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UnsettledVictory in the war is not victory in the argument about the war.

By Michael KinsleyPosted Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 2:12 PM ET

So, we've won, or just about. There is no quagmire. Saddam is dead, or as good as, along with his sons. It was all fairly painless—at least for most Americans sitting at home watching it on television. Those who opposed the war look like fools. They are thoroughly discredited and, if they happen to be Democratic presidential candidates (and who isn't these days?), they might as well withdraw and nurse their shame somewhere off the public stage. The debate over Gulf War II is as over as the war itself soon will be, and the anti's were defeated as thoroughly as Saddam Hussein.

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Right? No, not at all.

To start with an obvious point that may get buried in the confetti of the victory parade, the debate was not about whether America would win a war against Iraq if we chose to start one. No sane person doubted that the mighty United States military machine could defeat and conquer a country with a tiny fraction of its population and an even tinier fraction of its wealth—a country suffering from over a decade of economic strangulation by the rest of the world.

Oh, sure, there was a tepid public discussion of how long victory might take to achieve, in which pro's and anti's were represented across the spectrum of opinion. And the first law of journalistic dynamics—The Story Has To Change—inevitably produced a couple of comic days last week when the media and their rent-a-generals were peddling the Q-word. No doubt there are some unreflective peaceniks still mentally trapped in Vietnam, or grasping at any available argument, who are still talking quagmire. But the serious case against this war was never that we might actually lose it militarily.

The serious case involved questions that are still unresolved. Factual questions: Is there a connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of 9/11? Is that connection really bigger than that of all the countries we're not invading? Does Iraq really have or almost have weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States? Predictive questions: What will toppling Saddam ultimately cost in dollars and in lives (American, Iraqi, others)? Will the result be a stable Iraq and a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East or something less attractive? How many young Muslims and others will be turned against the United States, and what will they do about it?

Political questions: Should we be doing this despite the opposition of most of our traditional allies? Without the approval of the United Nations? Moral questions: Is it justified to make "pre-emptive" war on nations that may threaten us in the future? When do internal human rights, or the lack of them, justify a war? Is there a policy about pre-emption and human rights that we are prepared to apply consistently? Does consistency matter? Even etiquette questions: Before Bush begins trying to create a civil society in Iraq, wouldn't it be nice if he apologized to Bill Clinton and Al Gore for all the nasty, dismissive things he said about "nation-building" in the 2000 campaign?

Some of these questions will be answered shortly, and some will be debated forever. This doesn't mean history will never render a judgment. History's judgment doesn't require unanimity or total certainty. But that judgment is not in yet. Supporters of this war who are in the mood for an ideological pogrom should chill out for a while, and opponents need not fold into permanent cringe position.

Of course opponents have been on the defensive since the day the fighting started, forced to repeat the mantra that we "oppose the war but support the troops." Critics mock this formula as psychologically implausible if not outright dishonest, but it's not even difficult or complicated. Most of the common reasons for opposing this war get more severe as the war grows longer. Above all is the cost in human lives, especially the lives of American soldiers. (And most American war opponents share with American war supporters—with most human beings, for that matter—an instinctively greater concern for the lives of fellow nationals, however illogical or deplorable that might be.) Unlike Vietnam, where opposition barely existed until the war had been going on for several years, this is a war in which calling for a pullout short of victory would be silly. So, once the war has started, no disingenuousness is required for opponents to hope for victory, the quicker the better.

What is an honest opponent of a war supposed to do? Since even the end of this war won't settle most of the important arguments about it, dropping all opposition at the beginning of the war would surely be more intellectually suspicious than maintaining your doubts while sincerely hoping for victory. Inevitably, more than one supporter of this war has taunted its opponents with Orwell's famous observation in 1942 that pacifists—the few who opposed a military response to Hitler—were "objectively pro-fascist." The suggestion is that opposing this war makes you objectively pro-Saddam. In an oddly less famous passage two years later, Orwell recanted that "objectively" formula and called it "dishonest." Which it is.

