[1] Morally speaking, the question is a no-brainer. Colin Powell tried to explain it to George W. Bush on the cusp of the invasion: “You break it, you own it.” After four years of ideological arrogance resulting in the second most stupidly managed American war in living memory, the one thing the Bush Administration is right about is that abandonment of Iraq to its fate is not a moral option. Of course, it is a political option. More on that momentarily. But the killing fields of Pol Pot and the disasters to this day of Lebanon and Sudan witness to the consequences of ignominious American retreat. The relative stability today of Serbia and Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, not to mention South Korea, Japan, and Germany all testify to the importance of the long-term commitment of power.
[2] It is not our obligation to fight Iraq's political or counter-insurgency battles for it. Inevitably, U.S. and coalition forces will turn the war-fighting task over to Iraqis. We owe Iraq, however, the bipartisan assurance that sufficient military force will remain in its territory to train its armed forces, to deter Syrian or Iranian interference, and to guarantee the long-term failure of the insurgencies (note the plural). We owe Iraq the bipartisan assurance that we have no desire to stay in its territory, except at the behest of a progressively democratic and law-governed state. We owe Iraq the assistance that will be needed to rebuild the nation's war-wrecked infrastructure. We owe ourselves in the process some truth-telling.
[3] Politically, American patience is worn thin. The Bush Administration has little credibility and increasingly less clout. The anti-war crowd has been praying, working, and dreaming of this day now for four years. In our dysfunctional politics, however, this is part of the reason that we are in the mess we are in. Yes, let me repeat that. Fanatical hatred of Bush, animated by raging blind opposition to any and all of his policies, is part of the dysfunctional system that has produced this mess and will make a further mess of things if the pendulum swings (e.g., as above: Cambodia, Lebanon, Sudan, except this time sitting on top of the world's oil supply).
[4] Undiscerning, unprincipled opposition to the war has played right into the bunker mentality of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. They would not or could not consequently distinguish between good-faith critiques of the occupation going awry and the cacophony of Hollywood wing smear. Poor Joe Lieberman! He was right, he is right, and he will be proved right—even though he has been demonized right out of the Democratic Party. Poor John McCain! He was right, he is right, and he will be proved right—the straight-talking bearer of bad news is talking himself right out of the presidency. Of course, the chief culprit in American political dysfunction is the “what me worry” President, who among other things may go down in history as the outstanding contemporary example of a prediction Martin Luther once made.
[5] I wish now that I had taken the time after Bush's re-election to re-read Luther's treatise, "Whether Soldiers Too Can Be Saved," so that I could have said then what I am about to say now. Given the enormous risks Bush took in going to war against Saddam, he should have been focused like a laser-beam on what von Clausewitz called the inevitable “friction of war.” Instead, he squandered his post-election political capital on a quixotic campaign to privatize Social Security and then fell asleep in front of the TV watching Hurricane Katrina. But what prediction am I talking about? I myself predicted on the eve of the invasion that defeating Saddam's armies would be the easy part; then I added that the next twenty years would be something else. Any fool could see that, I thought (though I see now that I was wrong to underestimate the capacity for folly). In any event, I faulted Bush then and there for failing to summon the American people to the requisite sacrifice that war would entail. His counsel was: Keep shopping! Well, that was my prediction, not Luther's prediction.
[6] For the anti-war crowd the very notion of 'just war' is an oxymoron (except when Clinton—to take our minds off Monica—took on Milosevic, the "Hitler of our times," as an obsequious Times Magazine portrayed the Serbian thug-communist turned nationalist demagogue). Luther, in contrast, employed the traditional just war categories with no little logic-chopping flair. The interesting thing, however, is that Luther then advises us to place no trust in our casuistry. And here comes Luther's prediction: the prince who trusts in the justice of his war is in especial danger of failing on account of moral arrogance. No matter how just the cause, trust belongs only to the God who covers our mixed motives and hidden faults with mercy. This is Luther's prediction that today is fulfilled in our hearing. This is the spiritual source of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld failure.
