Immorality on the March - Michael Kelly

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Einar Stefferud <Stef () thor nma com>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 21:47:34 -0800

The Seattle Times - Wednesday, February 19, 2003, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

All they are saying is give tyranny a chance   -   By Michael Kelly


PARIS - Last weekend, across Europe and America, somewhere between 1 million
and 2 million people marched against a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All
protests against war are ultimately ethical in nature, and Saturday's
placard-wavers did not break with tradition: "Give Peace a Chance," "Make
Tea, Not War," "Bush and Blair - The Real War Criminals." These are
statements of sentiment, not power politics, and the sentiment is, or is
meant to be, a moral one.

Of course, not all the marchers can be counted as 99.9 percent pure
moralists. Some -perhaps many- marched out of simple reactionary hatred: for
the United States, for its power, for its paramount position in a hated
world order. London's paleosocialist Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, a featured
speaker at that city's massive demo, comes to mind. His enlightened argument
against war consisted chiefly of calling George W. Bush "a lackey of the oil
industry," "a coward" and "this creature."

But doubtless, hundreds of thousands of marchers -and many more millions who
did not march- believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral
cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French
President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, "war is always the worst
answer." 

The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, at
least as concerns Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the
position of profound morality, but one that stands in profound opposition to
morality. 

The situation with Iraq may be considered in three primary contexts, and in
each, the true moral case is for war.

The FIRST context considers the people of Iraq. There are 24 million of
them, and they have been living (those who have not been slaughtered or
forced into exile) for decades under one of the cruelest and bloodiest
tyrannies on Earth. It must be assumed that, being human, they would prefer
to be rescued from a hell where more than a million lives have been so far
sacrificed to the dreams of a megalomaniac, where rape is a sanctioned
instrument of state policy, and where the removal of the tongue is the
prescribed punishment for uttering an offense against the Great Leader.

These people could be liberated from this horror - relatively easily and
very quickly. There is every reason to think that an American invasion will
swiftly vanquish the few elite units that can be counted on to defend the
detested Saddam; and that the victory will come at the cost of few -likely
hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands- Iraqi and American lives.

There is risk here; and if things go terribly wrong it is a risk that could
result in terrible suffering. But that is an equation that is present in any
just war, and in this case any rational expectation has to consider the
probable cost to humanity low and the probable benefit tremendous. To choose
perpetuation of tyranny over rescue from tyranny, where rescue may be
achieved, is immoral.

The SECOND context considers the security of America, and indeed of the
world, and here too morality is on the side of war. The great lesson of
Sept. 11, 2001, is not that terrorism must be stopped -an impossible dream-
but that (set italic) state-sanctioned (end italic) terrorism must be
stopped. The support of a state -even a weak and poor state- offers the
otherwise deeply vulnerable enemies of the established order the protection
they need in their attempts to destroy that order - through the terrorists'
only weapon, murder.

To tolerate the perpetuation of state-sanctioned terror, such as Saddam's
regime exemplifies, is to invite the next Sept. 11, and the next, and the
next. Again, immoral.

The THIRD context concerns the idea of order itself. The United Nations is a
mightily flawed construct, but it exists; and it exists on the side (more or
less) of law and humanity. Directly and unavoidably arising from the crisis
with Iraq, the U.N. today stands on the edge of the precipice of permanent
irrelevancy. If Iraq should be allowed to defy the law, the U.N. will never
recover, and the oppressed and weak of the world will lose even the limited
protection of the myth of collective security. Immoral.

To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give
tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the
next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of
evil instead of the vanquishing of evil.

This cannot be the moral position.

Michael Kelly's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times.
The Washington Post Writers Group can be contacted via e-mail at
writersgrp () washpost com

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/134636713_kelly19.ht
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