Gulf War

...But instead of recognizing the complexities of their position, the Dissent editors who supported the war tended to gloss over them...

...They saw, as clearly as Howe did, that Saddam Hussein was a thug, and that his expansionism required a firm international response...

...Discussing questions of proportionality, he wrote, "No one would choose a war that brought millions or even hundreds of thousands of deaths . . . merely for the sake of Kuwaiti independence...

...Were they wrong...

...What counts in politics is action...

...q SUMMER • 1991 • 425...

...Does Walzer now think that the war was a mistake...

...q Brian Morton poses a direct question to me, so I had better respond...

...He could go no farther, and the world was virtually as one in exerting pressure against him...

...I think not...

...soldier famously described as a "turkey shoot...

...The argument works only in extreme cases, and this case was not one of those...

...estimates, between one and two thousand Kurds are dying every day in refugee camps, after an unsuccessful rebellion that was cynically encouraged by the United States...

...Given this premise, his conclusions were inevitable...

...The most conservative estimates have it that more than a hundred thousand Iraqis have died...

...Good news—no...

...Perhaps one could have made a case for the war even while recognizing problems like this...

...In the Spring issue, Dissent carried seven brief comments on the war, three supporting it and four opposed...

...Anthony Lewis, for example, in a sober retrospective, said this: "Is the world a safer or better place after all the high moral talk about the purposes of the war...

...If I understood Michael Walzer's article "Perplexed," which appeared in the New Republic before the war began, he too, by his own standards, should now regret his support for the war...

...But this was not Munich...

...Now, will Morton reconsider his opposition to the war...

...Does this mean that, in Howe's view, George Bush provided sufficient answers...

...And what Bush did, over some five months, was to offer Saddam Hussein one opportunity after another to withdraw from Kuwait with his power intact...

...Perhaps a war can be worthy of support even if the government launching it has hypocritical motives—as Timothy Garton Ash put it, the fact that three murders have gone unpunished does not make it wrong to punish a fourth...

...In fact, from August to January the Bush administration explicitly proclaimed that there was "nothing to negotiate...

...But I will begin by turning the question around...

...They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

...Bush wanted war...

...I've been looking through my file of articles about the war, trying to find some telling quotation to end this piece with...

...The point of my New Republic article, unnoticed in his letter, was that the proportionality argument doesn't help us much, because no one can say what losses would count as proportionate or disproportionate (to what— Kuwaiti independence, the defeat of aggression, the deterrence of future aggression...

...Morton seems offended by the impure motives of the Bush administration, to which he returns several times in a short letter—as if he has adopted some Christian or Kantian doctrine of the good will...

...Let me use the example nearest to hand—Dissent magazine...

...Walzer, then, supported the war because he wanted Iraq evicted from Kuwait...

...Irving Howe began from the apparent premise that Hussein was uncontainable by normal methods of deterrence...

...And the figure cited by Morton for Iraqi military casualties is, it's now said, a statistical inference based on a very considerable overestimate of the number of Iraqi soldiers who were in Kuwait...

...and with fuel-air explosives, which cause death by incineration and asphyxiation...

...In retrospect, perhaps it is those who supported the war who took refuge in simplifications...

...We had drawn a line...

...Had Saddam seized these opportunities, we would now be preparing for a future war rather than arguing over a war just past...

...Journalists now in Baghdad are reporting that damage to the city is much lighter than we were led to believe and civilian casualties remarkably low...

...During the last days of the war, the United States battered Iraqi troops with napalm— napalm...

...But finally I think the best summation of the U.S...

...The peace movement had a more sophisticated grasp of the situation than Howe did—the more intelligent parts of the peace movement, at any rate: those who advocated a policy of sanctions, containment, regional disarmament measures, and an embargo on military technology to Iraq...

...In the words of the Iraqi exile Samir 424 • DISSENT Communications al-Khalil, a longtime enemy of Saddam Hussein: "For the Iraqi people, the cost of enforcing the will of the United Nations has been grotesque...

...Sanctions might not have forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait any time soon...

...Many of us who supported a policy of sanctions and multilateral containment did so not because we were naive about Saddam Hussein's malevolence but because we believed this policy could deter two evils—the evil of Hussein's expansionism and the evil of war...

...Two further comments, now that I have started...

...Had the embargo "worked" and, in a year or two, severely weakened the Baathist regime, there would probably have been a Kurdish rising and a bloody civil war...

...In Iraq, parts of which still have no electricity or running water, there are reports that children are dying of cholera...

...How many soldiers, killed as they were retreating, in what one U.S...

...Dissenting intellectuals should have a habit of skepticism about the good intentions of any government...

...Howe supported the war because he feared what Hussein might do if, five or ten years down the line, he developed nuclear weapons...

...if he doesn't, he should explain why casualty figures that he had once found unacceptable seem acceptable to him now...

...How many Iraqi civilians died, as a direct or indirect result of U.S...

...But they also saw that George Bush, in pressing for war without exploring the alternatives, was also being thuggish...

...Does that count in Morton's mind against the embargo...

...government's motives as it pushed toward war...

...There are two moral questions here: the wanton quality of the violence over and above what was required to dislodge the Iraqi army from Kuwait...

...the actual number of deaths is almost certainly lower...

...and second, the disproportion between the amount of violence used and the values supposedly being upheld...

...Some people who supported the war have come to regret their support...

...Those who supported a policy of sanctions were trying to tie the hands of two thugs...

...According to U.N...

...I don't believe in my own good will, let alone George Bush's...

...He ignored the pretty well-established historical lesson that governments that launch wars to prevent hypothetical future wars are usually up to no good...

...What shall be done about the frightening prospect that the thug who rules Iraq . . . might soon have nuclear weapons...

...None of those who wrote in support of the war made any serious acknowledgment of the hypocrisy of the Bush administration—which invaded Panama with no more justification than Iraq had for invading Kuwait, and which enlisted as coalition partners countries that maintain occupations no more legal than Iraq's...

...role in this war was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby...

...What was striking here is that Howe and Walzer exhibited almost no skepticism about the U.S...

...Michael Walzer, mindful of the fact that a war cannot be called just unless other means to resolve the conflict have been explored exhaustively, wrote that "there was a lot of negotiating between August and January...

...If he does, he should say so...

...Of course, he won't, for his moral and political judgments, like mine, are not mathematically determined...

...I prefer the arguments...

...That this was a view firmly held by Bush—not merely a tough public stance veiling behind-the-scenes diplomacy—was confirmed recently by Bob Woodward's book, The Commanders, which reveals that in early November, Bush rejected Colin Powell's suggestion that Iraq could be forced out of Kuwait through a strategy of sanctions and containment...

...Howe called for the defeat of Hussein and the destruction of his weaponry...

...The reference to Kurdish deaths seems odd to me, since they are the result of Iraqi tyranny and repression, not of any American decisions...

...Whatever caused the Bush administration to go to war, principle had nothing to do with it...

...He ignored the fact that other means to evict Iraq were never seriously tried...

...For months we heard reports of Iraq's exotic weaponry, but as it turned out, the United States had the advantage here...

...bombing...

...To such questions neither we nor our friends in the antiwar movement provide sufficient answers...