Fourteen forty-one, the Security Council resolution passed unanimously last fall, said clearly that Saddam Hussein has one last chance to disarm. He hasn’t disarmed.
George W. Bush, press conference, 6 March 2003
Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it.
George W. Bush, speaking at the United Nations, September 2002
Two arguments
The slow buildup to the United States attack on Iraq in March 2003 gave George W. Bush many opportunities to set out the ethical ideas underlying his actions. He offered two separate arguments for going to war with Iraq. They could be put like this:
Argument 1
The ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War, in April 1991, required Iraq to give up weapons of mass destruction, and to accept UN inspectors who would inspect and monitor the destruction and removal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The Iraq government led by Saddam Hussein accepted these terms, but Saddam deceived the world, continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. Hence he was in breach of the cease-fire and the coalition that had fought Iraq in 1991 was free to resume hostilities.
Argument 2
A change of regime in Iraq would liberate that country from a tyrant who had, during the long years of his rule, been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people and allowed others to remain in grim poverty while he poured the country’s oil revenues into military projects and extravagant palaces for his own luxury.
Weapons of mass destruction and the United Nations resolutions
Bush’s primary case for war with Iraq rested on the claim that the Security Council had required Saddam Hussein to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, but he had not done so. It now seems very probable that Saddam Hussein had largely, and perhaps entirely, rid himself of weapons of mass destruction. That simple fact undermines the main reason Bush offered for the war. It also raises important questions about why Bush falsely claimed to know—even insisted that there was ‘no doubt’—that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. But let us assume, as a purely hypothetical exercise, that Bush’s statement was correct and Saddam had not disarmed. We need to make this assumption if we want to scrutinise the ethical basis on which Bush claimed to be acting. The most important question to ask here is: if the facts were as Bush said they were, would the US-led attack on Iraq have been justified by the Iraqi dictator’s failure to comply with Resolution 1441?
As Bush said, Resolution 1441, adopted by the UN Security Council in November 2002, gave Iraq ‘a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Council’. To that end, it called on Iraq to accept an enhanced system of inspections. Once Iraq accepted the weapons inspectors, the key issue became one of determining whether or not Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction, as it claimed. But Resolution 1441 was not as clearcut as Bush’s two-sentence summary suggests. The resolution directs the Executive Chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) to report if Iraq is not co-operating with the inspectors, or has not fulfilled its obligations to disarm, and reminds Iraq that it has repeatedly warned that it will face ‘serious consequences’ if it continues to violate its obligations. But the last words of the resolution state that the Council ‘decides to remain seized of the matter’. This peculiar wording is used by bodies like the Security Council to indicate that they are maintaining an interest in a particular matter, and have not finished dealing with it. The same wording was used in the earlier Resolution 687, which declared the ceasefire in 1991. The Security Council then said that it ‘decides to remain seized of the matter and to take such further steps as may be required for the implementation of the present resolution and to secure peace and security in the region’. In that respect the language of both Resolution 687 and Resolution 1441 is in sharp contrast with the language of the earlier Resolution 678, adopted in August 1990 after the Iraqi army had invaded Kuwait. That resolution authorised member nations to ‘use all necessary means’ to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Thus the Gulf War of 1991 was fought under the auspices of the United Nations. But the formula used in Resolution 687 and Resolution 1441 indicates that the Council is keeping the matter under active consideration, rather than handing it over to any nation, or group of nations, to decide whether Iraq was or was not complying with its obligations.
