The ethical case against withdrawal from Iraq: a matter urgently to consider.

DEBATE over whether America should withdraw from Iraq has turned primarily on strategic questions. But one need not be a utopian--or, more dreaded still, a "Wilsonian"--to see that not all foreign-policy questions are strategic. Almost everyone, conservative or liberal, believes that ethical claims restrict to one degree or another the means by which a government may pursue its foreign-policy ends. (If not, the massive and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians would be morally permissible in the pursuit even of non-vital interests.) There may also be cases--though this is more controversial--in which ethical claims are sufficient in their own right to decide a policy.

So it is, I believe, with Iraq. Withdrawal of U.S. forces would in all likelihood be a strategic disaster. But a powerful case can be made that it would also violate a duty America owes Iraq; that the duty alone gives us reason enough to stay; and that conservatives and liberals should be able to agree on this point.

The duty at issue is adumbrated in the claim that, were the U.S. to quit Iraq, sectarian genocide (or some lesser form of mass murder) would ensue. As prediction, this warning is highly plausible, given the incipient balkanization of mixed Iraqi neighborhoods and the great profusion of blood let therein. As ethics, the warning rests on an unstated premise that America has an obligation not to abandon Iraq to genocide.

This premise leaves unexplained the source of the obligation it contains. That lack of specificity in turn invites dissent from a certain type of conservative. Not all conservatives seek to minimize the role of moral obligation in foreign policy, but those who do so seek tend to call themselves conservatives. Such conservatives may think they detect, underlying the claim that the U.S. must prevent Iraqi genocide, the more sweeping claim that the U.S. must spend blood and treasure pursuing morally desirable outcomes, regardless of whether doing so advances American interests. If so, they are mistaken. The ethical case against withdrawal can be made without reference to any broader duty to choose ends for their moral worth.

This is so, first, because America is the cause of the Iraqi maelstrom. No matter what good--strategic or moral--has come or may yet come from toppling Saddam Hussein's regime, one cannot dispute that our decision to do so, and our subsequent mishandling of the occupation, created the vacuum into which Salafist and Khomeinist extremisms have been drawn, bringing with them an access of barbarity. This obvious fact implies a specific and narrow duty to repair the damage we have done. The average kindergartner could give a perfectly intelligible account of the operative moral principle here: When you make a mess, you clean it up; when you break something, you fix it; etc. The average congressman's capacity for moral reasoning may well be less developed.

It is ethically irrelevant whether the violence that Saddam's overthrow unleashed would have happened sooner or later anyway (for example, following an Iraqi coup). This is irrelevant for the same reason that it does not matter, when I burn your house down today, that a lightning strike would have turned it to ash tomorrow. Nor is our responsibility for the state of affairs in Iraq simply absolved if the war was a justified response to an intolerable threat. In no case does the justification of a war indemnify one against all moral considerations, and the relevant considerations at this stage of this war compel us to ask whether it is right for America to midwife a genocide (or, at the very least, to risk doing so).

DISCRETIONARY WAR, JUST WAR

Those who seek to minimize the role of morality in foreign policy may object that all wars have unfortunate consequences, that these consequences cannot be foreseen, and that it is morally unnecessary or practically impossible, or both, for the United States to accept a general obligation to repair the damages of war whenever it fights.

The force of such reasoning is attenuated in this case by the enormity of withdrawal's possible consequences. It is also attenuated because the Iraq War was, in an important sense, discretionary. Had Saddam Hussein dispatched agents to detonate a bomb in Times Square, the U.S. could not reasonably have responded other than by declaring war. So, too, if the U.S. had acquired intelligence proving that Saddam intended such an attack. In these scenarios, the suffering of the Iraqi people would have fallen solely on Saddam's shoulders.

The casus belli of the actual Iraq War was not nearly so clear-cut. It is true that Saddam's history of WMD possession and his ties to terrorism posed a threat. But it is also true that he did not commit or threaten any particular aggression to which the toppling of his regime was a response. The U.S. might reasonably have tried to reduce or deter his threat in a variety of ways, of which war might (or might not) have been the most prudent. (To imagine how one alternative might have looked, compare the Iraq War with the way President Bush has, so far, addressed the Iranian nuclear threat. I do not believe such an approach would have worked in Iraq, and do not expect it to work in Iran. But it is not self-evidently unreasonable.) We did choose war, and the Iraqis do suffer; and while blame for this still falls largely on Saddam (it was he, after all, who provoked us to arms) responsibility for Iraq's fate also attaches to us, for exercising our discretion as we did.