[7] From “Shock and Awe” to “Mission Accomplished” to “Bring 'em on” to Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, this Administration has wittingly or unwittingly served a rich and steady diet of superbia to feed every fanatical Muslim stereotype of the Crusader. It has swelled the ranks of Al-Qaeda and its allies and affiliates far beyond any numbers it has killed on the battlefield. It is this humiliating insight that now drives General Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy; it is the grain of truth in the Democrat contention that the war on terror generally, and the war in Iraq specifically, cannot be won only by military means, but requires also a political-diplomatic full court press.
[8] Not that Democrats, however, have any clear idea of an alternative (except those on the fringe calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal). Hillary Clinton is to be admired for refusing to bow down to the Hollywood wing and recant her vote on authorizing the war, instead putting the blame for what has gone wrong squarely where it belongs. For that very reason, she is vilified by the anti-war wing just as Blair has been pilloried in the UK. Obama is a Niebuhrian who also knows better. He is benefiting politically from his prudential (not moral!) opposition to the invasion four years ago, but he is far too responsible a person to do as the anti-war crowd demands and just withdraw, if he were elected. Politics aside, no new president will immediately and unconditionally withdraw. It would be immoral. It would be politically catastrophic. Everybody knows that. We are stuck. Call down curses from heaven on Bush for getting us into this mess, if it makes you feel better. Now get serious.
[9] That is what we owe ourselves. It is one of the huge ironies of the Bush presidency that the man who campaigned on the platform of a new “humility in foreign policy” will go down in history as a utopian undone more than anything by his own sense of moral superiority. The costs in blood and treasure of this irony are too cruel to count. Can we please learn from this? We Americans have got to get past the Vietnam syndrome and find our way back to a bipartisan foreign policy consensus which really is at once humble and realistic. We may be the world's only superpower, but military power alone never carries the day. The cost of thinking so in fact progressively undermines the efficacy of the force we do possess. A just cause justly pursued is necessary. Yet, as Luther would add, it is never sufficient. What suffices is not trusting in our justice, but humility before God who judges the heart, as the prophets liked to remind the kings. Concretely, technology cannot save us. This was Rumsfeld's science-fiction fantasy, itself a convoluted product of the Vietnam syndrome. Here's the ugly truth: any decision to go to war involves boots on the ground and body bags returned home for military funerals. In other words, can we get real about war?
[10] And, can we get real about oil? The nutty conspiracy theories about the whole thing being a grab for Iraq's oil only serve to avert our eyes from the real problem. For what we have spent in these past four years, we could have bought Iraq and turned Saddam into a hero of human rights. Of course it's about oil, which is what theorists call a 'strategic commodity.' But it's not about Exxon bribing Bush for the sake of private profit. It is about who gets to leverage the alliances of nations. Just watch the behavior of oil rich Russia and oil poor China in coming years—where Exxon has but little influence—to see the truth of that thesis. We need to go green fast. Not only to check as best we can global warming but to lessen the strategic value of oil. Isn't that something we can all get serious about?
[11] And, can we get real about the new global politics of cultural identity? You don't have to buy Samuel Huntington's thesis on the 'clash of civilizations' hook, line, and sinker to see that the old battle lines drawn between communism and capitalism, imperialism and self-determination are passé (even though they live on in institutionally soft niches like the field of Christian ethics). I should think that Christian ethicists would be particularly stimulated by Huntington's sophisticated arguments about the salience of religion and the historical relativity of Western secularism. In any case, Bush's rather simplistic ideas about the universal desire for Western-style freedom and his failure to comprehend 1400 years of tension between Islam, Byzantium, and the Latin West are no small factors in his woeful missteps. Don't we need to have a real debate no longer formed by the useless categories of Marxism and anti-Marxism?
[12] We broke it. We have to fix it. But fixing it requires of us a paradigm shift along the lines just sketched. In my view any of the leading contenders, both Republican and Democrat, are going to be far more able than the current one. But whoever is elected is going to be constrained by the same geo-political forces and deep cultural-civilization cleavages that are emerging. Therefore whoever is elected may also be driven by the same dysfunctional American politics which turned the witless Bush into the king who went to war without first counting the cost. What we owe Iraq, morally speaking, is easy. What Americans owe themselves is something else.
© August 2007
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 7, Issue 8
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