That Resolution 1441 did not authorise any nations to take action was also made clear by France, Russia and China, who all pointed out at the time the resolution was passed that it did not contain any ‘automaticity’ about the use of force. Each of these nations could have vetoed the resolution, and would probably have done so if it had contained an automatic authorisation of force. Other non-veto members of the Security Council who voted for Resolution 1441, like Mexico, Ireland, Syria, Bulgaria, Norway, Cameroon and Guinea made similar points. Many of them stressed that the resolution strengthened the role of the Security Council in deciding issues of international peace and security. The Mexican representative, for instance, was reported as saying, in the United Nations official summary, that the passage of Resolution 1441 ‘strengthened the Council, the United Nations, multilateralism and an international system of norms and principles’. He added that it provided for the use of force to be valid only ‘as a last resort, with prior, explicit authorization of the Council’.262
Both the United States and the United Kingdom representatives accepted that Resolution 1441 contained no ‘hidden triggers’ or ‘automaticity’ regarding the use of force, although the United States representative, John Negroponte, asserted that it also ‘did not constrain any Member State from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by that country, or to enforce relevant United Nations resolutions and protect world peace and security’. Negroponte’s remark about a country defending itself against the ‘threat’ posed by Iraq suggests a justification for war outside the framework of the UN resolutions, and thus is a different argument from the kind we are here examining. The second part of Negroponte’s remarks presupposes that there is a relevant UN resolution to be enforced, but does not indicate what resolution that might be, nor why it should be open to the United States, or any other member of the UN, to take it upon itself to enforce a resolution that the Security Council had not asked it to enforce. The UK representative explicitly agreed that ‘If there was a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter would return to the Council for discussion.’263
All this makes it clear that in regard to Resolution 1441, the Council was expecting to be informed by its weapons inspectors, and was prepared to take further decisions, depending on what they reported. That is, of course, what happened over the next four months. The inspectors reported back to the Security Council on several occasions. Iraq denied having any weapons of mass destruction. Although it did not provide complete documentation of what had happened to some chemical and biological agents it had once possessed, the inspectors failed to find proof that the Iraqis were lying. The inspectors’ reports indicate that, after a slow start, Iraq was, by February, showing a significant amount of co-operation. When the inspectors established (using information supplied by Iraq) that one of Iraq’s missiles had, in test firings, slightly exceeded the 150-kilometre range set by the ceasefire terms, Iraq agreed to destroy the missiles, and had already destroyed sixty-five, or more than half of them, by the date of the American attack.
Bush asserted flatly that Saddam ‘hasn’t disarmed’. In other speeches Bush said, over and over again, that Saddam ‘has weapons of mass destruction’. In the speech in which he issued his forty-eight-hour ultimatum, he said: ‘Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.’264 Even at the time he made these statements, there were good reasons for doubting the evidence that the Bush administration offered in support of its claims. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said: ‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa’ and went on to say that Saddam had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminium tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.265 In support of the claim that Saddam had tried to import uranium from Africa, Colin Powell presented to the United Nations documents purporting to show that Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger. These documents were soon— before the war began—shown to be, as Powell and the White House later admitted, clumsy forgeries. One of the documents dated October 2000 bore the signature of a man who by that date had not held the post of foreign minister of Niger for several years.266 Other evidence Bush and Powell presented was inconclusive. For example, as chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed Elbaradei later said, no evidence was ever produced to show that the aluminium tubes to which Bush referred were intended for anything other than the production of conventional missiles.267
The intelligence information to which Bush referred was unreliable, and could be seen to be unreliable before the war began. In these circumstances it was entirely reasonable for France, China and other members of the Security Council to take the view that inspections should be allowed to continue in order to establish whether Saddam had or had not disarmed. Despite American outrage at the French threat to veto a resolution authorising an attack on Iraq—an outrage which went to such absurd lengths as US citizens boycotting French goods and renaming ‘French fries’ as ‘freedom fries’—French President Jacques Chirac had good grounds for resisting Bush’s rush to war. He considered that Bush and Powell had not succeeded in showing, in a way that would justify war, that Iraq was in violation of its obligations under Resolution 1441. Subsequent events suggest that he was right, and Bush and Powell were wrong.
Whatever view one takes of the evidence, however, whether Iraq was or was not in compliance with its obligations was not a decision for the US, or any other country, to make. (Similarly, the decision whether Israel is or is not in compliance with UN resolutions relating to the occupied territories is not a decision for, say, Russia to make.) Under Resolution 1441, the Security Council had retained the right to make that decision for itself, and to decide also on the nature of the consequences that would follow if Iraq was found to be in violation of its obligations. That is why the Bush administration tried so hard to obtain a second resolution declaring that Iraq had not disarmed and authorising the use of force against Iraq. When it became apparent that France, and perhaps Russia and China too, would use their veto to prevent the passage of such a resolution, the administration began to suggest that if a majority voted for the resolution, that would provide some sort of moral authority for action in accordance with it, even if a veto prevented its formal acceptance by the Council. This is a proposition which the United States would surely have vigorously resisted had it been invoked by any other nation on the seventy-six occasions on which it has itself used the veto. (Only the former Soviet Union has used the veto more frequently.) And when, despite great efforts from both Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, it became apparent that there would not even be a majority for a resolution authorising force, Bush acted as if a second resolution was not necessary anyway. Robin Cook, the leader of the House of Commons until he resigned to show his opposition to Blair’s stance on Iraq, was surely correct when he said, in explanation of his resignation:‘I applaud the determined efforts of the prime minister and foreign secretary to secure a second resolution. Now that those attempts have ended in failure, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.’268
