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The Case Against This Monstrous War
By Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
11/09/05 "Lew
Rockwell" -- -- I have never recommended a book as
strongly as I am recommending
Neoconned and Neoconned Again, two new
collections of essays that make just about every argument you can
think of against the war in Iraq. Now if you’re thinking that you’ve
read enough about this subject already, or that such books just
aren’t your cup of tea, or that you have too much to read as it is,
I urge you to abandon such thoughts right away. These books need to
be purchased by everyone, right away, this minute, and need to be
circulated just as far as possible.
I was asked early last year to contribute an essay to these volumes.
At that time I was consumed by the task of writing The Politically
Incorrect Guide to American History, along with my usual dozen other
projects, and unfortunately had to decline. All I can say is, they
sure didn’t need my essay. Light in the Darkness Publications has
assembled one of the most impressive lineups of scholars and
commentators I have ever seen on any subject. Many of the names will
be familiar to LRC readers; see the list for volume 1 here and
volume 2 here.
Worth the price of the two volumes alone is the very lengthy
interview with the late, great Jude Wanniski, the supply-side
theorist who had such influence on President Ronald Reagan (and who
therefore cannot be dismissed so easily as a leftist peacenik). In
recent years Wanniski had become – along with all too few other
conservatives – skeptical not only of government intervention on the
domestic front but of its foreign interventions as well. (Recall Joe
Sobran’s amusing dictum: if you want the government to intervene
domestically you’re a liberal, if you want the government to
intervene abroad you’re a conservative, if you want the government
to intervene both domestically and abroad you’re a moderate, and if
you don’t want the government to intervene either domestically or
abroad you’re an extremist.)
It may sound like an exaggeration to say that just about every major
claim made about Iraq and Saddam by the U.S. government since the
1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has been misleading or simply false,
and that the mainstream media has bought into these distortions with
nary a peep of opposition, but that’s just about the only conclusion
one can draw from Wanniski’s case. If you think it’s an open and
shut case that Saddam "gassed
his own people," not to mention
countless other episodes routinely cited to work us into a frenzy
for war, you need to read this. (Saddam did brutally suppress
uprisings against his regime, but violence in the service of
nationalism seems to disturb the neoconservative conscience only
selectively – China and Iraq bad, Russia and the United States
[under Lincoln] good.)
Although not every essay touches on the issue explicitly, the first
of the two volumes is organized around Catholic just-war theory and
what it has to say about the war in Iraq. Now hold on a minute
before you say you’re non-Catholic and just move along. The
principles of Catholic just-war theory, long appropriated and
developed by a great many non-Catholics, are widely regarded as
useful tools for moral reflection, and you’ll be surprised at just
how satisfying it is to see how dramatically short the war in Iraq
falls on the basis of every one of those principles.
Wanniski also reminds us of the real history of the past 15 years.
He recalls the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, including
the deliberate targeting of water treatment facilities (followed by
a sanctions regime that forbade the entry into Iraq of equipment
needed to repair them) and other installations vital to civilian
life. This was all necessary, say the shills, because Saddam was
such a bad person. The sanctions, too, which led to half a million
children dead – "worth it," according to Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, who did not question that figure – were
routinely defended on the same grounds. (Wanniski also addresses the
"if Saddam hadn’t built so many palaces he could have fed his
people" argument.) A prosperous, secular country that was liberal by
regional standards, and which could boast one of the finest health
care systems in the Middle East, was reduced to an economic basket
case, and plagued by a nightmare of disease, malnourishment, and
sick and deformed children – all as the result of a vain effort to
dislodge its leader. If the "Saddam was bad" defense strikes you as
insufficient to justify the infliction of this degree of suffering –
of which this is the tip of the iceberg – welcome to the human race.
That people who describe themselves as Christians supported this
policy is but the icing on the cake. As I recall, there was a
Christian theologian of no small importance who condemned the idea
that we should "do evil that good may come."
A surprising contributor to these volumes is Alfredo Cardinal
Ottaviani, who headed what in his day was known as the Holy Office
of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Ottaviani was known for his
outspoken opposition to the new rite of Mass, which he considered an
intolerable liberal innovation, so it would not be easy to accuse
him of "liberalism." And yet the editors include for us a wonderful
and compelling essay of his called "Modern War Is to Be Absolutely
Forbidden." Let’s see pro-war Catholics wiggle out of this one.
Professor Peter Chojnowski, another traditional Catholic,
contributes a surprisingly radical essay on the right of
conscientious objection. He reminds us of an important statement by
the Ethics Committee of the Catholic Association for International
Peace six decades ago. That committee included distinguished and
orthodox scholars such as Msgr. Fulton Sheen (who wrote scholarly
books early in his career) and Msgr. John A. Ryan. It concluded:
Practically speaking, the task of deciding the justice or injustice
of any particular war devolves upon the conscience of the individual
conscript or soldier. It is his conscientious duty to decide, as a
matter of concrete fact, whether any particular war is aggressive or
defensive, and, if defensive, whether it is justified or
unjustified, and, in consequence, whether he is free or obliged or
forbidden to participate formally in it, whether he is free or
obliged or forbidden to be a conscientious objector.
