I’ve already said my peace on this war, but I’m pissed off at what I’m continuing to hear. On Monday night, in a classroom in an American university, I was verbally attacked as naïve when the war came up in conversation and I said it wasn’t about oil and demanded an argument be provided. I can’t open my e-mail without hearing ridiculous calls to impeach Bush and to e-mail the White House or some senator with strong condemnation of the war, nicely provided by the e-mails themselves. While people ridiculously claim that their anti-war views are being oppressed in a country that allows them the freedom of speech to oppose the government’s war during wartime, people of all stances have faced angry oppression of their viewpoints. Of course, on college campuses, this is distinctly one-sided, but the pro-war attitude of the rest of the United States allows these people to act as it was a brave act to oppose the war on campus, which it obviously isn’t.

Before you read this, you need to know where I’m coming from. I'm a lifelong liberal, unapologetically so, who's come to detest the betrayal of liberal values in the Democratic party -- not that the Republicans are any better, mind you. And I sit around and think -- far too much for my mental health -- which is pretty much all I do, save write. And I'm a political junkie. And I'm fairly on the fence on this war, but I'm angered at the lack of real argumentation going on on both sides, which really has gripped this country in a remarkable fashion.

The reasons people are against this war, by and large, are obvious. Bush and his people are oilmen, and Iraq has a lot of oil. Bush didn't get elected through a normal process. And Bush has thrown a lot of weight around, his administration infringing on civil liberties and plunging post-9/11 U.S. approval around the world to shockingly -- shockingly -- low levels. Not to mention the grudge between the Bush family and Sadaam Hussein, who tried to have Bush the elder killed -- a lot of people working in the present Bush administration were the people who in 1991 wanted to continue on to Baghdad without a U.N. mandate to do so. Besides general distrust of Bush, the idea of invading a sovereign nation is appalling to a lot of people. And the case for war has not been very clearly made: is it weapons of mass destruction, protecting ourselves or our allies, or freeing the Iraqi people?

These are good reasons, and I'm sympathetic to them. But they don't have much to do with this war or have much weight when they do. I don't think the Supreme Court ruling that gave Bush the Presidency was anything but ridiculous, if not unconstitutional. I don't like corporate oil guys; I'm a big believer in alternate energy. And I generally don't like the U.S. record of military action with little justification and lots of civilian casualties. And I think there are lots of places in which to intervene prior to Iraq: say, reconstructing Afghanistan or creating a Palestinian state and enforcing the peace on the ground. But, again, all of that just adds up to bias against Bush and doesn't pertain to this war in specific. And, if we're going to be intellectuals, if we're trained in analysis, we have to learn to bracket that bias and analyse the issue at hand.

I have no idea why Bush is pursuing this war. It might be hatred or paranoia of Saddam Hussein; almost certainly, that plays a part. It might be political, a campaign of distraction to keep the news focused away from the economy, though that doesn't explain it fully. It might be a way to flex American muscle after feeling impotent by 9/11 -- or, conversely, a more understandable paranoia following 9/11 that such regimes can't exist (though, of course, there are plenty such regimes and Saddam is being singled out). It might also be to help the Iraqi people: as much as I'm suspicious of Bush, he is a true believer, and I have no doubt that as a born-again Christian he feels something for the Iraqi people, even if that's secondary to other concerns. Whatever the reason, I'm not sure it matters. It should make us suspicious, but hypothesized motivation, while important, has to be secondary to the actual case at hand.

One can easily say that there's no great argument for war. Weapons of mass destruction would be better contained, probably, by vigorous inspections, and the U.S. only half-heartedly ever committed to inspections. The neighbors of Saddam that we claim to want to protect almost entirely don't want us there. Nor, it seems, to many if not most of the Iraqi people. And there's a great price to be paid for war, in money, in lives on both sides, and in terms of global prestige -- not to mention incurring the wrath of Muslim fundamentalists.

On the other hand, the arguments against the war are equally pathetic. The idea that this is about oil is just utterly unsubstantiated, and I've given it a lot of thought. No one has advanced an argument more than saying A) Bush is an oilman and B) Iraq has a lot of oil -- a suspicious connection, but hardly a case. Not to mention that our own sanctions actually restrict the amount of oil Iraq sells, and it'd be a heck of a lot easier to force Iraq to sell or not sell oil than it would to invade -- and as bizarre as it might sound that we were demanding oil, it would be far less surprising and damaging in terms of world opinion than what many see as a unilateral invasion. Not to mention that Bush's oil buddies would lose money if millions of gallons were unleashed onto the market. Mention this and watch how quickly people who think this is about oil falter for an argument to support their suspicion.