The United Kingdom’s attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, issued a statement outlining a legal basis for the use of force against Iraq. He claimed that if the Security Council had, in passing Resolution 1441, intended that a further resolution was required to authorise the use of force against Iraq, it would have said so explicitly in 1441. The fact that it did not do so means that, in Lord Goldsmith’s view,‘all that resolution 1441 requires is reporting to and discussion by the Security Council of Iraq’s failures, but not an express further decision to authorise force.’ Logically, however, one might just as well argue that if the Security Council had intended that no second resolution was required it would have explicitly said this. But it didn’t; therefore we should presume that a second resolution was required. In any case, Lord Goldsmith’s interpretation suggests that the Security Council was asking the inspectors to report to it on Iraq’s compliance, or failure to comply, and was planning to discuss the question, but at the same time was willing to leave the decision to use force to individual member nations acting on their own. Why would the Security Council intentionally turn itself into a mere talking-shop, while the decisions that matter are taken elsewhere? Vaughan Lowe, Chichele Professor of Public International Law at Oxford University, and several other leading British law professors took a different, and surely more plausible, view:‘There is nothing in the resolution that gives anyone apart from the Security Council itself the right to decide when the final chance has been exhausted.’ Lord Goldsmith was valiantly attempting to find a legal basis for the actions about to be taken by Tony Blair’s cabinet, of which he was a member, but as the British law professors point out, his interpretation makes no sense, and is inconsistent with the words of the UK’s own representative at the UN on the day on which Resolution 1441 was passed.269
As I have already indicated, there were other arguments for war with Iraq, apart from the claim that war was justified in order to enforce UN resolutions. Since we are still to consider these arguments, at this stage it would be wrong to decide whether the war was or was not ethically justified. Nevertheless, the record of the Bush administration in taking its case for the disarmament of Iraq to the United Nations, and then, when it could not get its way there, going ahead anyway, is not one that puts Bush in a good light. It looks very much as if Bush supported Resolution 1441 because he expected that Iraq would refuse to accept the stringent inspection requirements. That was a reasonable prediction, since Saddam had previously refused to accept more restricted inspections. Bush no doubt thought that Saddam’s refusal to accept the inspectors would provide a justification for the US to overthrow Saddam with the backing of the United Nations. Indeed, while Bush was going to the UN, the military forces under his command were already softening up Iraq for the war to come. From June 2002 into early 2003, the US air force was striking at Iraq’s command centres, radar, and fibre-optic networks, dropping over 600 bombs on about 350 selected targets. Although these attacks were justified at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq, Lieutenant General Michael Moseley, the chief commander of the air war against Iraq, later admitted that this justification was at least partly spurious, since the Iraqis were responding to more aggressive American attacks that were consciously preparing the way for a military offensive against Iraq.270
When, to the surprise of Bush and his advisers, Saddam accepted the inspectors, who then proved unable to find proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush became concerned that if the inspections continued in that manner, he would no longer have any grounds for attacking Saddam. So he switched to a different justification for an attack. Two weeks before the outbreak of war, CBS News journalist Mark Knoller asked Bush whether he was worried that the United States might be perceived as defying the UN, if it went ahead with military action without explicit authorisation from that body. On that occasion Bush did not go into the details of past UN resolutions to claim that an attack would be lawful. Instead he replied:
I’m confident the American people understand that when it comes to our security, if we need to act, we will act, and we really don’t need United Nations approval to do so…as we head into the twenty-first century, Mark, when it comes to our security, we really don’t need anybody’s permission.271
As this comment indicates, Bush’s real justification for invading Iraq does not lie in his commitment to upholding international law. In going to the UN, he was not in good faith. Like someone who accepts arbitration in a dispute because he hopes the decision will go his way, but has no intention of complying if it does not, Bush took his case to the UN but had already decided to act no matter what the UN decided.
Being in bad faith on so serious an issue at the United Nations is a grave ethical failing. But there is an even more serious charge to be considered. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Bush’s claims about Saddam’s ‘vast arsenal of deadly, biological and chemical weapons’ have turned out to be false.272 Probably at least some senior figures in the Bush administration knew all along that these claims were not well grounded. In February 2001, at a press briefing in Cairo after meeting Egyptian leaders, Colin Powell said:
We had a good discussion…about the nature of the sanctions— the fact that the sanctions exist—not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction… And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.273
Why did Powell speak so differently two years later? Was it because, at least by July 2002, a decision to attack Iraq had been made, and it was based on considerations other than a belief about the danger posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? According to Richard Haass, then director of the policy-planning staff at the State Department, it was around that time that Condoleezza Rice told him that opposing the decision would be ‘a waste of breath’.274 If the decision had already been taken by that time, it seems clear that afterwards the administration was not seeking the truth about Iraq’s weapons in an objective manner.
