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Long reply to critics on war issues

Ok, several responses to my Friday post have come in over the weekend, so I’ll make several replies together here. John Shaffer writes in the comments: What about the Arab proverb, "Better 100 years of tyranny than one night of anarchy." Surely that proverb refers to chaos, not anarcho-capitalism, but even in that case, it’s not clear that 100 years, or even 10 years, of secret police torture and mass graves is better than a night of looting. “Maybe they don't value freedom above all else, whether we think they should or whether we think they're entitled to it.” If there are any such things as human rights, all humans are entitled to them, whether or nor they have countervailing cultural or religious traditions. In general, too, the line that human rights is just a western prejudice is more likely the refrain of abusers, not victims. “The country is in utter chaos now and it's hard to see how it gets any better from here.” It gets better when the US establishes indigenous security and policing, withdraws the bulk of its troops, and lets them experience how good life is when you have autonomy and a freedom bounded only by the constraint of respect for the rights of others. (Hmm, I wish we had that here!) “A system of freedom cannot just be imposed by a colonial occupier.” Sure it can: ask the Germans and Japanese. The trick, of course, is to disarm the forces of the tyrant(s), then “impose” the system of freedom, and then leave.

Chris writes in the comments: “because of all the internal contradictions of this system, we are obliged to be very careful in the kinds of actions we advocate. Yes, of course, ‘[t]he general population in Iraq and in Germany ... are just as entitled to freedom as we are.’ But how freedom comes to these general populations is a profoundly important strategic question. There are enormous differences between the current context of Iraq and the historical context of post-war Japan and Germany, both of which were utterly destroyed by total war, but which still retained a uniform culture, with some democratic antecedents.” I’m sure that’s true, and I agree that we need to be, as Chris puts it, careful, and also that the administration is not doing a bang-up job of doing so. To defend libertarian hawkishness is not to defend the current administration.

My colleague from downstairs emailed, in response to my claim that tyrannies have no right to exist: “A regime which is rights-abusive loses some of its legitimacy, but it hardly is black-and-white. My government does many things that seem dubiously moral. It connives at the denial of equal rights to gays. It used to allow, through Jim Crow, abuse of all sorts of rights of black Americans. I am not sure that an invasion from Canada to rectify either of these would strike me as morally impeccable. I would not accept that the US government had NO legitimacy, nor would the use of force to defend the US from the neo-Aristotelian libertarian Canadians seem necessarily illegitimate.” That’s correct. Jim Crow laws were illegitimate, but did not require a Canadian invasion to rectify. More generally, there’s a difference between a nominally rights-respecting regime that violates rights, and a regime which doesn’t even have the fundamental structure of respect for rights. (This distinction is straight out of Locke, and echoed by Jefferson.) If the structure of the regime is legitimate, then a transgression may be corrected without overthrow. Overthrow becomes permissible when the very structure of the regime is illegitimate, i.e., completely abusive and disrespectful of rights in a pervasive way. That’s why the reductio ad absurdum (from overthrowing Saddam or the Taliban to Canadians invading the US over gay marriage) fails.

Both my colleague downstairs and Wilkinson disagree with my claim that anyone may prosecute justice. In certain contexts, e.g., within a stable and legitimate society, we might say that we have delegated any purported natural right to prosecute justice to the agents of the state who are so charged. But even then, a duty to rescue may override. If I am witnessing Smith assault Jones, should my response be “well, it’s the job of the police to help out here, and since I have delegated my natural right to intervene to the state as part of joining civil society, I cannot help Jones”? Surely not. And on the global scale, the analogy holds even less well, since the US and Iraq aren’t both parts of a larger society (and if we say that the UN represents some analogue to civil society, we note also that Iraq was in violation of many UN-mandated conditions which enable the cease-fire from the previous war), so the idea that the power to interfere has been delegated away doesn’t apply anyway.

My colleague asks a series of slippery-slope questions: “But what if my neighbor were flushing unwanted pets down his toilet, could I shoot him then? What if he was striking his child, but not in a way likely to permanently injure said child? What if in the firefight I accidentally killed someone else in the house in the process of taking out the illegitimate, rights-abusive neighbor? What if he really did kill somebody in his house, but it was years ago, I was there at the time, was a friend of his, didn’t say anything about it then, but years later decided to shoot him? Any of these scenarios might fit the Iraqi situation as well as the one you consider.” I hardly think the mass graves and torture squads are analogous to flushing a pet down the toilet. Some of the other entries on this list are thought-provoking, but don’t, just by being asked, constitute a refutation of the principle. If Smith is assaulting Jones, Jones has the right to defend himself, and Smith has no right to assault Jones, so everyone has the right to help Jones defend himself. This doesn’t imply, however, that everyone has the obligation to help – it may be imprudent or unfeasible. That’s why this: “Considerations of natural rights might incline you to the view that the US would therefore be morally justified in invading, say, China, and I might agree, in the brief moment before deciding that your helpfulness in crafting a decent real world foreign policy was at an end” isn’t quite right – since China has intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads, it wouldn’t be prudent to invade China. That doesn’t mean their regime has a right to exist which we’d be violating if we did invade. I am not in favor of invading China, but not because the regime there doesn’t deserve to be toppled.

Was it necessary to invade Iraq? Probably not necessary. Was it prudent? Not sure. It depends on how the administration wraps things up. If the conclusion is a relatively free and peaceful Iraq, that’ll be great. If they make a total botch job of it, and the theocrats take over, then it will have been imprudent. “In Iraq we have become part of the injustice we came to solve, and it was utterly predictable that that would be so.” It need not have been so. I agree though, that they’re handling this badly.

Will Wilkinson writes on his blog that I’m wrong about the anyone-can-seek-justice thing because of the quantifiers. “If a regime like Iraq is illegitimate, then, perhaps, there is someone or other that is justified in overthrowing the illegitimate regime. But it doesn't follow that that somebody is us, or even any state.” That’s correct. That’s the point I made earlier, in reverse. To claim that the war is imprudent, or that we had no obligation to free the Iraqis, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t permissible. Wilkinson concedes that “Iraq, or the Baathist regime, would not be wronged if we invaded” but then says “But that doesn't entail that we, or anyone else in particular, may invade.” It does entail that we may invade. It doesn’t entail that we must invade. It’s true that “The state may be obligated to forebear for other reasons, namely, that the war is not in the interest of its citizens, and the actions of the state can only be justified in reference to the interests of its citizens.” If a freer and more peaceful Iraq has a stabilizing influence on the region, and represents an alternative to Islamism, it will be. “The citizens who pay the taxes are wronged, even if the Baathists aren't.” I already agreed to that, but qualified by observing that we’re not any more wronged by that wealth-transfer than by any other, and liberating a nation from a tyrant is, if anything, more justifiable than, say, steel tariffs. “For me, the whole argument comes down to this nuts and bolts empirical squabble: was Iraq a threat? The answer, as far as I can see is ‘No.’” I don’t know. Irfan did a nice job documenting some of this over the summer. In any case, I’ve been trying to say something about libertarianism and hawkishness generally, not necessarily about this war in particular. Do the anti-war libertarians, as a matter of principle, think it was immoral for the colonists to go to war against the British? That was consistent, I’d argue, with Lockean approaches to libertarianism.

Posted on Monday, September 13, 2004 at 3:58 PM | Comments (22) | Return

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