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They Were Wrong
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
In those days following Thanksgiving when the Taliban fell, the War
Party enjoyed their greatest successes, and they didn't hesitate to
rub our noses in it. Ha, ha, ha, they chortled, the people who warned
of quagmire and failure were wrong. The Taliban was not invulnerable
after all. The vaunted Islamic warriors fled for the hills for fear
of the mighty air war waged by the US, and so victory is ours, with
very few casualties of the kind that matter (meaning US casualties).
It turns out, however, that the War Party was too smug too soon. None
of the top officials of the Taliban have been captured. Al-Qaidah is
still on the loose. Above all, Bin Laden and his coterie got away.
Even the Pentagon admits that it is "anyone's guess" where he is. If
the goal was to hammer the parties said to be guilty for 9-11, it
hasn't work. Even by their own standards, the war has not exacted
justice but only destroyed.
True, the Taliban no longer runs Afghanistan. But no one claims that the Taliban was
directly responsible for any events of 9-11. Overthrowing that regime was not the
primary point of the military intervention. To put the
best spin on the outcome, the US celebrated the advent of rock music and women's
rights in Afghanistan (while remaining silent about the absence of such rights in
other Islamic states, particular former Soviet states now
serving as military staging grounds).
But the ostensible point of the intervention was to get Bin Laden and his
organization. If that is not achieved, what was the point of the war? To put a gaggle
of tribal warlords, some left over from Soviet days, in charg
e of the country? That's all we really have to show for the war so far, that and a lot
of civilian corpses and burned up liberties.
As a result, the War Party is changing its targets. "As for bin Laden, we shouldn't be
too picky about timing," writes National Review's Rich Lowry, adherent of the doctrine
of Pentagon Infallibility. "It doesn't matter t
oo much whether he is killed before or after Saddam Hussein." Oh yeah? Just because
Lowry says it doesn't make it so.
And say what you want about Saddam, he had nothing to do with September 11. In fact,
as the leader of what used to be one of the most liberal states in the Arab world, he
has always been a bitter opponent of radical Islam
and Bin Laden in particular. Bin Laden's attitude toward Saddam duplicates the US
position: Saddam is an illegitimate leader who should be overthrown. The attempt to
turn this war from one of retaliation into a general w
ar against Islam completely changes the public rationale for why the US is waging this
war in the first place.
Having failed to accomplish its stated aims of exacting justice, the War Party is
simply changing the stated goal. This is akin to the changed rationale of the Welfare
State after the 1970s, when its advocates announced t
hat their goal was not to eradicate poverty so much as to redistribute wealth from the
rich. It's called defining your goal by the outcome, whatever it is, like the child on
the playground who always declares after any em
barrassment: "I meant to do that."
In the same way, the new rationale for this war is not to punish the evildoers who
plotted the destruction of the World Trade Center; it is to eradicate states that the
US doesn't like: in other words, behaving like an em
pire.
Whenever I write about this topic, I receive a flurry of emails demanding to know:
what is your alternative? The answer can be summed up in a single, very unfashionable
word: diplomacy, the practice of resolving internati
onal disputes through adroit and tactful negotiation as an alternative to destructive
war.
In diplomacy, there are no ultimatums or non-negotiable demands. There are proposals,
counter-proposals, and rounds of give and take, ideally conducted by sober men and
women, and all based on the belief that keeping the
peace is better for all parties than going to war. While diplomacy proceeds, the peace
is kept, trading continues, and normal relations among states remain. This is why
civilized states always prefer diplomacy to violence
in resolving disputes even with uncivilized states.
Hours after the attacks on 9-11, the US theorized that Bin Laden was behind them. The
Bush administration demanded that the government of Afghanistan hand him over. It's
not at all clear that the Taliban could have done s
o if it wanted to, but before it even tried, the Taliban made two requests that are
entirely in accord with traditional diplomatic practice: first, it wanted evidence
that Bin Laden was involved, and second, it wanted Bin
Laden tried in an international court, not in a US kangaroo court. The second demand
suggests that the Taliban was not fundamentally opposed to handing him over, provided
that the evidence that he was involved was forthc
oming.
What if the US had worked to gather evidence and turn it over to the Taliban? At least
in doing so, it would have developed a solid case against him and thereby persuaded
fence-sitters to come over to the US side. It coul
d have worked to rally world opinion in a way that would have made it far more
difficult for Bin Laden to escape. A trial in international court would have been the
opportunity to expose him for all the world to see.
The costs of war would have been entirely avoided: Afghanistan wouldn't look like the
surface of the moon, tens or hundreds of millions in tax dollars would have been
saved, the dead American soldiers would still be alive
, we would have stood a better chance of retaining civil liberties at home, and we
would not have inspired terrorists of the future. In any case, we wouldn't be worse
off than we are today.
But diplomacy was ruled out the minute everyone concluded that September 11 was an act
of war rather than a multiple hijacking that ended in horrendous murder. War is a
license for the state to do whatever it wishes; the
congressional resolution empowering Bush said as much. It means ruling out a
diplomatic solution, which means ruling out peace.
What if Bin Laden is captured tomorrow? He should be put on trial, as the diplomatic
tradition would dictate, not executed on the spot as the War Party demands. The
Nuremberg Trials helped drive home the moral strictures
that bind states in peace and war, and established the principle that obeying orders
is not a morally licit excuse for rampant criminality. Similarly, the McVeigh trial
highlighted the horror of ideologically driven viole
nce. A trial for terrorists would help reassert ancient codes of ethics in times when
states and terrorists disregard them.
Our dictum is summed up by Ludwig von Mises: "Whoever wants peace among nations must
seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly." The War Party says roughly
the opposite: "We want war, so there should be no
limits on the state and its influence." And look what the War Party has done to us as
compared with what they have done to make the world a safer place. So far they have
achieved none of their stated objectives while havi
ng destroyed so much. It is they, and not us, who should be hanging their heads in
shame.
December 21, 2001
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], is president of the Ludwig von Mises
Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com.
Copyright � 2001 LewRockwell.com
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