Right to Fight
29 Aug 2003
[732w]
It doesn't matter whether Campbell lied or Gilligan lied. Or either or both. Governments never tell the truth all the time. Get used to it. It doesn’t matter too much why the government took the country to war. In people, the goodness of the act inheres in the goodness of the motive. But a state is not a person. I’d like a government that did the right thing for the right reasons, but I’m not greedy. I’ll settle for right action from mixed motives. That’s certainly better than doing the wrong thing out of high-minded conviction. What matters is whether we were right to fight. And we were. (I hasten to add, I didn’t do any fighting myself – but I helped pay for it, and so share the responsibility if not the glory.)
The first reason is, Saddam was a bad man. The Ba'athist government really did arrest lots of people without trial and torture them to death. This happened. You cannot dismiss it. Please stop now, and take thirty seconds to think what it means to live in a country where you can be arrested and tortured to death with no appeal. It was a government that used judicial robbery and murder to make the rulers rich. On a small scale we see this kind of wickedness at home, we call it organised crime, and we try to break it up. Organised crime on a national scale is a far greater horror.
Of course it is a very grave thing to overthrow a government. As people found in Baghdad, even the worst government is in some respects better than no government. Also it defiles the nation's power to rule itself in the long run. But Iraq did not have the resources to solve its own problems. After Baghdad fell I saw it argued that we should do the same in Zimbabwe. But in Zimbabwe there is an opposition party that organises rallies. Its leader is arrested. There is an independent judiciary which, although much put upon, sets him free. Zimbabwe is a tyrrany; but it may be able to set itself right. Iraq could not. There was no opposition and no judiciary worth the name; and Saddam had an equally horrible son ready to carry on the family business. It could have gone on for ever. The only solution was from outside.
The other reasons to fight were more selfish. The danger was that Iraq invaded Kuwait again, we sent our armies to the Gulf, but found Saddam had atom bombs. Then he could hold Kuwait and invade or disrupt the Arabian peninsula. And though we should not mind much if archaic despotisms get overthrown by a modern one we should worry if about half the world's oil is in the hands of such a bad man.
To that extent it was about oil. Oil is very important, as you will know if you recently ate anything delivered by truck. It's twice as important in poor countries with inadequate electricity grids who can't enjoy power stations that burn something else. Do you want to make a living ploughing with oxen? Then oil is important.
That we have not found any bomb factories yet doesn't change the calculation. Iraq is a good country for hiding things in. We haven't found Saddam Hussein yet, and we know he existed. And even if there were no bomb factories we were right to act on the justifiable belief that there was. If you heard on the radio that it was going to blow a gale, and you cancelled your sailing trip, would you then think you had made a bad choice if it turned out sunny instead? Obviously not. Nobody expects intelligence information to be more reliable than weather forecasting. If it were easy to find out what our enemies were doing, it wouldn’t be called intelligence. The important decisions are always based on best guesses, never on facts. In this world of shadows, all our choices are on imperfect information. But we still have to choose.
You notice I don’t say these were the reasons why the government acted. Like anyone else, ministers had mixed motives. But we fought. And because Saddam was a bad man who was hurting many people and could have hurt many more, including us, we were right to do so.
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wrote on 14 Apr 2007
armies to the Gulf, but found Saddam had atom bombs. Then he could hold Kuwait and invade or disrupt the Arabian peninsula. And though we should not mind much if archaic despotisms get overthrown by a modern one we should worry if about half the world's oil is in the hands of such a bad man
wrote on 25 Jun 2005
wrote on 18 May 2005
wrote on 18 May 2005
Ed wrote on 17 Oct 2003
You suppose wrong, Owen. Every day we do things we'd rather not do because if we didn't do them something worse would happen. If we didn't the world would be in a parlous state. This is not invalid reasoning: it's trying to do the right thing in a more complex world than the one you want to live in.
Owen wrote on 17 Oct 2003
The argument used here sound vaguely reminiscent of the old 'End justifies the means' argument which was, I believe, supposed to be an example of invalid reasoning. With all due respect, the rest of the article is little more valid.