Abstract
The general task of philosophizing war is commonly carried out within specific theoretical structures that standardize the moral assessment of war. Arguing about War is frequently pursued within a moral continuum of notable positions ranging from theories of pacifism and nonviolence to just-war theory and political realism. This book sets out to analyze four arguments that have dominated philosophical discourse about the Iraq war and the implications of this discourse for the analysis of contemporary wars more generally. The arguments about war examined in this work address topical areas dealing with just-war theory (JWT), humanitarian intervention, democratization, and the notion of preventive war, as means of grappling with the philosophical complexity of contemporary warfare.
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Notes
Some of these critiques are well-known classics by now, though I do not intend to imitate these accounts. See for example Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (New York: Henry Holt, 2004);
William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2005);
Tariq Ali, Bush in Babylon (New York: Verso, 2003); and Michael Parenti’s widely cited work published just before the Iraq war, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001).
More than two decades ago philosophers such as Robert L. Holmes and Duane L. Cady put forth eloquent pacifist or pacifist-inspired critiques that have received updated treatments in the work of many contemporary philosophers. Robert L. Holmes’s classic, On War and Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), draws many of its examples from the Cold War era, building many of its arguments around US-Soviet relations during the 1980s. The anti-warist position adopted by Holmes was similarly taken up by other thinkers writing in the same period. Duane L. Cady’s From Warism to Pacifism is another key text arguing along similar lines (updated in a second edition published late in 2010 by Temple University Press). A more recent work that draws its examples heavily from both the War on Terror and the Iraq war reaches a very similar pacifist-inspired/antiwarist conclusion; this work is Andrew Fiala’s The Just War Myth (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), an influential text I have extensively used.
Among the most absurd of arguments or reasons is the accusation that Saddam’s government was involved in an assassination attempt on the first Bush. Coincidentally, there are no notes or references to support these claims in an article I came across which makes this connection. See Thomas M. Nichols, “Just War, Not Prevention,” Ethics and International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2003): 26–28.
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). See especially Chapter 8, “Iraq and Dreams of Transforming the Middle East,” 229–62.
The regime toppling and subsequent “democratization” of Iraq, as well as the aim of ensuring US economic gains, was officially signed into law with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 under the Clinton Administration. See George Leaman, “Iraq, American Empire, and the War on Terrorism,” in The Philosophical Challenge of September 11, eds. Joseph Margolis, Tom Rockmore, and Armen T. Marsoobian (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 4–18, 8n16.
Tom Rockmore, “Can War Transform Iraq into a Democracy?,” Theoria 103 (April 2004): 16.
A hypothetical price tag on the Iraq war is detailed in a recent work by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. What many of us would be surprised to hear is that nearly five trillion dollars of this amount is borrowed money, and once we do the accounting on the war in Afghanistan, the bill surpasses seven trillion dollars; of course that number is likely to increase in the coming years. See Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
This point is discussed at length by Helen Stacy. The idea is that if humanitarian intervention is to make sense at all, it ought to be extended to include other gross human rights violations, such as global problems of starvation and world hunger. See Helen Stacy, “Humanitarian Intervention and Relational Sovereignty,” in Intervention, Terrorism, and Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory, ed. Steven P. Lee (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 89–104.
Oman G. Encarnacion, “Coming to Terms with Iraq,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 3 (2005): 93.
John Rawls, Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8.
This is briefly discussed in David E. Cooper, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 92–107.
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© 2012 Bassam Romaya
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Romaya, B. (2012). Introduction. In: The Iraq War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137055309_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137055309_1
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