On Tuesday, US casualties associated with the war on Iraq passed the 1000 marker. And of course, it is likely that Iraqi deaths passed this point within days, if not the first day, of the invasion. How many Iraqi casualties have there been by now? We don’t know exactly, of course, because as Tommy-gun Franks said, “We don’t do body counts”. As of last November, though, a study by the London-based health organization MEDACT gave a rough estimate of between 22,000 to 55,000 Iraqi dead.
On this terrible occasion, which marks not only the tens of thousands of human lives snuffed out by this war, but also the reverberating lifelong misery each death has brought to the friends, families, and other loved ones of each dead American and Iraqi, I want to ask the question: Who is morally responsible for these deaths?
This question must be asked, since, as we all know, each of these individuals died because of a lie (about Saddam’s possessing WMDs), which was easily discernible as a lie prior to the invasion. Of course, as it became impossible for the Bush administration to maintain this particular lie, other lies about why we went to war sprung up (concerning Saddam’s connection to 9/11 and the goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East), which again were transparently discernible as such. Only one among the (late in the day) motivations has even the slightest tractability---namely, the good attaching to getting Saddam out of power. But arguably, this admirable goal could have been accomplished without invasion. And with Allawi---Saddam sans Moustache---placed in power, this motivation too must be thrown on the pile of false motivations for the war.
On the other hand, the three real reasons for the war on Iraq were and continue to be equally transparently discernible. The first concerned the fulfillment of the neo-Con dreams of Preemptive American Imperialism (what Foreign Affairs called the “new imperial grand strategy”) as a general foreign policy, the second concerned the specific desire to establish U.S. hegemonic control over Iraq’s oil resources, and the third concerned the standing desire to funnel billions of U.S. taxpayer money into the pockets of those who profit from the manufacture and sale of armaments and the associated paraphernalia of war. Of course, these goals are all in intimate concordance. But in assessing responsibility for the war, it’s useful to distinguish them.
We can begin to assess who is morally responsible for the tens of thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, then, by considering both who stood directly to gain from fulfillment of the real goals, and by considering who created, propagated, or countenanced the lies that that provided the concrete ideological basis for conducting the war. I’ll group my discussion by attention to the three real goals of the war.
Goal 1: The fulfillment of the neo-Con agenda of a strategy of Preemptive American Imperialism. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Rice and various other individuals associated with or on board with the Project for a New American Century stood to gain very directly here in the goods of power and prestige (of course, there were financial and other benefits as well). Now, it’s clear that neither the U.S. public nor the majority of career U.S. foreign policy personnel would have been prepared to accept the neo-Con agenda as an acceptable motivation for war on Iraq. Among other things, the U.S. is a signatory to treaties forbidding the preemptive invasion of on country by another, unless an immanent attack on the latter by the former is in the offing. Hence it was that the neo-Cons created and propagated the lie that Saddam had WMDs, far in advance of Bush’s administration.
Of course, in the immediate run-up to war their primary means of propagating the WMD lie was Bush, whose blank slate of a stupid brain was ready and willing to be colonized by the neo-Cons, from the first days of his administration. And Rice also deserves special notice here as an ever-willing propagator of this and the lies to come.
Now, perhaps surprisingly, qua ideologues or gullible idiots, these individuals may not be as directly morally responsible as some others that we will consider down the line. For persons who are insane, as those in the strong grip of a corrupt ideology may be, and persons who are so gullible and/or stupid as to be unable to tell the difference between right and wrong, may, at least sometimes, be let off the moral hook, as those familiar with Strawson’s classic “Reason and Resentment” will recognize. Of course, we can still ask what moral and intellectual failings enable someone to become caught in the grip of an insane ideology, or to fail to develop what brains they were given, however meager. But still, when people do wrong as a result of being crazy or stupid the proper response appears to be pity and treatment, not moral outrage or punishment. In fact, I don’t think that the neo-Cons or Bush were either insane enough or stupid enough to get off the moral hook here; but we should allow that the ideological frenzy of the neo-Cons, and the fact that Bush is an intellectual (if not a political) idiot, no doubt distorted the clarity of their moral vision.
Such potentially mitigating circumstances do not, however, attach to the many (hundreds? thousands?) of individuals working in government, in the Cabinet, the Congress, the Foreign Service, the Pentagon, and other branches of government, who saw clearly that Bush had been hijacked by the rabid neo-Cons, and that these mad dogs were steering the country to war on fabricated grounds. Though these many individuals knew that the WMD claim was a lie, and knew also the truth about the true motivations for the war, and knew also that the war would result in the loss of countless human lives and associated misery for Americans and Iraqis, they went along for the ride and either propagated or else countenanced the lies. In my view, these persons are among the most morally responsible for the many deaths that we mourn today, precisely because each of them knew better, but failed to stand up against what they knew was wrong, and for what they knew was right.
