This past month having been the 10th annivesary of the war in Iraq, there was naturally was some talk of how the Iraq War was not just mistaken or had horrible consequences but that it was immoral and a war crime (not just say Abu Gharib or Haditha but the invasion itself).
This led me to wonder, however, whether certain regimes (as Saddam’s clearly was in my opinion) due to reprehensible crimes and actions, forfeit any right to its continued existence and perpetuation. In my view, this doesn’t include every regimes that’s authoritarian (like say the Communist regime in Cuba which while a dictatorship hasn’t committed mass murder), but regimes that do have commit mass murder either directly or deliberate neglect or engage in extreme oppression of the populace certainly apply such as Hussein’s Iraq or Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea. The practical consequence of this view, is that basically the fact of any sort of invasion or war against the said regime and which will result in its overthrow on any sort of justification (with some exceptions, which I’ll get to below) is morally justified (the way the justification is sold such as by lying is a different case), even if there is no moral *obligation * for anybody to destroy it. The exception to this case would be something akin to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which was aimed not just at destroying the Soviet government but enslaving and massacring the Russian people and on the whole bringing an even worse fate for that country. In such a case, the regime can be justified in defending itself not to preserve the regime itself but (even if its not intended) for the Russian people and nation.
Slight hijack: What’s a “regime”? I used to think it was just a synonym for gov’t, but it seems to have taken on a meaning of “gov’t I want to overthrow” lately. The US and France have “governments” but Iran and Saddam’s Iraq and N. Korea have “regimes”. What’s the difference?
I meant it in the sense of a “government”, although for the reasons you say the word “regime” pops up in my mind rather than “government” when I’m talking about North Korea or Saddam.
No regimes have a moral right to exist. I don’t think the concept of moral rights can really even be applied to regimes.
But just because a regime doesn’t have a moral right to exist doesn’t mean that it’s morally permissible to overthrow it for any reason.
What would make it morally permissible is the same as what would make anything else morally permissible: if it would be reasonably expected to help more people than it harms.
When the US was slaughtering native Americans, did it have a “moral right” to exist? When Great Britain was slaughtering Africans in its colonies, did it have a “moral right” to exist? Is it ok if the government is slaughtering thousands of people somewhere else, rather than its own heartland?
If your question is sincere I really wish you’d pick a better example than Iraq. There are plenty of regimes, past and present, as reprehensible as Saddam’s. Saddam’s immorality was never a real reason for the stupid war. Indeed at the time of the 2003 invasion, most of the Iraqi suffering was due to U.S. sanctions. Saddam’s most heinous crimes were committed when he was allied with Cheney-Rumsfeld during the Reagan Administration!
So … if you want to discuss “Do Some Regimes Not Have The Moral Right to Exist?” then please pick a different example. If you want to discuss the 2003 Iraq War, please open a new thread in BBQ Pit.
Well, that assumes that a Utilitarian analysis is the correct one. But even if we assume that, if we allow a regime like SH’s to exist indefinately, how do we do the calculus? How do we determine how many people are helped vs harmed if the regime is allowed to exist for 10, 50, 100 or more years?
No, when American “regime” was slaughtering native Americans, it didn’t have a moral right to exist. The same is true for slavery regimes. And it is a great tragedy that no power stopped it from happening. Of course there are lots of reasons why it didn’t happen. Including the norm of that time.
Governments that create mass suffering should be brought down. However you run into problems. Saddam, like him or not, seems to have kept tabs on all the religious and ethnic violence that has grown now that he is gone. I read an article a few years ago saying torture was worse in the aftermath of the Iraqi war than it was under Saddam. I don’t know if that is still the case (I think they were talking about how there were so many splinter groups mad at each other, more people were being tortured).
Looking at North vs South Korea, I can’t see any reason the North is such an evil dictatorship other than the evil that eminates from the leadership. But in nations ridden with various forms of ethnic and religious hatred, do the dictators sometimes keep a lid on things? That complicates matters. During the cold war the US would ally with dictators who kept a lid on communist insurgencies. Some dictators may act that way because that is the only way to maintain order. In that case, then what do you do?
If the dictator is removed, will the people just engage in new forms of brutality against each other for different reasons?
However you don’t need to use hard military power to bring down a regime even if you do think it is immoral to exist. Things like sanctions, various forms of international pressure, aiding resistance groups, etc. can do the job. In Libya the US provided air support to help the rebels. The cost was low and the US didn’t get involved in a protracted land war.