The psychological challenge of opposing a war like this after it has started isn't supporting the American troops, but hoping to be proven wrong. That, though, is the burden of pessimism on all subjects. As a skeptic, at the least, about Gulf War II, I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn't happened yet.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Well, OK. Most of the news I hear about Iraq is about Iraq, the Americans in Iraq, or what the Americans being in Iraq mean to the rest of the world. But I can accept that a big piece of this puzzle, one that the mainstream media and even al Jazeera are ignoring, is whether Mike Kinsley should ever have to say he was wrong about any of the arguments he made against taking action against Saddam Hussein. Who knows, that might prove to be the most important question of all! Let's just note for the record, one more time, that every one of the questions he asked about this war were asked after the last war, in 1991, and received a different answer. The point isn't whether Kinsley supported the first Bush administration 12 years ago, because I frankly don't remember. Rather, the point is that the requirements of allied, even world solidarity, a measured and nonviolent approach to the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, containment rather than replacement of the Iraqi regime, and regional stability were all met, and met scrupulously, by the first Bush administration and its successor. By what standard -- and you can choose from American national interests, reducing the threat of terrorism, promoting human rights, or even finally securing Iraqi compliance with the agreement signed to end the Gulf War -- was their policy a success?

--Zathras

(To reply, click here)

Kinsely is right on the mark. If all of the main purported reasons for going to war were false (WMD, active nuke program, imminent threat to the US, the Bin Laden link, inspections not enough), and they all remain unproven, then America just went to war merely because it could win. The result is that all of this celebrating about America's victory is certain to look smug and imperialist to our enemies in the Muslim world who have no real means to give the US a real fight on the battlefield. In that regard, it doesn't matter whether they are right. America simply cannot afford to be perceived that way, lest we forget that about 30 times more Americans died in the attacks on September 11 than in the Iraq war. If the lesson our enemies learn from this war is that their successful battlefields are America's cities, America will have lost far, far more than it just gained. And it should be no moral consolation for those "told you sos" that the Iraqi people are now out from under Hussien's thumb. The Iraqi people's quality of life was never Bush's actual justification for this war, period, despite the see-through gesture of branding the war as such. The US didn't go before the UN with "Iraqi Liberation" as its case in chief, it went with "Imminent Danger to the US." Few in the world will shed tears for Hussein's demise, and his demise is no doubt a very good thing for Iraq's future. But what Bush's war has done to America's future remains to be seen. For America's sake, I hope we find a ton of WMD hidden away in Iraq. I'm afraid of what the rest of the world will think if we don't, and frankly, I'll wonder if their view of Bush isn't right.

--Adam_Masin

(To reply, click here)

…[Kinsley] mentions Orwell's recantation of the accusation that pacifists are "objectively pro-Fascist." Orwell was recanting the tactic of disregarding subjective feelings and considering only the specifics of the acts or beliefs in question. Note that Orwell is *not* saying, anywhere in his recantation that pacifists do not, by their actions, help the Germans. What he is saying is that it is dishonest (and impractical) to consider the pacifist who opposes war because he supports Hitler as equivalent to the pacifist who opposes war because he abjures all violence, *even though* both of them help the Germans. His example was that if a pacifist worked in a sensitive area and was approached by a German agent, then his subjective feelings matter quite apart from his pacifism: namely, if he's objectively pro-Fascist then he'll pass on the secrets he knows and if not then he won't. In other words, even if his beliefs and actions help the Germans, his motives matter when we judge him, especially because if we know his motives then we may know where he draws the line between his duty to his beliefs and exactly how much he is willing to help the enemy. Nowhere, in any of his writings, does Orwell absolve pacifists of criticism for their views, and at the end of that same passage he writes: "In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies." This statement is utterly true of the antiwar movement. It's one thing to wave signs in San Francisco, but quite another to go to Baghdad to become a "human shield". Of course some human shields realized what the Iraqi government wanted of them and went home, but what of the ones who didn't? Moreover, what of the endless "Bush = Hitler" signs? Most people would agree that as bad as Saddam is, he is not as bad as Hitler was. Doesn't this assertion of moral equivalence between Hitler and Bush therefore imply that Saddam is a better and less dangerous leader than Bush? How is that not "pro-Saddam"?…

--Ananda

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