The Iraq War retrospective Thread

[kandrathe]

Your statement that Nations are different than Individuals and thus the morality we place on their actions is different is by definition Relative. It's not a wrong definition, but like i said if you want to debate the war in retrospect the main question is always was the war just and to answer that you need to define morality.

Just war and the morality of war are huge topics that span at least 2000 years of critical thinking. The perspective of "just" is always different from those who prosecute it, from those who observe. People quickly forget all the attempts by the US and the UN from 1991 to 2003 to bring Iraq back to legitimacy. My thought is that given the actors, war was inevitable. We might have waited for the *real* solid justification, but there was ample cause to get it over with early.

Ironically, when I think about the war I tend to use the same perspective of morality as Bush and Cheney. The Utilitarian perspective. Although I come to a completely different conclusion as they do. Bush constantly says that history will judge his decisions. His point is that in the long run the sum of good that will come from the war will outweigh the sum of bad. I think if we are to just look at the time frame we have now there is no reasonable way you can say the the sum of good has been more than the sum of bad. And I don't foresee that changing in the future.

I guess you would need to start with what you think a Bathist Iraq, with the Tikriti mob still in power, if not Saddam, then possibly Uday. You would need to project what would happen when the US no longer maintains a presence in the region. You would need to determine what Iraq would do with all their oil wealth now that they were no longer under the scrutiny of weapons inspectors. You would need to forecast how Iraq's relationships with terrorist groups would evolve, and the implications for the export of terrorism around the world. So, what does that Tikriti Mob Iraq look like in 2013, versus the one we have now. I'm still not sure that this imposed democracy will stand over time, and that the whole house of cards will not come tumbling down and devolve into civil war, or worse a regional war.