I hear the following over and over again:

Peacenik: "I think no one has the authority to impose a regime change on another country, by waging an aggressive war on that regime. Such change should born from within, and not imposed from outside."

Rational person: "But... but... if they tried to change the regime from within, they and their families were murdered and/or tortured. When the regime is that brutal and has that much control, it is just too hard to change it from within. And given that huge number of people are killed there by the regime, the deaths incurred in the war are only a few month's normal-course-of-business losses, with the difference that NOW the killing will STOP FOREVER. Don't you care at all about the people being killed, tortured, or imprisoned? Is this abstract idea about not imposing regime change really so important that this kind of thing should be allowed to go on? Would you personally be willing to escort the freed prisoners back to their torture chambers in order to undo the war, if you could?"

Peacenik: ""For whatever reason, [the sufferings of the Iraqi civilians] just started to bother U.S. officials after 20+ or so! I wonder what that reason might be."

In other words, the peacenik says regime change from outside is wrong, as if that is a fundamental moral principle. When the suffering it is curing in Iraq is pointed out, he changes the subject and says that the hawks are the ones who don't care, because a) it didn't bother them for 20+ years; and/or b) they aren't attacking China, etc, where human rights abuses also exist.

That logic is based on the wholly irrational assumption that if one doesn't take military action in every instance at every time that human rights abuses occur, then one doesn't care. Even if it were true, it would remain nothing but a distraction from the question "how could the Iraqi war be wrong, given the suffering it has relieved?" The peacenik can't answer that question in a rational way, so he offers a distraction by saying "Well, really it's YOU who don't care."

Now, proving that I don't care doesn't make you any less guilty of not caring, if indeed you don't. It doesn't change that. It is just a primitive, childlike way of offering distraction from the accusation.

But even as a distraction, it is totally irrational. Accusations based on the argument that if we really cared, we would have waged war earlier or we would be attacking other countries like China where there are abuses ignore the fact that THE PERCEIVED COST MAY BE TOO HIGH to wage war in any given case without a number of factors in place. There is always value in saving people from suffering, especially immense suffering such as occurred in Iraq, but the cost is just too high most of the time for it to be practical. In the case of Iraq there are other factors. The harbouring of terrorists, the historical desire to create WMD's which could find themselves in the hands of terrorists, the geopolitical benefits of having a democracy in Iraq, etc.

All those reasons are reasons for the war. The fact that there are other benefits besides relieving the suffering of Iraqi's does not mean that we don't care about that suffering. It means that a number of factors have to line up before we can justify the cost of doing something about it.

In my personal opinion, when peaceniks offer the arguments quoted earlier, the real motivation is a pretty much desperate attempt to rationalize a contradiction. The contradiction is between a) a self-image of being a compassionate, peace-and-freedom loving, morally superior peacenik who always rejects regime change from outside because regime change from outside is always bad, vs. b) the fact that such rejection of war in this case, if it had carried the day, would mean that more thousands of innocent Iraqi's would be tortured and/or killed every month.

It is a way of trying to deal with that contradiction, but it is ultimately nonsensical and totally self-involved.

The question to people who are still anti-war remains: would you personally escort innocent civilians back to their torture cells in order to undo the war if you could?

My own view is that it is highly likely that the war will turn out to be justified for other reasons than alleviating the suffering of the Iraqi people. But if not, I am damned proud to be part of a country that can, and did, alleviate that suffering, and deeply glad that it happened, just for its own sake. You should be too.
10:42:47 AM