That conclusion is strongly supported by the evidence of Joseph C. Wilson, who served as an American diplomat both in Iraq and in several African countries. Wilson has told how in February 2002 he was asked by the CIA to look into a report that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger. The office of Vice-President Cheney was interested in getting the facts straight, Wilson was told. He therefore travelled to Niger, investigated the question, and concluded that the reports were ‘highly doubtful’.275 It was most unlikely that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. The US ambassador to Niger agreed with this finding, and had already reported to Washington along those lines. Wilson, of course, provided a detailed briefing to the CIA, and later shared his findings with the State Department. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a secret CIA document, included the following sentence: ‘Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in [the assessment of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research] highly dubious.’276 That month, the CIA sent two memos to the White House voicing doubts about the claims. One went to Bush’s deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and the other to his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson. CIA Director George J. Tenet also phoned Hadley before the president was to make a speech in Cincinnati, on 7 October, asking that the allegation be removed.277 Nevertheless in January 2003, in the most solemn and well-prepared speech he gives each year, the State of the Union address, Bush referred to Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium from Africa as a significant piece of evidence for his assertion that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. According to the Washington Post, administration officials developing the speech originally wanted to refer specifically to Niger, but substituted the vague reference to ‘Africa’, after being told by CIA officials that there were problems with the information relating to Niger. If the most specific information in support of this claim was not reliable, however, why did administration officials not reconsider the entire allegation about Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium? If they had inquired further, they would have been told of the various grounds for doubting that Iraq had recently attempted to purchase uranium from any African country.278
Further suspicion is raised by the fact that only a few days after Bush’s State of the Union address, Secretary of State Colin Powell reviewed the information about Iraq’s alleged attempt to purchase uranium in Africa, and decided that it was not sufficiently reliable to use in the speech he gave to the United Nations a week after Bush’s State of the Union address. If Powell formed this view, it is reasonable to suppose that he would have mentioned it to Bush, or to one of his aides. This was still six weeks before the United States attacked Iraq. Meanwhile, the claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa had been made not only by the president, but by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.279 The White House finally retracted the information in July, when the war was all over and Wilson had made public his trip to Africa. Why did Bush not acknowledge, when the nation, and the United Nations, were still in the process of deciding whether to go to war, that part of his case against Iraq rested on information that could not be substantiated?
As we have seen, the case the Bush administration made that Iraq was in breach of its obligations included other shaky pieces of evidence. One was the claim that Iraq was trying to buy aluminium tubes with specifications suitable only for use in a centrifuge, the equipment used to enrich uranium. This assertion was made despite advice from the Bush administration’s own Department of Energy that the tubes were the wrong specification to be used in a centrifuge, and an opinion from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the tubes were most probably intended for use in a multiple-rocket-launching system, which Iraq was not prohibited from possessing. Another claim later shown to be false was that ‘Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack forty-five minutes after the order is given.’This claim, originally made by the British government, was repeated twice by Bush, without receiving CIA clearance, in a speech he made in the Rose Garden in September 2002, and in a radio address made in the same month.280
Apart from the issue of weapons of mass destruction, the other allegation about Iraq made by the administration was that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In presenting his case for war with Iraq to the American public, Bush repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, but provided no real evidence of such a connection.281 Early reports that an Al Qaeda member had met a representative of the Iraq regime in Prague were later repudiated by the Czech government.282 In his Cincinnati speech on 7 October 2002, Bush said ‘we’ve learned’ that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members ‘in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases’. He also said that Al Qaeda leaders had fled from Afghanistan to Iraq, and in particular that a ‘very senior Al Qaeda leader’ had received medical treatment in Baghdad earlier that year. Yet the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a secret CIA document that had been completed shortly before Bush’s Cincinnati speech, warned that reports by Iraqi defectors and captured Al Qaeda members about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda were contradictory and unreliable. It also indicated that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda had occurred in the early 1990s, when Al Qaeda was in its infancy, and that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. As for the ‘very senior Al Qaeda leader’ who had received medical treatment in Baghdad, the National Intelligence Estimate stated that although he had occasionally associated with Al Qaeda adherents, he was not an Al Qaeda member at all.283 Months after the war, no real evidence of cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda in terrorist activities had come to light. On the other hand, the New York Times revealed that two Al Qaeda leaders captured by the US independently told the CIA that their organisation did not work with Saddam Hussein.284 The Bush administration did not make these statements public. Four days after Bush made his Cincinnati speech alleging that there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Congress voted to grant him the authority to make war on Iraq.
The overall impression obtained from these and other revelations is that, instead of taking an objective view of the intelligence it was receiving about whether Iraq did or did not have weapons of mass destruction and contact with Al Qaeda, and then deciding what action was necessary, the Bush administration decided what action it wanted to take, and then selected and massaged the intelligence to make it support that action.285 After reviewing the fate of the information he provided, Joseph Wilson concludes,‘a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses’. There can hardly be a more grave charge against the President of the United States and his administration than that he misled Congress, his own citizens, and governments and people all over the world, in order to start a war that killed thousands of people, including at least 3000 civilians, and maimed and wounded, or made homeless, tens of thousands more.
