not at all what I was arguing. [note: this I am also taking mostly out of my comment responses.] His criticism might have been fair if I had taken a position of principled pacifism. But I did not. We created Saddam Hussein and propped him up in one way or another. Did we create Hitler in the same way? At best, indirectly.
What the Iraq war legitimized was the creation and destruction of tyrants at our convenience (by "our" I mean the elected leadership of "The West"). When we allow this, we allow a cycle of murder and violence for which we are mostly responsible.
If Saddam Hussein had magically appeared there on his own, then depending on the circumstances it might have been supportable to take him out. Even if he had come into existence as a response to policies we imposed, it still might have been supportable, depending on the circumstances again. But when we create or support these problems and then enter as liberating/conquering heroes, that's totally contemptible.
The only exception I would make to this is if our leaders took responsibility for it by putting themselves on public trial afterwards and by taking public steps to make sure they never do such things again.