Anti-Climacus

PRE-EMPTIVE, PREVENTIVE, AND HUMANITARIAN: Bill Wallo asks a pretty good question of pro-war types:

"On the other hand, I don’t see as many “pro-war” folks honestly assessing the “pre-emptive strike” side of things as I’d like; far too many of them seem locked into the “well, everybody thought the WMDs were there” line of defense. It still doesn’t really address whether “preemptive” war (or the so-called Bush Doctrine) can be articulately defended, or whether “humanitarian intervention” actually works."

In the mess of pro-war discussion, there's sometimes as many as three different types of arguments being offered:

pre-emptive: we believe an attack or threat is immanent, so we strike first.

preventive: we believe that an attack or war will eventually be fought, possibly on terms that are disadvantageous to us (such as, for example, Iraq possessing nuclear weapons), so we strike before there's even time for a threat to arise.

humanitarian/regime change: our moral obligations do not allow us not to act in response to a degenerate situation within a regime.

Obviously, the Bush administration has offered versions of all three arguments. For myself, I think I've clung mostly to the third, but I never exactly turned down rhetorical help from the other two, when it could be provided. As to the first two, the moral argument for pre-emptive war is that, given that a conflict will occur (this is perhaps a hard supposition to hold in the case of Iraq, but it doesn't seem so ridiculous in the abstract), and given an interest in minimizing the costs of war, the most efficacious possible action is to produce a first strike so overwhelming it will encourage the other side not to retaliate. Obviously, there's a moral justification that can be offered (given that you're in the amoral situation of a war, this is one way to try and make it a quick and relatively painless one), though it has to be weighed against a couple of entirely subjective factors (belief in the immanence of a threat and the absence of other (acceptable*) resolutions). It's not a decision to be made lightly, but by no means do I think this option should be off the table**.

Preventive war is on much shakier moral ground, since it requires not the actual presence of a threat, but only the supposition that a threat might arise. I don't believe that this can be countenanced in foreign policy, and I don't think it should be (at least not as an exponent of purely realist concerns about relative military strengths). This is one where it's probably in everyone's best interests to remove it as an option straightaway.

Regime change is a sub-category of preventive wars which replaces the purely negative concerns of prevention (the fear of being surpassed) with something positive: the belief that liberal governments are the only ways of maintaining peace, security and growth across the world. Nevertheless, I think the assumption here always has to be in the negative: unless some conditions are met which would allow us to assume liberal government could take root, we should avoid this option (I've listed some of those conditions before, and I'd be happy to do so again, if there's interests; note also that this is why I supported regime change in Iraq but do not support it in, say, Iran or the Sudan).

Finally, there's humanitarian motives. These are, in a key way, essentially different: preempitve and preventive doctrines look primarily toward the future and the gauging of threats; humanitarian motives look primarily to the past and present, and say, 'what has been, and what continues to be, is offensive to us as human beings. We have the capability to stop it, and we can let it go no further.' This is the argument to hang one's hat on***. To sidestep Bill's big question, it's irrelevant (to some extent, anyway) whether or not one succeeds in a humanitarian intervention: certainly on the individual level, we don't judge the value of the humanitarian act on it's results (though good results are better, there's something valuable and meaningful in the effort, but perhaps more on this later, if it's still not clear).

*I think that not every outcome is preferable to peace, and I'll quote y'all some Locke as justification if you want it.

**All the moreso because I doubt, as a matter of geopolitics, that anyone else is willing to take it off the table.

***I recognize there's a problem here because this sort of logic tends to run roughshod over the language of national sovereignty (that is, this could equally be applied to slave-holding America as it could to Iraq). Part of the answer here has to speak back to the difference between liberal and autocratic regimes: a liberal regime can and should be pressured to make changes, though not militarily, because to change is to move within the traditions of rights discourses, etc, which have already been established. An autocratic regime can appeal to nothing but caprice, which suggests another range of policies (more militarily-based) might be in order. But these things, as always, are meant to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.