After the war was over, it became known that as the American build-up for war was reaching its peak, the Bush administration was informed by a Lebanese-American businessman that Saddam was willing to give the Americans much of what they wanted. The businessman had been told by the Iraqi chief of intelligence that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, and was willing to allow American troops to conduct a search. The Iraqis were also reportedly offering to hand over to the Americans a man wanted as a suspect in a 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. Most remarkable of all, they were pledging to hold elections. As a result of these overtures, Richard Perle, an adviser to the Department of Defense, flew to London to meet with the businessman. The businessman pressed for a direct meeting between Iraqi officials and Perle, or another representative of the United States. Perle conveyed this message to officials in the Bush administration, but they rebuffed the Iraqi overture. According to Perle,‘The message was:“Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.”’
Though it is impossible to know whether the Iraqis were genuine in their offer to negotiate, the Bush administration’s response to the offer fits the pattern we have already observed. The administration was not interested in negotiations for the same reason that it was not interested in evidence casting doubt on the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. It had already decided on war. This was very far from being a war of last resort.
Liberating the Iraqi people
In speaking to the United Nations in September 2002, Bush said: ‘Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it.’ Six months later, he used similar terms when he gave General Tommy Franks the order to attack Iraq.286 Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. That fact offers a straightforward ethical argument for overthrowing him, as long as the cost of doing so, in terms of Iraqi deaths, injuries and destruction of property is not great, in comparison to the suffering that he would continue to inflict on his own people.
This ethical argument is not a legal justification for the attack on Iraq. Traditionally, international law has recognised the sovereignty of nations, independently of how their governments are constituted, and—almost—independently of the crimes they commit against their own people. The United Nations Charter confirms this, stating that apart from acts of aggression or threats to peace,‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.’287 It is true that the UN itself has sometimes stretched this clause to the limit. One such earlier ‘stretching’ involved Iraq. In 1991 the Security Council resolved that the repression of the civilian population had consequences that were a threat to international peace and security, and therefore justified intervention. Since the Council mentioned the flow of refugees to other countries, this repression did have some consequences outside the borders of Iraq.288 In other cases, however, for example in Haiti, where the Council acted to restore to power the democratically elected president Jean-Bertr and Aristide, the claim that intervention was necessary to prevent a threat to international peace and security was highly tenuous.289
In extreme cases, however, an ethically-based right of humanitarian intervention has been recognised. Many believe that intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 would have been ethically justified. Remorse at the failure to do so may have encouraged the leaders of the NATO powers to intervene in Yugoslavia to stop the killing of people in Kosovo. Many people from President Clinton down regarded that as the right thing to do, although at the time it lacked UN authorisation and so was of dubious legality. It is possible to argue that international law is constantly evolving, and will eventually follow world opinion on ethical issues such as the right to humanitarian intervention.290
Nevertheless, the situation of Iraq in 2003 was significantly different from Rwanda in 1994 and Kosovo in 1999. Saddam was not, at the time of the invasion, engaged in any form of genocide or widespread massacres. In his speech to the United Nations, Bush said:
Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He’s fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of fifteen and seventy in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians and forty Iraqi villages.
The killing of the Kurds in Northern Iraq took place in 1988, and the use of gas against Iranian and Iraqi villages was from the same period. Subsequently, in 1991, Saddam put down an uprising by Shia in the south with great brutality, and in the mid-1990s, he attacked Arabs living in the remote marshes near the Iranian border. A plausible ethical case for humanitarian intervention against Saddam could have been made at any of those times. Over the years immediately before Bush’s decision to attack Iraq, however, while the torture and executions of people suspected of opposition to Saddam continued, there was nothing on the scale of the earlier atrocities. Con Coughlin, who chronicles Saddam’s long record of brutality in Saddam, King of Terror, acknowledges that by 2002,‘ordinary Iraqis were starting to recover from the appalling privations that they had endured for most of the 1990s’.291 Thus, when Bush was building his case for an attack on Iraq, it would have been difficult to show that the Iraqi government was committing greater crimes against its people than were other repressive regimes like those of Burma, North Korea and Turkmenistan.
