Positive Liberty

First off, watch Ron Paul reduce Mitt Romney to a reflexive splutter.

The Paul campaign has convinced me more than any other event that the way to a more libertarian America lies within, not outside, the two major political parties. Just join up and speak your mind, and don’t worry too much about where the party has been in the recent past. Lord knows it isn’t stopping Ron Paul. Yes, you’ll be an outlier, but the magic words “Democrat” and “Republican” conjure attention, money, and CNN. (Doesn’t hurt that he’s a congressman, either, I suppose.)

Note that Romney’s “Have you forgotten about 9/11?” isn’t an argument. It’s an appeal to emotionalism, and the appeal is wearing thin. Until the war’s architects and supporters can do a better job of justifying our continued presence there, the war will remain unpopular. Meanwhile, Paul makes the very strong case that we might accomplish more for liberty or at least stability in the Middle East by simply leaving Iraq to its own devices. (Perhaps a parting statement wouldn’t hurt, though, if appropriately diplomatic wording could be found: “Don’t make us come back, please. Um, for both our sakes.”)

Recall that we went to Iraq with three goals: Find and destroy weapons of mass destruction. End the Baathist dictatorship. Create a free and democratic society. (Enforcing U.N. resolutions was only ever a pretense; one can hardly imagine the Bush administration fighting for the greater glory of the United Nations.)

Let’s set aside the fact that as we approached the invasion, a near-majority of Americans saw the Iraq War not as a war for these three objectives, but as punishment for 9/11. This was a nonsensical but politically decisive rationale. Without the fictive 9/11 guilt, the other reasons would not have been enough to pass an authorization for war. We can ignore this for the moment. We can also ignore the question of whether the official reasons were either compelling or legally permitted causes for war.

So — how did we do at the things we nominally set out to do? Did we get what we (on paper) wanted?

–To the best of our knowledge, we’ve rid Iraq of any WMDs that might have existed, even if probably they did not. Of all the rationales for going to war, this one seemed the strongest to me, and we have achieved our objective.

–We’ve killed Saddam Hussein and many of his top henchmen. Whether or not Americans held Saddam personally responsible for 9/11, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. They were brutal, genocidal thugs, and I am glad they are gone. Baathism will continue, but it will have been sorely chastened.

–We’ve given the Iraqis every opportunity to set up a good government. For a variety of reasons, most of which are beyond our control, they haven’t, and they show virtually no signs of moving in this direction. It remains just as unclear as at the beginning of the war how shooting people can induce them to like us.

The fact is, we’ve gotten two of the three objectives we wanted. We’ve won, mostly. The doves should be humble enough to admit this, and the hawks should learn to win with a bit more grace than they’ve shown so far. Grumbling about a stab in the back, for instance, seems particularly bad form. I mean, when you’ve just won a war and all.

Of course, one could easily argue that the third point is actually the most important in the long term. Let’s just concede this, because it is probably true. And yet if we actually found a better way to achieve our third goal, we could move this war from a “mostly victory” to a “full, complete, total victory.” This would be a good thing for all involved.

It is entirely possible that achieving the goal of a free and democratic Iraq required an invasion — but that it still requires a withdrawal. And the time for that withdrawal may very well be now. The Iraqi government has been floundering under U.S. occupation. It’s not working — at least, not under U.S. occupation.

This is because all of the major organized factions are theocratic or totalitarian. None of them are worth our support. Watching them fight, albeit watching them with the closest of attention, seems more prudent than supporting any of them, or than creating power structures (like a trained Iraqi army) that one or more of these factions can then exploit.

The general run of the Iraqi people may be worth our support, but not if they are supporting the theocrats or the fascists. Until a sincere movement for liberty, democracy, and toleration emerges, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we support the Iraqi people by supporting their current government. Throughout most of history, movements for liberty, democracy, and tolerance tend to emerge as reactions to eras of despotism and intolerance. The Enlightenment can be understood almost entirely as a reaction against the Reformation and the wars of religion. We make this reaction more difficult when we — posing as the agents of democracy and tolerance — actively take sides in a conflict among theocrats and fascists. We risk making the open society seem like just another flavor of despotism. Already the Arabic world mistrusts us far more than it ever did, and already many within it have resolved to make peace with the tyrants at home, rather than the (apparent) tyrants from abroad.

Given the results of continued occupation so far — constant misery and death — a change starts to seem more and more reasonable. Could it possibly be that the best way to create a peaceful, at least quasi-democratic Iraq, or maybe a set of more-or-less democratic successor states, would be to withdraw? Why is it that certain strategies for achieving what we want are so blithely dismissed?

Oh wait — if you ever disagree with the administration, you’ve forgotten about 9/11. How silly of me.

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