The world should’ve gotten involved in the genocide in Rwanda.
There is also the fact that dictatorships that don’t respect their own people are not likely to respect the international community.
Of the worst violators of civil/political/human rights in 2000, the US has (over the last 13 years) overthrown 2 of the governments, helped overthrow a 3rd (and maybe a 4th if we get more involved in Syria). We are constantly tense with North Korea. We put pressure on Myanmar, Cuba, Sudan, etc. So countries that abuse their citizens tend to become problems for the US. We’ve overthrown or helped to overthrow (or are trying to overthrow) 4 of the 11 worst governments listed in 2000 as of 2013.
When I was young, retired US Army Indian fighters were still alive.
Did the US regime have a moral right to exist then?
Does it have a moral right to exist now?
If the answer is yes, when did this right start?
And what about non-native individuals who are living on land that is theirs because their great great grandfathers (perhaps one was a buffalo soldier) helped massacre the previous inhabitants? Do they have a right to live where they do?
This is a little theoretical to me because William Penn purchased the land I live and work on in what was, as far as I can tell, a fair transaction. The same is true for residents of Rhode Island. But what about the rest of you Americans out there?
I was using the Iraq example mostly because the discussion on the Iraq War due to this being the anniversary led me to these musings.
As I said in the OP, even a dictator doesn’t haven’t to engage in mass ethnic cleansing or gas civilians to maintain order, even in an unstable or diverse country. That’s the difference IMO between Saddam and say Mubarak.
That said, I agree that the international community ought to have some sort of a strategy for dealing with the collapse of a dictatorships in situations it may result in chaos.
Or you might get an even worse dictator too.
I agree, I personally don’t support direct military intervention against such regimes unless we run out of all other options or if its a full on genocide as was the case in Rwanda.
I agree fully. I think one of the underlying problems, is that the United States despite all the rhetoric of “Never again” doesn’t have any serious
We could Myanmar too IMO, since it was partially American diplomacy that’s helping to democratize the country. Although I’m a bit skeptical as to how Cuba is more oppressive than the PRC.
I had a number of issues with the invasion of Iraq by the USA, but IMO, his regime was one of the worst on the planet at this time. Besides the regular executions and tortures, you had the gazing of Kurds, the less often mentioned planned elimination of the “people of the marshes”, and Saddam started two conquest wars, one of which was particularly horrendous and bloody.
It was definitely part of my personal “axis of evil”.
And obviously, I think it didn’t have a right to exist. What moral right a clique of oppressors, even much more lenient, could have to maintain their power, anyway?
No governments have a “right to exist”. Groups can’t and don’t have rights (states’ rights is a misnomer). Individuals have rights. Govenments can only claim legitimacy, not a right to exist. Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
Once you start making judgements about legitimacy, things get a bit hairy.
Give me a magic button that will eliminate the top 500 members of the government of a country of my choosing and I think I could easily pick a dozen or so potential regimes I’d casually destroy and consider it a job well done.
I agree that Saddam was particularly heinous. Read about his torture chambers. Read about his sons’ behavior. But most of the particular crimes you cite were committed when he was a U.S. ally, before Gulf War I “put him in a box.”
I thought prolonging the pressure just a few more days during Gulf War I could have led to the removal of Saddam – not “democracy for Iraq”, just replacing the monster with a somewhat less heinous Baathist – but Bush-41 thought differently (or overthrowing Saddam did not fit his cynical plans). And to be very clear: most of us who condemned Gulf War II, condemned it not for “immortality,” but for stupidity.
Despite that Saddam was peculiarly heinous, one can identify a few regimes in Africa that were even worse: regimes which could have been overthrown with far less cost in native and foreign lives, and which would have had far more local and international support. I’m sorry if I overreacted in this thread, but association of the true “reasons” for Gulf War II with Saddam’s monstrosity is just so wrong-headed and hypocritical that I lash out whenever I hear it.
With others, I agree that no government has the “right” to exist. None. If you could implement a bloodless coup every Thursday, I wouldn’t fault you for it. The problem arises when you have to kill people to achieve your goals. Then, you’d better be sure things will be better after the regime change than before, and that the death and destruction were worth it.
Toppling Nazi Germany? Sure, justified. Invading Saddam’s Iraq? Hardly. How many people did Saddam kill, versus how many died in the ten year war that the US started? I think we clearly did more harm than good there. But quite often it’s a tough call ahead of time (not that Iraq was, it was clearly misguided from the start). When the case isn’t overwhelmingly clear, we should err on the side of peace.