Yes, a War Would Be Moral

By Andrew Sullivan

The strongest emotional appeal of the movement opposing a war against Saddam Hussein is the idea that peace should always be given the moral benefit of the doubt over war. War is always "failure," as French President Jacques Chirac has put it. Most religious leaders--from the Pope on down--have argued that peace is almost always morally preferable to war, and that this war--whatever its strategic or political justification--would be simply unjust. Indeed, many of these authorities have gone right up to the edge of saying that peace under any circumstance deserves not only a chance but an almost infinite number of chances before we resort to force of arms. But this ignores the fact that some wars are obviously moral. The war against Hitler killed millions--but it was just.

No sane person, after all, is opposed to peace as such. The question is, Peace at what risk? Peace on whose terms? Peace for how long? Looked at this way, war is not only sometimes a moral option--as theologians have long argued. Sometimes it's the only moral option we have. In some ways, this war is a textbook example of that. First off, we are not initiating a war. We are not the aggressor. We are still in a long process of defense. It's hard to remember now, but this war is not a new one. It's merely the continuation of one begun in 1990 by Saddam when he invaded Kuwait. Recall that when that war was won 12 years ago, no peace treaty was signed. Instead, a truce was arranged on a clear and unequivocal condition: that Saddam completely disarm himself of weapons of mass destruction. Since no one--not even the U.N. inspectors--believes that such disarmament has happened, the truce no longer holds.

The issue is therefore not whether to start a war. It is whether to end one by rewarding the aggressor and simply ignoring his infractions of the truce. Such a policy, inasmuch as it clearly rewards unprovoked violence, is immoral and imprudent. Have we exhausted every single alternative to war? Well, we have spent the past 12 years trying to find peaceful ways to get Saddam to live up to his promises. Waves of inspections, countless resolutions, occasional use of targeted force under the Clinton Administration, crippling economic sanctions and finally an attempt under U.N. Resolution 1441 to give Saddam a last, last chance to disarm. He was told nearly four months ago by a unanimous U.N. Security Council that he had to disarm immediately and completely. He still hasn't. I can't think of any recent war that tried so hard for so long to give peace a chance. This isn't so much a "rush to war," as some have bizarrely called it. It's an endless, painstaking, nail-biting crawl.

But can the war be legitimate without the sanction of the U.N.? Of course it can. Traditional just-war theory leaves the responsibility for grave decisions like these to the relevant authorities--the parties to the dispute and the countries planning to take action. We do not live under a world government. We live under a system in which nation states wield authority in cooperation with one another. A coalition of the willing--a majority of the states in Europe, the U.S., Britain and other countries--easily qualifies as a legitimate source of authority for launching war.

Is there a credible alternative? Well, there is one obvious alternative to war: continuation of economic sanctions on Iraq. But these sanctions have long been abused by Saddam to allow him to finance his weapons programs while leaving thousands of innocent Iraqis, including children, to starve or die for lack of good medical care. Is it moral to allow this intense suffering to continue indefinitely while we congratulate ourselves for giving "peace" a chance? Is it more moral to maintain that horror indefinitely rather than to try to win a quick war to depose Saddam, free the Iraqi people from tyranny and end the sanctions?

War is an awful thing. But it isn't the most awful thing. No one disputes the evil of Saddam's brutal police state. No one doubts that he would get and use weapons of mass destruction if he could. No one can guarantee that he would not help Islamist terrorists get exactly those weapons to use against the West or his own regional enemies. No one disputes that the Iraqi people would be better off under almost any other regime than the current one--or that vast numbers of them, including almost every Iraqi exile, endorse a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimum of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice.