The United States in Iraq: Ethical Implications

October 29, 2007

a talk given at St. Norbert College in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the Get InFORUMed event put on by the Peace and Justice Center

Formulating an ethical response to the war is difficult because it does not feel like individuals have a voice in what happens. Unless Secretary of Defense Gates is hiding back there in the shadows, I can say confidently that none of us has a real say in the actions taken by our government. The question to be addressed here is “What do we do now?” I am not going to ask that question as if we were president Bush or vice president Cheney. I am going to try to reflect on our own position and the way we as individuals think about this conflict.

I am a religious studies professor. My interest is in older things: Islam in the urban context of medieval Cairo, the Quran, and travelers through the Islamic world during its golden age. I would much rather talk to you about that world, when Islamic civilization was confident, powerful, and even peaceful. I have not been to Iraq.. the closest I got was during a trip to an archeological site in the Syrian desert, and I noted the road sign that pointed the way to Baghdad. It was like a road sign here pointing the freeway direction to Milwaukee.. but this one said “Baghdad”. I give this talk as someone who has lived in the Middle East and who loves this part of the world.. and who is saddened by the destruction that has been unleashed due both to internal forces in the Middle East and our own actions.

Last Monday a student came to my office for an independent study. She is Turkish and was a little upset. She explained that she had just talked to her brother, whose compulsory military service was approaching in December. Since some of his friends had been deployed to the East, it seemed that this might be where he would head as well. If you have been following the news you know that Eastern Turkey is currently a hot spot for conflict with Kurdish factions in Northern Iraq. There is a good possibility that this conflict will widen.. and it goes without saying that this would not be a comfortable place to have a brother stationed.

I was shocked to get a glimpse of the long reach of our national decisions and actions. This girl is not in a particularly unique position; I would bet that there are people in this audience who have loved ones stationed in a dangerous place. But this makes for a good place to start a consideration of the ethical implications of our current involvement in Iraq: the realization that with our international might comes the responsibility to think not only about our own lives, but about those whose lives are destroyed or changed in far away places.

Loss of lives on our own side has been of course significant. As of yesterday the US had suffered 3,838 casualties. We spend approximately 6 billion dollars a month on the war—and remember we have just watched terrible fires burning out of control in Southern California, causing what will be something more than a billion dollars in damage; a huge number but absolutely dwarfed by our monthly war spending.

A disturbingly less examined number is the tally of Iraq dead: between 75,000 and 82,500 confirmed deaths thus far. The refugee crisis is perhaps even more mind-boggling. About 2.2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and another 2.2 million have fled to neighboring countries. That represents a lot of lives turned upside down. The US is of course not directly responsible for much of this loss, which comes from sectarian conflict, terrorism, and other issues. But surely our own neglect and confidence are indirectly responsible for this state of affairs. I wonder sometimes if we will not collectively wake up and say: what have we done?

So what do we do now? Like all of you, I don’t get daily Pentagon briefings.. and it is painfully difficult to form a clear notion of the details of our presence in Iraq. But one clear step in the right direction would be for us to act as if we want to leave. That would mean re-thinking our huge embassy in the heart of Baghdad. It was slated to cost 592 millions dollars, but as was reported earlier in the month it is almost 150 million dollars over budget. I have seen big embassies.. the one in Cairo is quite large. But it is nowhere near this size. Why exactly do we need such a large embassy in Iraq? I have trouble imagining any scenario in which such a presence would be necessary. The easy conclusion.. also drawn by many Iraqis.. is that we plan on staying a long time, and exerting a powerful influence on any ruling government. This embassy is in addition to the construction of military bases that look to be permanent; if they are not, we do not disavow their permanence.

Our actions on the ground belie our stated hope of withdrawal. The war is sold and re-sold to us, the American people, on an approximately six month basis, but the planning, poor as it may be, is working according to a longer timetable. That longer timetable is not clear, although it may well mean we spend a decade or longer in Iraq. Occupation is an inflammatory subject, and we owe ourselves, and the Iraqis—and the rest of the world—absolute transparency as to our intentions. Yet we are a long way from anything like transparency. I would argue that such transparency is an ethical imperative.

