Sicking The Saddamites #6: Machan's Musings - A Contrary View
by Tibor R. Machan
It would be cowardly, I think, not to chime in at this time for those who opposed President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, given the apparent success of the Iraqi elections. So, as an opponent of this war from the outset, let me chime away for a moment.
Why oppose the war? Because the idea that it amounted to what the military of a free country should be doing, namely, protecting the rights of the citizens—in other words, defending the country from aggressors—simply wasn’t credible. As to the claim that the military of a free country may invade countries with tyrannical governments, that is simply not the case. The military has as its proper job to protect the citizenry, not to embark upon rescue missions around the globe.
It isn’t that such rescue missions are in principle wrong, but they may not be conducted by the military that already has its job specified. The reason we have government, as the American founders made clear, is "to secure [our] rights," not to answer the 911 calls of the world’s oppressed. For that mission some other solution must be found—perhaps the UN needs to do this job, or maybe various civilian militias need to be established. But it is wrong to send a military to do this job which is already employed and thus committed to do another.
Of course, one can do a wrong and yet something good can come of it. Getting Iraq to be more democratic is undeniably some measure of progress, even if the full impact cannot yet be evaluated. (A democratic Iraq could yet also be a tyrannical Iraq, since the ruling majority could be pretty nasty to the minority. It remains to be seen.)
It isn’t true, however, that this move toward democracy vindicates the Bush Administration that has sent over a thousand American soldiers to their deaths and a lot more to become severely injured in a war that the American government should not have undertaken. Volunteers in a free country sign up so as to be ready to defend their fellow-citizens, not to become the police force of the globe. So these soldiers were treated badly. (This isn’t altered by the fact that some of them were willing to fight in Iraq.)
It is difficult to remain principled in the face of all kinds of pressure and, especially, when one’s fellow-contrarians can be a pretty unsavory lot. Many opponents of this war have rested their opposition on grounds that are entirely inconsistent with their very own political philosophy. All the beef about the preemptive nature of Bush’s war from those who have absolutely no hesitation about violating individual rights for various "precautionary" purposes—e.g., in the area of environmental policy or other types of government regulation—belies their supposed outrage with how the Bush administration has acted vis-à-vis Iraq. Nearly everything I read from such folks against the war in Iraq reeks of hypocrisy and opportunism.
Never mind. The crucial issue is whether a champion of a fully free society can back a war that does not involve national defense. And I do not believe such a person can do so. And since I think such a person is right—which is to say, such a person holds a reasonable, sensible view of the proper function of government and, thus, the military—the unsavory company he or she happens to keep in this particular instance is irrelevant. (Consider that in defending the right to private property, one is also defending the exercise of that right for such purposes as racial discrimination. This does not undermine the justice of defending the right to private property.)
Of course, the move in the direction of a free society in Iraq is to be welcomed. That’s so even if it is the fruit of a wrongheaded foreign policy. But it should not blind us to the fact that going to war in Iraq was wrong. Liberty is indeed a worthy goal for the US government to champion and pursue, but not by means that undermine that very goal, namely, embarking on military aggression, even if it’s against a dictator like Saddam Hussein.
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