As for trying peace, it's been tried for twelve years. Sure, we bombed during those years, but the ultimate peaceful tactic -- sanctions -- actually resulted in thousands of dead Iraqi civilians per month, according to many estimates. And, despite that we would all prefer a war in which putting flowers in soldiers' rifles would eliminate all evil, violence does solve problems. We ended slavery in this nation through a bloody civil war. We ended Hitler's reign through another horrible war -- and one that, while remembered as a just war, was filled with indiscriminate civilian casualties on the side of the "good guys," something this war certainly will not feature.

As for this being unilateral, it isn't. The U.N. resolution under which we're acting is ambiguous, though probably doesn't authorize invasion, but the legality or illegality of invasion says nothing about its morality or lack thereof: it may be illegal in some places to shoot a guy who's beat his kids and terrorized his neighborhood viciously, but it's morally debatable, if not right in the absence of a legal entity that will do the same. Sure, that's dangerous to say -- this is international vigilantism. But that may well be necessary in a post-9/11 environment in which none may rightly hold a comfy position of moral relativism.

Clinton went into Bosnia without even consulting the U.N. and liberals hailed it as a just war, a rare humanitarian use of the military. Why is the same consideration not given Bush? Because he's Bush? Because it's Arabs living under threat of rape and torture and not Europeans? If this were a Democrat as President doing the same, his months of work at the U.N. would be hailed, his unprecedented use of humanitarian aid and focus on reconstruction would be hailed, and his allowing news coverage after years of utter media lock-outs (e.g. Panama) would also be hailed -- all as quintessentially liberal.

Sometimes, you can't pretend pacifism and humanitarianism are compatible.

If Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor (of course, after being provoked), would it have been wrong to go after the Axis? Certainly, Hussein's no Hitler -- those who make that comparison should study Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot. But the quality of murderously oppressive regime holds for both. And it is, in a sense, this question that we're negotiating. And -- make no mistake -- the American people in December 1941, without Pearl Harbor, would have been far more strongly opposed to taking down Hitler than they are now to taking down Hussein. And yet the real cause, the right cause -- to stop the Holocaust (which was never our aim) -- would have been more just.

History is made up of circumstances. People do the right things for the wrong reasons, and others still benefit. And good people do the wrong things for the right reasons, and others still suffer. Why a war is fought is, in this sense, incidental: it misses entirely what should be the question.

I do think the Bush administration screwed up diplomatically. I don't think the "with us or against us" or the "crusade" comments have done a lot of good. And I think it's appalling that we're not addressing the collapse of education in the states, or the lack of health insurance, or the two-party stranglehold on our slow government. And I think it's wrong that we didn't do a better job reconstructing Afghanistan, or declare a Palestinian state. But, all that having been said, I'm with the Iraqi people. I want them to be fed and to not fear for their lives even if that means incurring their anger by deposing their government. If we start talking about tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties, or a failed reconstruction, I'll be more opposed to this war than all but the most vociferous protesters today. The question to me is that of the Iraqi people, and of people everywhere: I hate both the lack of caring for them on the right and the crisis of conscience that would prevent helping them on the left. These are people, like you or I, cultural differences aside, and the war in Iraq will be won or lost based on how they're doing in one year, in two years, in ten, in twenty.

Arabs don't like us invading an Arab nation. If the cause it just, that's just tough. I love Arabs and I love Islam, but if someone objects to something that's right, that's their problem. You may have to deal with the consequences of their anger, and you might not like doing so, but that doesn't mean you're not in the right. And that you didn't help people. The same applies to the opinions of the French, the Germans, the U.N., and the world: the argument must be whether it's right, whether it benefits people, not any of these other, troubling but peripheral issues. As for Iraqi resistance, the German people under a worse dictator resisted our invasion far more.

If this goes bad for civilians, it has to go bad for Bush. It's on his word that we've gone in, trusting the word of our President that the Iraqi people will benefit. Bush doesn't have the credentials to trust him on this, but we must not ourselves be so shallow as to think him unredeemably evil or incapable of learning. Moreover, the war has come through so far in terms of massive concern for civilians, unprecedented precision bombing, thousands of tons of food ready to go, humanitarian concerns not only vying with but overruling military ones. For God’s sake, fewer civilians have died in two weeks of war than we’ve been hearing were dying during the same time from our “peaceful” tactic of sanctions. The moment this becomes untrue, the moment it becomes clear that Iraq won't be better off two years from now, is the moment that this becomes a horrible, horrible travesty. Until then, we should be suspicious. But we can't, as liberals or humanitarians or cosmopolitans, pretend to be other than self-interested America Firsters, or party loyalists without a soul (unfortunately what liberalism in this country has become), if we oppose this war on its face.

Be warned: history judges the politically correct demagogues as well as militant demagogues.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

If you haven't read Apollonian Bacchanalia #49, go back and read it. It's a careful analysis of the theorized reasons for this war and of the liberal case for supporting it, however cautiously.

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