I do not believe that the duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human
liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists. It was
reasonable (but not necessary) for American liberty-lovers to decide to
liberate Iraq based on the conjunction of
*
Saddam's apparent threat to America, consisting of his
*
admitted nuclear ambitions,
*
hatred for America (regardless of whether some think it justified),
and
*
support for terrorists who have targeted American civilians;
* Saddam's record of aggression, in which he
* killed over a million people,
* invaded one sovereign neighbor,
* annexed another by force,
* fired ballistic missiles at two more,
* defied UN nuclear disarmament mandates that Iraq was bound to obey
as a 1945 UN Charter signatory,
* used chemical WMDs in a war of aggression, and
* used chemical WMDs in genocidal attacks on his own citizens; and
* the existence proofs we had in Kurdistan and Afghanistan that the
U.S. military could depose tyranny in even less-modernized Islamic societies
and replace it with reasonably stable self-determination.
There are two predictions that could have changed my mind about liberating
Iraq if before the invasion we had been given reasonable grounds for
believing them. The most important is the prediction that, despite the
stability in Kurdish Iraq under U.S. military protection, and despite the
surprising success America had in deposing the Taliban, a sectarian civil
war would be more likely than not to eventually undermine our effort to
liberate the rest of Iraq -- a region much more secular, prosperous, and
literate than Afghanistan. This prediction would have needed to be
accompanied by evidence that this sectarian civil war was likely to be
permanently avoidable under some alternative US course of action that had
acceptable costs in terms of what evils Saddam and his sons committed or
abetted (both in the region and against the West) during the rest of their
tenure.
The other crucial prediction would have been that Saddam in fact had neither
a nuclear WMD program nor the capability and intention of reconstituting the
pre-1991 program that we found out in 1995 he had so successfully hidden
from the West. On my blog I document an intensive but fruitless search for
any Iraq Cassandra who credibly registered either of these two predictions.
Indeed, the Iraqi people themselves were still failing to make the first
prediction a year after the invasion. In an April 2004 CNN/Gallup nationwide
poll of Iraqis, 42% "said Iraq was better off because of the war", and 61%
"said Saddam Hussein's ouster made it worth any hardships." In a nationwide
poll of Iraqis completed in Mar 2004 for BBC by Oxford Research
International, "56% said that things were better now than they were before
the war".
We have now achieved our two most important war aims: 1) elimination of any
WMD capability or international terrorist infrastructure, and 2) deposing
Saddam's regime in favor of a federal democratic constitutional framework
designed to protect minorities and fundamental human rights. We would have
liked to also successfully transition security responsibility to the new
Iraqi government, but Iraq's thirst for civil war has effectively exhausted
the reconstruction and stabilization efforts we owed the Iraqis for having
liberated them. It is now time to accept our partial victory and let the
Iraqi people take responsibility for their own future.
Liberty has blessed America with the prosperity required to defend its
freedom, and with the worldwide respect that has made such defense so rarely
needed. However, modern weapons technology and our high expectations for
near-perfect security have combined to make Americans feel vulnerable to
those who oppose America's influence on the rest of the world. America has
done more to advance the cause of human liberty than any other society in
human history, and yet America's foreign policy has fallen tragically short
of the standard of conduct on which any libertarian would insist. We are
appalled at the loss of life and compromises against liberty that some
American leaders have considered an acceptable price for advancing liberty
and opposing tyranny. Reasonable and principled Libertarians hold good-faith
views on both sides of the question of liberating Iraq, but we all can agree
that our candidates when elected will hold America to the highest standards
of conduct.
