"The war in Iraq is really about peace" President Bush said on April 11, 2003. He and his regimeconfidently assert that the ends of peace and liberation justify the means of war and destruction.
It’s an old trick question in ethics to ask if the ends justify the means. The trick is usually presentedas checking out the ends. That is, a bad end doesn’t justify any means, while of course a good end is justwhat justifies good means. As to bad means, you have to weigh the bad means (like war) against the good ends(like peace and liberation). And sometimes they are judged just, sometimes not. It’s presented as a matterof proportion.
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The devil is in the details of proportion of course. How many lives and wounds, how much pain, anguish anddestruction should be sacrificed to ‘peace and liberation?’ Would we sacrifice bombing of our cities anddestruction of our civilian population for the peace and liberation of Iraq as confidently as we sacrificeIraqi lives and cities? How do we reckon costs of lives, cities, money?
Moral philosophers bicker. The Pope has condemned preemptive war as unjust and American neocon CatholicMichael Novak has hied to Rome to argue US righteousness.
Our ability to abstract and argue like this is often cited as our human genius. It’s also clearly acurse. Life happens only in the present tense. Memory and imagination look back and forward and can make usignore and rationalize the present, but morality happens only in the present and usually has a bodily notabstract character. We drop fire from the sky and wound, we do shoot or don’t shoot. Making war and makingpeace are different: one accuses and rends, the other forgives and embraces. We’re trying to do both at onceand while that’s clearly an improvement over a purely bellicose posture, it’s also an illusion. In thepresent tense it’s impossible. The Lieutenant Colonel who told his men to go down on one knee, turn theirweapons muzzle down and smile made peace in a scene of war. But mostly we’ve made war, bringing staggeringmilitary might against a defiant but ill-matched foe. We’re Goliath here, not David. Except we’re anenlightened Goliath who really wants to be seen not as the giant but as the unarmored David, belovedentrepreneurial champion and chosen king of God.
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TV coverage cracks and confuses our heads about time. What’s going on, what’s on tape, what’s filefootage, what’s the story, fills the time. Very little is in real time except fireworks and reporterstelling stories. It feeds our appetite for passing time, giving escape and intensity, but it’s weak on thepresent tense -- very much pushing off-scene (literally ‘obscene’) the broken bodies and buildings.President Bush announces he’s upset by scenes showing carnage and looting. It’s all really about peace tohim but a future disembodied peace via sanitized, not brutal, maiming and ugly war.
When the finest collection of ancient culture was pillaged and destroyed in Baghdad the Bush regime commentwas that it’s terrible and untidy and the result of transition turbulence -- i.e. not really our fault butthe sad consequence of liberation from a brutal regime. Back to Saddam for blame, forward to liberation andfixing it. But whether 50 thousand or 170 thousand artifacts are gone or destroyed the cultural memory and artare savaged. Some reports already blame ‘ignorant’ Shia revenging their Sunni (Saddam) repression. Clearlythe Baghdad museum was not an asset equal to the oilfields for the American liberators. The looting is notjust a transition in Rumsfeld’s hypocritical shorthand, it is more war and ruin, bad means and no good end.When Rumsfeld was asked how we could have let this happen he reared mightily in his righteous fashion andsnapped that we didn’t let this happen. It happened, he said, no fault of ours, our men were probablyprotecting hospitals at the time. Already, he said, some people were returning things.
You can say that war is about peace but that doesn’t make it so. That may be your desire for the futureor your rationalization or delusion about the past. The only really moral mirror is the present tense -- thefirst casualty of politicians always anxious to ‘move forward’ and ‘get this behind us.’ Whateverclever ends and means we construct, adduce, or asseverate, we act and will be judged in the present tense --the only place one can live or die.
Diane Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor atUniversity at Buffalo.