Indeed, given that the main perpetrators of the drive to war were to some extent out of their minds (or didn't have any to begin with), the person who may well bear the most moral responsibility for the deaths attendant to the war on Iraq is Colin Powell. Powell, whose reputation was as a person of sterling character, knew the WMD lie for a lie, and yet (assuming the reputation was deserved, which can of course be questioned) he sold away his integrity, and the lives of the now dead, in his sordidly dishonest speech to the U.N. about the existence of said WMD. I maintain that Colin Powell, had he chosen to speak up---in particular, to resign while speaking out---could have stopped the war in its tracks. His vaunted integrity as a man of principle and character were (deserved or not) such that his refusal to go along with the madness would have shaken the hypnotized and intimidated out of their craven complicity with the effectively insane. That he did not do so, but rather chose to send tens of thousands of human beings to their deaths on the basis of a lie, makes him truly worthy of our moral revulsion.
But Powell is not the only one so worthy. Though we should be grateful for their post-war revelations, not least because they confirm that the progressive critics of the war were right, neither Paul O’Neill nor Richard Clarke spoke out about the fact that our country was headed to war on false pretexts when it could have mattered. And every single person working in government who knew the truth, but who parroted the party line, or who shut their mouth and looked away, in order to keep their job, is, I say, personally morally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings.
To be frank, I really don’t see much difference here between these complicit individuals and the Germans and others who went along with the Nazis as they perpetrated genocide against the Jews. The numbers of deaths are different, and of course the goals associated with the deaths are different. The moral responsibility attaching to propagating or countenancing a policy known to be based on lies and known to surely bring about the deaths of innocents is, so far as I can tell, more or less the same.
Goal 2: The specific desire to establish U.S. hegemonic control over Iraq’s oil resources. The names of those who primarily directly benefit from the fulfillment of this goal are in general unfamiliar: they are the heads of U.S. and multinational corporations, and their associates (including their families, as with the Bush clan). Of course, some of their names are known knowns: Bush and Cheney, for example; and in any case it would be easy to look them up. It is these members of the corporate elite who most stand to gain here, for it’s not so much that the U.S. needs Iraq’s oil, although of course it’s useful to have another ready source of such. It’s rather that the U.S. needs to be able to control the oil---for those with their hands on the spigot of the second-biggest supply of oil have a tremendous amount of power to get foreign governments dependent on oil---and moreover, cheap oil---to do whatever they want.
But what the “U.S.” wants, of course, is what the U.S. and multi-national corporate elites want: namely, that foreign governments open up their markets for speculative foreign investment by these corporations, which involves, among other things, that the commons and natural resources of the countries of these foreign governments become privatized (creating both wild profit and an impoverished labor force ready for corporate exploitation), that trade unions and other forms of resistance to corporate exploitation be violently suppressed, that corporations be allowed to dump their toxic waste on the countries, and so on. All of which is of a piece with the specific goal of laying Iraq bare for foreign investment!
Iraq’s oil supply serves another useful purpose for the U.S. and world corporate elites, for it is one of two oil supplies (Saudi Arabia’s being the other one) that has room to increase its productivity (beyond its previous high points of production, that is). The cash value of this ability is that, should some foreign country get the wacky idea of trying to satisfy its energy needs via some means alternative to oil, the production of oil can be increased and the market flooded, thereby bringing the price of oil energy down so low that countries can’t afford not to use oil as their primary source of energy. This then puts them in thrall to… you guessed it, whoever has their hand on the spigot of the largest oil reserves. That is to say, the U.S. and its good buddy Saudi Arabia.
The individuals constituting the corporate elite are, of course, fully aware of the fact that U.S. aggression against Iraq is aimed at satisfying the desires of U.S. corporations to impose their agenda on the world. Again, we must allow for the moral blindness that comes from individuals’ being embedded in a insane ideology---here, the insanity of capitalist market ideology---and from individuals’ being stupid or bovine enough to embrace this ideology, in the face of the clear evidence of its foundational theoretical and empirical difficulties. Still, to the extent that any individual member of the corporate elite is neither insane or stupid, then by their encouragement and complicity in pressuring the U.S. government, either directly or via their ubiquitous lobbyists, to ensure the control of access to foreign markets, resources, and labor, then that individual is, in my view, personally morally responsible for the tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi deaths that have resulted from war being waged in service of their corrupt and greedy goal. And the same goes, of course, for each lobbyist who dispenses with his integrity in order to do the dirty work of getting representatives of the U.S. government to legislate or act so as to screw the inhabitants of this and other countries.