For Bush to have made his case for war with Iraq exclusively on humanitarian grounds, his position would have had to undergo a dramatic turnaround from the one he professed during his campaign for the presidency. In the second of his debates with Gore, the moderator, Jim Lehrer, stated that 600,000 people had died in Rwanda in 1994, and there was no intervention from the United States. Was it, he asked, a mistake not to intervene? Bush replied: ‘I think the administration did the right thing in that case. I do…I thought they made the right decision not to send US troops into Rwanda.’292 Those familiar with the situation in Rwanda at the time believe that a relatively small number of troops, certainly far fewer than the number necessary to overthrow Saddam, would have sufficed to stop the massacre. It is therefore curious that Bush should, in 2000, have believed it wrong to send a modest number of US troops to Rwanda to save 600,000 lives, but by 2003 have changed his mind to such an extent that he was willing to send a much larger force to overthrow Saddam who, though undoubtedly oppressive and cruel, was not about to massacre 600,000 of his subjects. (Condoleezza Rice ignored Bush’s earlier statement of his views on Rwanda when, after it became apparent that the UN Security Council was unlikely to support a resolution authorising the use of force in Iraq, she sought to undermine the Security Council’s authority.‘The UN Security Council could not act,’ she said,‘when in Rwanda there was a genocide that cost almost a million lives.’293 )
We have seen that the case for humanitarian intervention against Saddam was much weaker when the war actually began than it would have been some years earlier. There are other repressive regimes, just as bad as his. And we have seen that Bush had previously opposed humanitarian intervention to stop a horrific massacre. Nevertheless, it is still possible that Bush’s decision to get rid of Saddam was justified. At its most straight- forward, the case for getting rid of Saddam in order to help the people of Iraq was a utilitarian one. All that it required was a demonstration that the benefits reasonably to be expected outweighed the costs, including the cost in innocent human lives, reasonably to be expected. Arguably, it would have been best to get rid of Saddam earlier, but it was better to do so late than never. Perhaps it would be better still to get rid of the Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il, but that might not be achievable without an even greater loss of innocent life than was involved in getting rid of Saddam.
Although there is a possible utilitarian justification for getting rid of Saddam, Bush would be contradicting his professed moral views on other questions if he were to appeal to it. As we saw when considering his stance on the loss of innocent lives caused by bombing, and on detention without trial, it would be odd for Bush to become a utilitarian on these issues while rejecting the same ethical approach to the destruction of embryos to produce stem cells. If he is prepared to argue in utilitarian terms that a war that kills innocents is justified because it saves many more innocents from being murdered under Saddam, he should be prepared to accept the same calculus of costs and benefits for using a few embryos to save many more lives. Alternatively, if Bush rejects utilitarianism, and refuses to accept that ‘the end justifies the means’, he will run into difficulties in justifying war to rid Iraq of Saddam’s tyranny. For there was not a shadow of doubt that this war would cost the lives of innocent Iraqis.
In addition to the general problem of showing how the humanitarian argument for war can be compatible with his stance on other ethical issues, Bush also faces a more specific problem in using that argument to justify his war with Iraq. Under the US constitution, only Congress can authorise war. Congress did, in a resolution passed on 10 October 2002, authorise the president to use force in Iraq. But that authority is given for a very specific purpose. The president may use force in order to:
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.294
The resolution contains no authorisation for the use of force to liberate the people of Iraq from a tyrant. If that was the real reason for the war, it was unconstitutional.
Notwithstanding these serious problems of constitutionality and consistency, I shall put them aside in order to ask whether there really was a strong utilitarian case for a war of liberation. Whether Bush was justified in attacking Iraq depends, in utilitarian terms, on how reasonable it was for him to believe that the benefits would outweigh the human costs of war, and that these benefits could not be obtained by any less costly means. We have already seen that the Bush administration did not go to all possible lengths to find out if there was any other way of freeing Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny. It did not follow up on the alleged offer to hold elections, relayed by the Lebanese-American businessman to Richard Perle. Improbable as that offer may have been, it was wrong to reject it without serious scrutiny, given the costs that were to result from the war. If dictators like Chile’s Pinochet yielded to pressure and allowed free elections, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Saddam, under even greater pressure, might have done the same. Many will scoff at the thought of such a sudden conversion by so brutal a dictator, but it remains true that, whether the war was fought to eliminate the threat of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, or to liberate Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny, it was not a war of last resort.
