The Hypocracy of the ‘Anti-War’ Movement

Two years ago it was clear that our nation was on a path which would lead to the conquest and occupation of Iraq. In the months leading up to the final invasion, there were many both in America and abroad who put great time and effort into preventing this invasion. To this end they spoke passionately and convincingly about the horrors of war, detailing its manifold miseries. This was noble, for all too often we allow ourselves to forget the breadth of devistation that armed struggle brings. But unfortunately, it was also beside the point.

The problem was that most of these people somehow convinced themselves that they were witnessing the beginning of a war. According to this logic, if they could prevent the war from starting, they could spare the thousands of lives that it would surely claim. This was a great idea, except that it ignored the bloody warfare that was at that moment consuming the nation of Iraq and that had done so unceasingly for more than ten years. If in 2002 they wanted to prevent war in Iraq they were far too late, for by then it had been some time since Iraq had known peace.

When the Gulf War ended and Kurdish and Shi’ite millitias fought for control of their cities, Iraq was not at peace. When they lost the fight and Hussein’s gestapo moved in and tortuously murdered tens of thousands of the rebels along with their wives and children, Iraq was not at peace. When American and British planes were making weekly bombing raids on military bases in the no-fly zones, when the Iraqi government diverted oil-for-food proceeds to strengthen the Republican Guard, and when every day Hussein’s secret police imprisoned, tortured, and murdered unknown numbers of civilians just to maintain its brutal stranglehold on the nation’s political system, Iraq was not at peace.

Thus the question that confronted our nation when Bush came to power was not whether to begin a war with Iraq, but how to manage a war that was already raging and showed no signs of ending. For his part, Saddam Hussein had proven himself to be utterly devoted to its preservation, refusing to relinquish his position or make the consessions the world community required to end the UN sanctions regime. Ten years of static conflict had given him an even stronger grip on power, and there was every reason to believe that he would be able to survive this kind of fighting for decades to come.

To oppose the administration’s plan to oust Hussein was thus to support his continued rule and an indefinite continuation of the brutality and slaughter that was his only means of staying in power. Those who marched in opposition to the administration’s plan for invasion and occupation were therefore in no way working for peace, but merely for a different kind of war - a slower, quieter, more familliar war in which Americans didn’t die.

My contention is not that there was something inherently, morally wrong with this position; there were some scenarios one could have imagined to which ten or twenty years of Hussein’s casual slaughter might actually have been preferable. But what I do contend was immoral was the refusal of most ‘anti-war’ protesters to admit to themselves and the nation that they, too, had blood on their hands.

If these people believed that choosing the status quo would result in fewer deaths, then they were certainly right to try and bring that about. But they should not have confused fewer deaths with no deaths. Most supporters of the war believed that a U.S. invasion would in the long run result in a more peaceful and stable Iraq, but made no bones about the fact that it would cause many to die in the short term.
But most of those who sought to maintain the simmering war as it was did everything they could through rhetoric and sophistry to pretend that their choice would not wind up condemning millions to oppression, deprivation, and early death.

Had they succeeded, they would have quickly gone on with their lives as if nothing had happened. And twenty years later, when the Iraqi people were in the same brutal situation as in 2002, or 1992, how many of them would even have recognized that they were partially to blame?

Those who felt that the coming invasion was wrong certainly should have held fast to their convictions and tried to stop it. But they should have done so with the sober realization that they were playing a very dangerous game - one in which inaction can sometimes kill as surely as action. And they should have admitted at least to themselves that their moral character was perhaps not so terribly different from their opponents’.