I believe there is no contradiction between this view and the belief that discretionary war can, under certain conditions, be just. In so saying, I break with traditional just-war theory, which, to my mind, cannot offer satisfactory guidance when confronting the potential convergence of terrorism, rogue states, and WMD. The traditional view, in its most common modern interpretation, requires that force be used only as a last resort in responding to--or, more controversially, preempting--specific aggression. The threat posed by a regime such as Saddam's, by contrast, is general: There is no way of anticipating particular acts of aggression, or even of knowing at what point all measures short of war have failed to dispel the general danger. The traditional view, as I have outlined it, would thus rule out war in such a case (which is why many just-war theorists, probably a majority, have held the Iraq War to be unjust).

Yet I see no reason to think that a government can never be morally obligated to protect its citizens from such threats; nor do I think a government can always know which policies will offer adequate protection and which not; nor still do I think that, in cases where preventive war clearly seems to offer the best protection, it will be possible to demonstrate that the probability of success by other means is so low that a government is strictly compelled to wage war. More simply: The justification of war under conditions of great uncertainty cannot aspire to syllogistic precision. Grave but nonspecific dangers may present a government with a range of permissible action, including war; and while no particular action is obligatory, the government may nonetheless be obligated to choose one action or another as wisely as it can.

If I am wrong, and discretionary war cannot be just, then it is all the easier to see that we are accountable for what we have done in Iraq. If I am right, and discretionary war can be just, it does not follow that the ethics governing it are identical to those governing warfare of a more traditional sort. In particular, a country waging discretionary war ought to feel special concern for the consequences of its choice upon the enemy country. Determination to prevent the war from inflicting severe or long-term damage may even be a necessary condition of its justification. I believe that some such principle shapes our intuitions about Iraq. It is why many who advocated the war on strategic grounds felt compelled to note that it would also liberate an oppressed people from tyranny. It is also why the tragedies of post-war Iraq contribute mightily to the feeling that the war was not just.

Even those conservatives who are generally hostile to "nation building" can admit the unique moral status of discretionary war with a minimum of damage to their principles. There is no contradiction between the following propositions: (1) In a war with a classic casus belli, we may say "to hell with them" upon the cessation of fighting; and (2) the Iraq War involved us in a special duty whose discharge requires our continuing presence in Iraq. For that matter, there is no contradiction between (1) the belief that the Iraq War, or the decision to occupy Iraq, was a strategic mistake and (2) the belief that strategic mistakes can create duties.

THE MIND OF MODERN LIBERALS

Of course, if anyone should need no convincing that withdrawal would be unethical, it is modern liberals. For it is they who, in their rhetoric, advocate the most sweeping ethics-based restrictions on the conduct of foreign policy. The record of modern liberalism is another story, as witness its penchant for defending tyrants, from totalizing ideologues such as Stalin and Mao to machete-wielding, "anti-colonialist" jungle thugs. Where war is concerned, however, liberal impulses are consistently pacifistic. The post-Vietnam Left looks upon all war as morally suspect for the reason that it maims and kills innocent people. So deep does this feeling run in liberal bones that the Left has opposed using force even against regimes which flagrantly violate human rights, and even when overwhelming strategic reasons to topple these regimes have emerged. (The most obvious recent case is the adulteress- and homosexual-murdering Taliban.)

If liberals took their rhetoric seriously, the politicians aligned most closely with the pacifist Left--Nancy Pelosi being the paradigmatic example--would suffer insomnia each night as they contemplated the probable human cost of U.S. failure in Iraq. They would recognize that their moral opposition to starting this war--or even a universalized opposition to starting any war--is consistent with the view that there are compelling moral reasons to continue it. More: that if the war was unjust, we have a unique interest in minimizing its harms, just as one feels a special obligation of kindness toward a person one has offended.

Instead we have Mrs. Pelosi voting with the majority of her caucus for immediate withdrawal.

These votes would be defensible, and consistent with liberal principles, if it were true either that the U.S. could do nothing to win the war, or that pulling out of Iraq would--cue deus ex machina--improve its security. In the latter case, withdrawal would be morally and not just strategically desirable; in the former, we would have no alternative but to withdraw and feel a guilt commensurate to the weight of the resultant catastrophe. Neither of these claims is plausible, or borne out by recent events (there is a reason the Iraqi government is begging us to stay). This may be why Pelosi and her Democrats make no argument for them.

Their apparent indifference to the consequences of their votes only highlights their immorality: for the case that withdrawal would destroy Iraq is a compelling one, and in any event it is the advocate of the new policy who must prove that it will not come at an unbearable cost. The most charitable thing that can be said of the Democratic majority is that it is morally thoughtless, in which case it is committing the political equivalent of criminal negligence. If it has its way and Iraq survives, it will have been lucky, not good. And if, as is more probable, our worst fears come true, then it will have been something else altogether.