The human costs of the war are difficult to estimate, but we know that for many Iraqis, they were very great. As in Afghanistan, bombs and missiles fell in the wrong places. Civilian deaths during the war exceeded 3000, and civilian injuries have been estimated at 20,000. Parents lost their children, children were orphaned, and both adults and children were maimed. Appalling conditions in hospitals were reported during the war. Beds became filthy and blood-soaked, but blackouts had closed down the laundry. Anaesthetics ran out, but casualties of the bombing continued to arrive, often with shocking injuries. Overworked, exhausted doctors performed emergency surgery on patients who had no pain relief apart from 800 milligrams of ibuprofen—the dose an American would take for muscle pain.295
Months after Bush proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq, American troops were still killing civilians. The shooting of Mazen Dana on 17 August 2003 by a soldier who thought his video camera was a rocket launcher was widely publicised, because he was a Reuters cameraman. Other shootings, like that of Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children just a week earlier, got less attention. But the al-Kerim family, who were inside their car, stopped at an American roadblock, were, like Dana, the innocent victims of panicking American troops who wrongly thought they were under fire.296
Nor is there any sound reason for leaving the deaths of combatants out of the calculation. The number of American military personnel killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war passed 500 in January 2004, and has continued to rise. In addition, over fifty British and sixteen Italian military personnel have been killed, as well as soldiers from Denmark, Spain, Poland and Ukraine. More than 2300 members of the coalition forces have suffered injuries, many of them with severe permanent effects. Iraqi combatant deaths have been estimated to be approximately 10,000, and the number of Iraqi wounded may be, as it is for the coalition forces, four or five times the number killed. Because the US used an upgraded form of napalm on certain Iraqi positions, some of these deaths and injuries would have been particularly agonising. Napalm, widely used by American forces in Vietnam, is a mixture of jet fuel and a polystyrene-like gel that sticks to the skin as it burns. Initially the Pentagon denied that it had used napalm, but later acknowledged that the upgraded form of the weapon it was using was ‘remarkably similar’. Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11, said of one attack: ‘We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches…Unfortunately there were people there...you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It’s no great way to die.’ Precisely because Saddam’s regime was so brutal, most of those serving in the Iraqi army were conscripts rather than volunteers. Thousands of young men, forced to go out and fight for a regime they did not support, were killed. They had mothers, perhaps wives and children, and their deaths are part of the costs of the war.297
In addition to the deaths and injuries, the war caused extensive damage to property. Thousands of people were bombed out of their homes and many more have, for long periods, been deprived of basic services like electricity and running water and police protection from crime. Factories and office buildings were destroyed, putting people out of work. There have been environmental disasters, like the looting of the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Facility, a relic of Iraq’s 1960s nuclear program, which before the war was being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Because US forces failed to secure the site in April 2003, locals ransacked the site for anything useful, emptying sealed barrels of uranium ore in order to use the barrels for household purposes, and causing radioactive material to be dispersed. Levels of radioactivity 3000 times normal have been found near a primary school in the area. In another environmental catastrophe, a refinery warehouse west of Baghdad was ransacked after the war, and 5000 tons of hazardous chemicals was spilled, burned or stolen. The surrounding area, to a radius of up to two miles, is believed to be heavily contaminated, and groundwater may also be affected.
Then there is cultural loss. The National Museum of Antiquities and the Mosul museum were looted. Although some objects were later recovered, an estimated 10,000 ancient artifacts are, at the time of writing, still missing. These include statues, jewellery, vessels and coins, as well as entire collections of clay tablets with cuneiform writing that are among the earliest written documents in the world, but have never been read. Since the collections of tablets have been broken up and individual items are being sold illicitly for a few hundred dollars each, the inscriptions will now never be read in their proper context. Archaeological sites that experts were delicately excavating by hand before the war have now been bulldozed in the search for objects that can be sold. The burning of the National Library and National Archives, as well as a special library of religious works, caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of documents, including more than 600 irreplaceable early Islamic manuscripts more than nine centuries old, and the bulk of the records documenting the social and political history of the country.
Despite all this, can we say that the Iraqi people will be better off after the war than they were before? As of this writing, such a judgment would be premature. True, Iraqis are free of Saddam’s tyranny, and free, too, of the hardship caused by the United Nations sanctions against Saddam, but instead they risk violence, not only at the hands of nervous American soldiers, but also from their fellow-citizens. Saddam, for all the horrors he perpetrated, maintained order. In Baghdad from mid-April 2003, when American forces had taken over the city, through the end of August, the city morgue recorded 2846 violent deaths. Deducting those that would have occurred if the pre-war rate of violent death had continued during this period, there were at least 1519 additional violent deaths in four and a half months. Gunshot wounds, which used to account for 10 per cent of violent deaths, were responsible for 60 per cent of these deaths. US Forces cause some of the violent deaths, but the majority are the result of Iraqis attacking other Iraqis. They are a consequence of the failure of the occupying forces to maintain order, and so are part of the price Iraqis are paying for the war. So, too, is the fear and insecurity that this breakdown of public order brings to every Iraqi, whether or not they become one of its victims.