Now, here too it is unlikely that the public would support war on Iraq being waged in service of the corporate elite’s desires for endless profit. But of course, the corporations (aided and abetted by countless moral compromises on the part of individuals throughout history, ranging from the judge who ruled that corporations were persons in the notorious Santa Clara case, to those recent members of the FCC who relaxed the restrictions on media monopolization) have gained control of the vast majority of the mainstream media. As you no doubt know, the vast majority of U.S. media are owned by just 5 or 6 monster corporations, which have all kinds of interest in foreign countries’ being laid bare for their use. Hence these corporations had both the motives and the means to propagate the lies about the war on Iraq. And the propaganda campaign worked very well indeed.
Which brings me to the editors and reporters who work for the corporate media. Here there are names we will recognize---those appearing, for example, in Michael Massing’s 'Now They Tell Us', and more generally, the names of the vast majority of television and print producers, editors and reporters whose responsibility it was to present the case for and against war on Iraq. At the top of the list of reporters that are personally morally responsible for the tens of thousands of American and Iraqi deaths is Judith Miller, whose hands are so bloody it’s a wonder she can still use a keyboard. Miller’s culpability is particularly gross, insofar as she was well aware of the fact that her primary source (Chalabi) was an administration shill. But there are countless other editors and reporters who failed in their crucial and sacred duty to search for and present the truth, especially when it comes to matters of life and death, as when a country goes to war. These cowardly stenographers and assistants to corrupt power betrayed their integrity, disgraced their profession, and via the influence they wielded, were directly implicated in creating the conditions which sent tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis to their death. That means you, Michael Gordon, Bob Woodward, Thomas Friedman, Elisabeth Bumiller, Todd Purdum, Bill Keller, David Sanger, Richard W. Stevenson, Douglas Jehl, and all you other kiss-ass sell-outs.
Goal 3: The goal of funnelling billions of U.S. taxpayer money to those who profit from the manufacture and sale of armaments and other means of war. Well, it’s clear enough who directly profits from this---again, the corporate elite who profit so massively off of the manufacturing and sale of the implements of death and destruction, as well as various military and civilian occupants of the Pentagon, who sooner or later waddle off to work as consultants for the armament industries; and here again, Bush and Cheney head the list of those who stand to benefit.
Once again, U.S. taxpayers might object if they knew that they were in fact subsidizing corporate welfare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, when 45 million of them don’t have access to basic health care, and 36 million of them are below the poverty line. But little chance of the public finding out about this real reason for the war on Iraq, since the same corporations that manufacture and sell armaments also own the major media, just as GE owns NBC. Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that editors and reporters are under pressure to present lies rather than the bloody truth about the corporation that writes their paycheck. But guess what? This doesn’t get these individuals off the moral hook. If they felt that their journalistic integrity was being inappropriately impugned, then they should have resigned, and made a big stink about it. If they weren’t under pressure, then they should have reported the truth, instead of the transparent administration lies. As it stands, these editors, reporters, and others were complicit in forwarding a corrupt agenda, and are each personally morally responsible for the tens of thousands of resulting deaths.
But now, enough said. I have not, of course, given anywhere near a complete answer to the question of who is morally responsible for the tens of thousands of American and Iraqi dead. There remain, of course, all those intelligent and articulate individuals, both inside and outside of academia, who saw the truth, yet failed to speak up or protest.
I do think, however, that we have to ask this question, not just to point fingers---which in any case will often end up turned towards ourselves, since few among us did enough to prevent this war or the other atrocities which are being committed under our noses and with our taxpayer dollars---but to determine the routes via which corrupt and murderous agendas, which have no right to be any part of the mechanisms of domestic or foreign policy, are carried out, individual by individual, along the chain of command and acquiescence. We have to figure out how it is that individuals, who are capable of great goodness and great acts of courage, can nonetheless act so as to submerge their principles and either propagate or countenance the occurrence of that which they know is wrong. It is in determining how basically good humans can go wrong in these ways that we best honor the dead---for only if we figure this out is there a chance of preventing future deaths, brought on by endless war.
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