| The Morality of War |
| By Achal Mehra The Bush administration’s war on morality in the morality of war Sometime in the next few weeks, possibly even days, the regime of Saddam Hussain will be overthrown. As Bush administration officials repeatedly crow, the outcome is certain. The brute force and overwhelming technological superiority of the world’s sole superpower preordains the ultimate outcome. The only unknown is the duration and cost, financial and human, of this conflict. Ready the bands and floats this summer for the triumphant return of American GIs. The one redeeming value of this conflict will be the elimination of perhaps the most brutal and ruthless dictatorial regime in the world today. We can celebrate that. But it is all we can truly celebrate. This is an immoral war. Immoral not because the United Nations Security Council failed to endorse it. Pakistan, Guinea and Cameroon, all security council members whose votes might have tipped the judicial scales, are hardly the high priests of international law. It’s immoral because the war is neither about a brutal regime nor weapons of mass destruction. Over the years, no government in the world has done more to coddle dictators of varying stripe than the U.S. government. Indeed, its flimsy and ludicrous “coalition of the willing” is populated by dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan, to tick off names at the top in the “smokescreen of the few.” Nor is this war about weapons of mass destruction, or of any other kind, for that matter. It’s likely that Saddam has retained some of the weapons he pledged to abandon. But Saddam’s regime, stripped to a hollow shell after a decade of crippling sanctions, posed no danger at this stage to anybody, much less the United States. In fact, the greatest arsenal of weapons in this world — conventional and weapons of mass destruction — is concentrated right here in America. Tellingly, the United States spends more on its armed forces than the rest of the world combined. That’s the reason this war is so lopsided. This war is about the Bush administration’s new global doctrine of asserting American power in pursuit of global hegemony. Iraq was invaded because American strategic planners concluded that the war would be cheap, quick and easy. American power would resonate throughout the world. Afghanistan and Iraq would forever put an end to skepticism about U.S. power and resolve, which has hobbled this colossus since Vietnam. No nation, no tribe, no group, hereafter dare challenge American power again. The cynical exploitation of international conflicts to wage war to achieve such a crass strategic end is what makes this war so immoral. Quick military victory was also calculated to generate political dividends for Bush in his domestic agenda as well as his reelection campaign. Bush is, lest you have forgotten by now, an illegitimate president — one who lost the popular vote and is currently presiding over perhaps the most disastrous economy since the Great Depression. Of course, the war has not proceeded quite as smoothly as Bush strategists had hoped. And that will make the peace, calculated to be tough under the best of circumstances, that much harder. Worse, the bullying ways of the Bush administration will produce neither the harmony nor the security the hawkish wagers of this war had hoped. On quite the contrary, it will likely unleash unprecedented hate and violence, the price of which this society and others the world over will forever pay. |