Whether Iraqis will, in the long run, be better off than they would have been if the war had not happened will largely depend on the nature of the future government of Iraq. Of course, it is good that a tyrant like Saddam should be removed and made to stand trial for the crimes that he committed. That will, no doubt, bring some satisfaction to the families of his victims. But much more important than bringing justice to the tyrant is the question whether a stable democractic state will emerge. If that happens, and Iraq prospers, then it may be possible to say that, on the whole, Iraqis have benefited from the war. But that judgment alone would not be sufficient to show that the war was ethically justified. Since international law does not recognise the desirability of ‘regime change’ as a ground for going to war, there would still be larger questions to consider, in particular questions about the possible impact of the war on weakening the constraints of international law.
In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 1999, Kofi Annan stated the ethical dilemma that this question raises. Some, he noted, believe that ‘the greatest threat to the future of international order is the use of force in the absence of a Security Council mandate’. He asked those who take this view to imagine that, in the dark days leading up to the genocide in Rwanda, a coalition of states had been prepared to act in defence of the Tutsi population, but had not received prompt authorisation from the Security Council. Should that coalition have stood aside and allowed the horror to unfold? Most of us would answer that it should not have stood aside. But then Annan asked those who think that states or groups of states are justified in acting outside the established mechanisms for enforcing international law, whether there was not a danger of such interventions ‘setting dangerous precedents for future interventions without a clear criterion to decide who might invoke these precedents, and in what circumstances?’298 After Bush’s attack on Iraq, that question seems more pertinent than ever.
It is noteworthy that even the Secretary-General of the UN is not saying that there can never be a case for intervention without UN authorisation. But the possible exceptions that he had in mind were situations like Rwanda, where without immediate action by other states, hundreds of thousands of lives might be lost. As has already been mentioned, in March 2003 there was no such urgency about the invasion of Iraq. The invasion therefore was not a case in which a humanitarian catastrophe was so urgent that there simply was not time to persuade the Security Council to change its mind.
Tragically, however, at the very time when Bush was causing the United Nations and the world to focus all its attention on Iraq, a much more urgent crisis was developing in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. For the past five years the region had been in a state of civil war and near-anarchy, with warring militia from different ethnic groups barely held in check by occupying armies from neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda. At the end of February, 2003, Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading non-government human rights organisation, warned the UN that the war in the Congo had sparked ‘a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions’, and that over two million people were currently displaced from their homes. It urged the UN Security Council to ensure that its peacekeeping mission in the Congo was able to fulfil its mandate to ‘protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence’.299 But with Bush’s efforts to persuade the Security Council to authorise the use of force in Iraq grabbing all the headlines, nothing was done. Less than two weeks later, Human Rights Watch again warned that civilians were at risk of being killed in Ituri, and again the warning went unheeded.300 The result has been graphically described by Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, a heartbreaking book on the Rwanda genocide:
…seven hundred poorly armed U. N. peacekeepers in the northeastern Ituri region have watched helplessly over the past few weeks as massacres by tribal militias have filled graves with fresh corpses at about the same clip that the dead of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror have been exhumed in Iraq.301
When the war in Iraq began, most of Saddam’s victims had been dead for several years. The victims of the fighting and ethnic killings that took place in Ituri in April and May—more than 400 around Bunia, the major city, in the last three weeks of May alone, according to a Reuters report—were still alive, and their lives could have been saved by far fewer troops than were needed to overthrow Saddam. At the end of May, after the Iraq war was over, the UN Security Council did turn its attention to the Congo, and authorised a French-led multinational peacekeeping force to go to Ituri to try to prevent further massacres. The Bush administration did not offer to send troops or any other form of support.302
As Kofi Annan suggests, in considering the ethics of humanitarian intervention, it is important to consider the precedent that is being set. That is why the claim that the war with Iraq has produced benefits for the people of Iraq that outweigh the heavy casualties they suffered during the conflict, does not, even if true, settle the issue of whether the war was a good thing. Even if the war in Iraq turns out to have good consequences for people in Iraq, if it is in flagrant defiance of international law, and weakens the authority of the UN to resolve disputes peacefully, it is likely to increase the danger that other nations, less scrupulous in their choice of circumstances, will also go to war outside the framework of the United Nations. When that additional factor is taken into account, the resort to war may have been not only illegal, but also unethical.
This judgment relies on the thought that the United Nations is, and should remain, the only source of lawful authority for resorting to force, except of course when a nation is defending itself from attack. Before accepting that idea we need to consider the broader framework of international relations that Bush is seeking to inaugurate, and of which his war with Iraq was a part. In one major speech and in a central policy document of his administration, Bush has put forward a new and radically different approach to achieving a peaceful world. We cannot reach a final judgment on the ethical case for the war with Iraq until we have examined this new approach.