The carrot that is being help out in front of us.. which keeps us sending soldiers and OKing money headed for Iraq is the word “victory”. For a country of sports fans that word inevitably maps onto a sports contest. It is as if we are in a ball game that unexpectedly has gone into extra-innings.. we have gotten out of a tight spot or two.. but here we are in the bottom of the eleventh with a chance to win it.. to gain a “victory”. If we score that run, we walk off the field victors.

That is emphatically not our situation in Iraq. The positive outcomes that were touted at the beginning are gone. They are not even on the table. Iraq is no model. Democracy has gotten no shot in the arm. US strength is less respected. Iran is on the rise. I won’t go through all this, but there is no real way to look at our situation and see a “victory” coming out of it. Now, we may be the last ones standing or we may outlast the insurgency, but that is hardly a victory. There should be no champagne in the locker room.

When we talk about Iraq, what we are talking about is not “victory” or “defeat”.. we are talking about damage control. If you listen carefully to the arguments about whether the US should stay in Iraq or leave, these are arguments over damage control. No option looks very good, but what would be best? Will our withdrawal mean that ethnic conflict skyrockets out of control? Or is loss of life and sectarian cleansing inevitable so we best have our soldiers out of the way. There is a real debate to be had here, and I am not going to offer an answer, but it is a debate that is sidestepped by the language of victory and defeat.

Our broad unwillingness to debate the situation in Iraq in terms of damage control and a failed policy is also at heart an ethical issue. We may be a long way from the Middle East here in Green Bay, but we nevertheless owe it to the people there to speak rightly about this conflict, and to interrogate ourselves as to our own motives. Many of our problems have stemmed from an unwillingness to say the words and call reality what it is. This imperative to think well about the issue calls for a willingness to engage in self-criticism, and not to fly under the cover of words that don’t really make sense for this situation, or that make us feel good about ourselves. “Victory” is one word I think we should dispense with.

I am not sure that we often think of our vocabulary and thoughts as ethical imperatives. But the way we as a nation conceptualize and talk about the war leads to real decisions.. and those decisions change lives—our own and those of people we have never met. That is a great responsibility.

The summer before this last we saw the invasion of southern Lebanon by Israel. I don’t want to discuss the ins and outs of that particular situation, but I was interested in the response given by Condoleeza Rice. She called the destruction a chance for a “new Middle East”.. and at other times she has spoken of “clarifying moments”. The concept that lies behind this way of talking is that peace will come through a crisis.. often a violent crisis. Out of the conflagration will arise something like a “new” Middle East. We have an easy time thinking in these terms.. and our most recent answer for building peace in Iraq is to distribute weapons to the locals who are willing to fight on our side. The sense is: there will be peace as soon as we blast our way over the next hill. But there is always another hill.

Great failures.. and I do believe this war, whatever the courage that members of the military have shown, is a great failure; I don’t think we have a strong enough conception as to how damaging this has been to our interests and our values in the eyes of the international community. Such a failure should get under our skin and prod us to take another look at ourselves, the way we think about the world, and the way we conceptualize conflict.

I can tell you that I have had to do some self-searching as a result of this war. I was living in Cairo when the war broke out.. and I was far too ambivalent, too willing to roll the dice and see what would happen in the attempt to re-arrange the Middle East. It’s not like I had any say in the matter.. but neither did most people. Change begins with ourselves and learning to reassess our ideas about power and the use of force. The unthinkable outcome of this war would be for us to go on as if nothing had happened to challenge our point of view.

The most immediate ethical call is for us to acknowledge and deal with the refugee crisis developing in the Middle East.. which means acknowledging the part we have played in tragically disturbing the lives of millions of fellow human beings. It is a crisis that is ironic for a couple of reasons. First, a war that was supposed to establish Iraq as a model for surrounding nations.. and contribute to long term stability.. has ended up sowing large numbers of refugees in neighboring countries. Especially in the case of a country like Jordan, this has the potential to be destabilizing. Second, a war that was supposed to engage the bad guys over there so we don’t face them here is actually going to end up bringing thousands of Iraqi refugees to our own country. But in all seriousness, we have a responsibility to take in and welcome people who have worked with the military or US companies, and also a generous slice of the refugees who are crowding to nearby countries. That is one obvious imperative for us as a nation; one way that we can begin to own up to the destruction we have wrought, indirectly or directly.