That’s another small taste of the hidden history that these books
have made available.
Volume 2 is, if anything, more impressive still, and features a
wider variety of ideological perspectives. No, I don’t much care for
some of what Noam Chomsky says, but I am prepared to give a
respectful hearing to anyone with the intelligence and the strength
of character to denounce wickedness and folly, especially this
particular case of wickedness and folly. Featuring an introduction
by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, volume 2 includes
dozens of essays by such authors as Claes Ryn, Kirkpatrick Sale,
Alexander Cockburn, Gordon Prather, Mark and Louise Zwick, Justin
Raimondo, Robert Fisk, and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski.
Like many Americans, I’ve grown sad and frustrated at the triumph of
neoconservative foreign policy. It was sold to Americans not merely
on the basis of lies, but also by means of bumper-sticker slogans
trotted out – and dutifully absorbed and repeated by shills
determined to live down to every caricature of conservatism ever
devised – by a White House that cynically exploited ordinary
people’s patriotic inclinations in order to prosecute a war whose
aims remain obscure to this day.
These books, a small victory in themselves, actually lifted my
spirits. It was a great pleasure to see how many serious,
intelligent observers were keeping a watchful eye on the Bush
administration well before criticism of the Iraq misadventure became
fashionable, and to see their case against it laid out with such
devastating precision. That case is so powerful and overwhelming
that it will leave you more dumbfounded than ever that anyone ever
fell for it, that anyone got away with denouncing skeptics of
transparent White House propaganda as "unpatriotic," or that so many
people believe conservatism involves no higher value than giving
intellectual cover to a series of ever-changing, ad hoc
rationalizations for war.
These books deserve to become bestsellers. To those who opposed the
Iraq war, think of purchasing these books as casting a vote against
the War Party, against the war-war choice of Bush/Kerry that we got
in 2004, and against a cowardly, servile mainstream media whose mea
culpas about pre-war intelligence came, well, rather too late.
If you have friends on the left or the right, or even in the center
for that matter, please forward this column to them. The same
supposedly "liberal" media that brazenly repeated White House
fabrications that a simple Google search could have refuted are
unlikely to showcase these books. (Can someone please remind the
major conservative publications that the "liberal" media supported
this war with a vengeance?) They belong not only in Americans’ homes
but also in classrooms, libraries (buy a set and donate it!), and
wherever intelligent Americans may be found.
Ordinary Americans who were too busy with their own lives to
investigate the administration’s claims too closely may come to see
they’ve been had, if they haven’t realized it already. But the most
outspoken of the war’s supporters are all but impossible to
persuade. Some of them are simply venal, eager to curry favor with
the regime no matter how idiotic or intellectually insulting the
line they are expected to tow. Others, whether they realize it or
not, look at the world as a giant baseball game, with the U.S.
government as our team. They’ll rush out of the dugout to protest an
obviously sound call at first base or a called strike that was in
fact well within the strike zone. When in matters of foreign policy
their team sets forth a barrage of propaganda they would have
laughed at had it come from the Soviet Union in the 1980s or Syria
today, they cannot defend it enthusiastically enough. Go, team.
Such a juvenile mentality would have been considered utterly beneath
conservatism in, say, the 1940s. At that time, you could find major
conservatives who were willing to hold their own government to the
same moral standards they applied to others. Even a man known as
"Mr. Republican," Senator Robert Taft, could cast a skeptical eye on
the Truman administration’s early Cold War foreign policy as – no,
this isn’t a misprint – gratuitously provocative.
Today, even to look for motivations behind 9/11 is to invite
accusations of "blaming America" for the attacks, as if a detective
seeking a killer’s motive should be accused of blaming the victim
for his fate. It is next to impossible to render serious judgments
about foreign policy when public discourse is dominated by
anti-intellectual hysterics calling themselves patriots. These two
books do the best job yet.
It may be worth noting, if only in order to underscore the intensity
of my feelings about these volumes, that not only do I have no
relationship to Light in the Darkness Publications, an imprint of
IHS Press (no relation to the Institute for Humane Studies), but I
have actually had some public and contentious exchanges with J.
Forrest Sharpe, one of the editors of Neoconned, on unrelated
matters. I am happy to let bygones be bygones. Sharpe has done his
country and the cause of truth a valuable service and deserves only
the most enthusiastic support.
It is not possible to do these books justice in a single column. All
I can say is that they are of the utmost importance. I cannot urge
readers of this column strongly enough: put aside any inclination
you may have to let these volumes pass you by, or even to put off
buying them until a later date. Buy them right now. You will not
regret it.
Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com
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