Things in Iraq seem to keep getting worse despite Bush Administration “corner turning” rhetoric. The US has been at the forefront of lecturing other nations and states about their moral and ethical failings for some time now, regarding our campaign in Iraq is there a valid charge regarding a moral failure or ethical violation in our actions or behavior that can be fairly made against us as a nation for what we have done there?
Of course. We created the situation; it’s our fault. Of course, it’s hard to get many Americans to admit that the situation is getting worse, much less our fault.
Well, I’m as anti-war as the next guy, and have been since day one, but I don’t know that I’d say that it’s all the fault of the US. Things were always going to be bad when Saddam left power (whether by ouster or by death from natural causes). Maybe his sons could have kept a handle on things, I guess, but then the whole problem of the brutal dictatorship is still there.
However, there was a brief window after Saddam’s fall to keep a lid on things, by having enough boots on the ground to maintain civil order. If the invasion had been planned properly and carried out with more international support, it should have been possible to bring in a new government with far fewer terrorist bombings going on. Maybe the various factions would have still been spoiling for a fight, and maybe civil war was inevitable from the get-go (though remember Sistani and others were rather conciliatory in those early days), but it seems to me that the failure to maintain basic civil order following the invasion destroyed any chance at a favourable resolution.
So, to recap: the US, not to blame for there being deep ethnic and religious divides in Iraq, but to blame for failing utterly to provide the first and most basic service of government, i.e., maintaining order, when it became the de facto ruler of Iraq in the first days after the fall of the old regime, thereby opening wide the door for those who have exploited the lack of order for their various sectarian causes.
The US and UK bear the vast majority of moral responsibility for sorting out the disaster we have created.
Can I add to that the psychological trauma of “shock and awe” - designed to put fear in the Republican Guard and Fedayeen, additionally put instant fear and hatred in the hearts of the “liberated” for their “liberators”. One of the dumbest and most short-sighted military ideas ever, IMO.
Is there really anybody out there who will argue that the US holds no moral responsibility for this invasion? I think the only question is one of degree.
Unless they vociferously and visibly protested against the war, lobbied their elected representatives extensively to avoid and end the war, and did every other thing in their power to help avoid this war, each American holds some moral responsibility for the war.
Financially, our great-grandchildren will still be paying for it, but I can’t begin to gauge the cost to our moral standing worldwide.
I suspect you can find some folks who hold exactly this view over at Little Green Football, Free Republic, or other similar “patriotic” watering holes.
I get into arguments on other boards with people who claim everything in Iraq is just going wonderfully.
Some responsibility must rest with the Brits who decided, after WWI, that stitching three former Ottoman provinces into one dom called “Iraq,” without regard to religious and ethnic divisions, was a good idea.
Sorry, I meant, “one kingdom called Iraq.” Without reference to D&S roles.
That’s it? Nothing else? The folks doing the actual killing don’t have any moral resposibility for what they did?
I think the U.S.'s primary moral responsibility is in its recklessness. I don’t have a strong moral objection with overthrowing somebody like Saddam Hussein on a purely abstract level. But with all the completely forseeable (and forseen) problems, and with the persistent incompetence and willfully ignorant optimism they had going into this war and in prosecuting it, yes the U.S. is morally responsible for what’s happening right now.
I don’t see how their responsibility dilutes ours. If we couldn’t have seen it coming, maybe. But I don’t think this was a 20/20 hindsight problem. The possibility of a bloody civil war between factions is pretty much what prevented George Bush Sr., and Clinton from invading Iraq and is a large part of the reason that the rest of the world gave us so little support. And it’s also what made the U.S.'s willingness to allow a power vacuum to emerge at the start of the occupation (“freedom is messy”) totally incomprehensible, in my view.
I know lots of these people exist, but I don’t know how you argue with somebody that says black is white. Or what the point of it is.
To correct myself - Rumsfeld actually said “freedom is untidy”
If I blow up a prison wall and let the bad guys loose, I deserve just as much blame for what they do as they do. Or in other words, there’s enough blame to go around, but we are the instigators.
I get irritated and argue with people, even when I know I’ll never convince them.
And by the same token some responsibility must rest with the followers of Ali, who refused to submit to the authority of the Umayyads following the death of Mohammed. Right? Sure, the history of how the current circumstances arose is relevant to some degree, but the demise of the Ottoman Empire is 90 years in the past, and it was never going to be able to carve it up without making some messes. Or are you under the illusion that those three provinces were themselves each religiously and ethnically unified?
I’m with everyone else. We, along with the Coalition of the Willing, created this crap. Actually, we can refine that and say it’s mostly the US and the UK. We went in and performed acts of conquering. Yeah, I’d sum it up by saying we’ve created an atmosphere of shit.
Don’t inhale.
Furthermore, we should all jump into the other watering holes of patriotism mentioned before. I don’t necessarily want to start any shit, but it may be too tempting to pass up.
Iraq wasn’t a prison.
But the analogy holds. In both cases we create a situation that we knew, or should have known, would lead to a massive crime spree/sectarian violence. I guess as a lawyer your question for culpability would be, “Should a reasonable person have been able to predict these results from their actions?”
And “If the prediction was made, was everything within reason done to alleviate this concern?”
The current situation in Iraq should serve as a reminder as to why going to war should always be the absolute last and final option after everything else has been tried. George W. Bush was aching to go to war and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could have done to talk him out of it. Therefore, he most certainly deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the current anarchy which exists in Iraq. I would like to think that his appearance at Arlington yesterday ate at his conscience, but I doubt it.