Was the war necessary?
By James Carroll, 7/22/2003
WHY DOES the apparent suicide of David Kelly strike such a
chord? The British weapons expert found himself in the
middle of the controversy over the Bush-Blair hyping of the
Saddam Hussein threat. Unsourced BBC reports, an aggressive
parliamentary interrogation, the stresses of weapons
inspection, a government's credibility in jeopardy, a rat's
nest of deceptions - all of this together could weigh too
much on one man.
Though the private demons of any suicide remain mysterious
forever, it seems that being snagged into this dispute
sparked an anguish in Dr. Kelly that he could not
bear. ''He told his wife he was taking a walk,'' an AP
report said. ''A local farmer said Kelly smiled as he
passed.'' Some hours later, early Friday, he was found near
a woods, his left wrist slashed.
Kelly gives a name and a face to the fact that the dispute
over intelligence manipulated to justify a ''preventive
war'' is a matter of life and death. This is not a mere
question of politics anymore, another argument between
liberals and conservatives. When told of Kelly's death,
Prime Minister Tony Blair called it ''an absolutely
terrible tragedy.'' But the burden that broke this man was,
at bottom, weight of the absolutely terrible question, Was
the British-American war against Iraq necessary?
Every person killed in that war - certainly including the
young American soldiers still dying by the day -
represents ''an absolutely terrible tragedy.'' On the News
Hour with Jim Lehrer, a daily honor roll is kept, with
photographs of dead Americans shown in silence. It has
become a poignant and depressing ritual, but in that
silence, one also asks: And what of the Iraqi dead?
The coalition air war commander, Lieutenant General T.
Michael Moseley, revealed this weekend that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld had to personally sign off on any
airstrike ''thought likely to result in deaths of more than
30 civilians,'' as The New York Times reported. ''More than
50 such strikes were proposed, and all of them were
approved.'' Moseley also revealed that the much celebrated
stealth attack on Hussein's bunker early in the war was a
double miss. Not only was there no Hussein; there was no
bunker. Sorry about that.
One sees the traditional just war ethic at work: A
necessary war can involve the ''collateral damage'' of
civilian deaths - tragic, but acceptable. But was the war
necessary? That question defines the stakes in the dispute
over the ways George Bush and Tony Blair misrepresented the
prospect of Saddam Hussein with nuclear, biological, and
chemical arms. When allied warplanes knowingly and
repeatedly attacked targets that would kill significant
numbers of civilians, only the urgent effort to prevent
Hussein's mass-destructive and imminent aggression could
have justified such carnage. But now the proffered
rationale of necessity is being shown to have been false.
The ''preventive war,'' as it turns out, prevented nothing.
At a press conference in Japan the day after David Kelly's
body was found, Tony Blair was asked, ''Have you got blood
on your hands, prime minister?'' Alas, there is an ocean of
blood on the hands of Tony Blair and George Bush. Whether
shown to be ''lying'' or not, they shunted aside the
ambiguities and uncertainties that characterized the prewar
intelligence assessments of Hussein's threat. And though,
as I argued last week, there is a long tradition of leaders
manipulating intelligence estimates for their own preset
purposes, the act of war is in a special category. When
disputed intelligence is the basis of war, then the
leader's reading of that intelligence had better be proven
true. Otherwise the just war argument from necessity fails.
No wonder the dispute won't die. The questions matter too
much. No wonder polls are shifting away from Bush. Citizens
of the United States do not like to think of themselves as
wanton killers. No wonder American soldiers in Iraq are
openly expressing doubts. A democracy's first requirement
of military discipline is the army's belief in the moral
necessity of its mission. No wonder, even, pressures of the
dispute may have driven one man to kill himself. The issue
is mortal: Was George Bush's new style ''preventive'' war
just another war of aggression, after all?
Tony Blair was asked if he would resign, and at least one
prominent Democrat hurled the word impeachment at the
president. But the political consequences of this
controversy begin to take second place to the moral, and
even legal. The traditional ethic declares that a war of
aggression is inherently unjust and that every civilian
death caused by such a war is murder. More than 50 air
raids, each with more than 30 Iraqi civilian fatalities,
each expressly approved by Rumsfeld. Absolutely terrible
tragedies, every one. And also - more evident by the day -
every one a war crime.
Source: The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/203/oped/Was_the_
war_necessary_%2B.shtm
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