The End Can Never Justify the Means

by Randall Cotton, Champaign resident and member of AWARE

Do you remember the old justifications for invading Iraq? The claim that they had a nuclear weapons program? That they had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction? That Saddam was working with Al Qaeda? And the insinuation that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? Now, President Bush has finally abandoned them all. Most folks listening to this broadcast have probably learned by now that these claims are increasingly seen as fraudulent and that even the Administration can see they're crumbling away.

So as belief that the war in Iraq was justified erodes in America and the body count rises daily, our President now claims his purpose was a humanitarian one - to save the world from Saddam Hussein, who, as he tirelessly points out, killed countless Iraqis, invaded other countries and used chemical weapons on his own people. This is all true, but Saddam did nearly all his killing, invading and gassing more than ten years ago when conditions were very different - in particular, the U.S. supported him politically, financially and militarily, helping *enable* Saddam to accomplish his worst atrocities. The administration always conveniently ignores the fact that since the first Gulf War in 1991, conditions changed dramatically for Saddam. He no longer enjoyed the support of the U.S. or any other country and in 2003 before the war, even Saddam knew that any such misbehavior on his part would likely seal his own doom. At that time, there was no discernible prospect of Saddam committing mass atrocities or invading anyone. Although Saddam's regime was always brutally repressive, by the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam's most horrible atrocities and his foreign invasions were historical data points far more than contemporary dangers. A Human Rights Watch report released in January addressed this by saying:

"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention... Saddam Hussein's atrocities should certainly be punished, and his worst atrocities, such as the 1988 genocide against the Kurds, would have justified humanitarian intervention then. But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They should not be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

Meanwhile, the most reliable estimates of innocent civilians killed in this war range above 10,000. In particular, a detailed accounting by the research group "Iraq Body Count" estimates civilian deaths as high as 10,430. And now, media reports say the country may be edging toward civil war (Associated Press, Knight-Ridder, Independent UK). Perhaps the administration could point to some individuals in Iraq that they saved from the hands of Saddam, but given the damage we've done, any claim that the people of Iraq as a whole will ultimately be better off is, at best, conjecture. A guess. A hunch. An increasingly implausible hunch. And you cannot justify starting a war that kills thousands of innocents based on a hunch. What if your hunch is wrong?