Anti-Climacus

WELL: Interesting post on Iraq and the neoconservative rethinking thereof by Daniel Nexon. He says:

"Nevertheless, I do wish Cohen hadn't written this: "the Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass destruction." The Bush administration did not, principally, do itself a disservice; it did the American people a disservice. By justifying the war on grounds that were, at best, not very compelling (Hussein was not about to give nuclear weapons to terrorists to attack New York) and, at worst, dishonest, the administration undermined democratic decision-making; it may also have, in the long term, undermined popular support for staying the course in Iraq.

More importantly, however, the Bush administration undermined American credibility. Remember Powell's presentation at the UN? Remember the reaction of the other members of the Security Council? The French were right that it was nonsense (scroll down to the February 5 box). From a foreign-policy perspective, that's not the outcome the US really wants, now is it?"

Now, of course, as one of those people who supported the war for broadly humanitarian interventionist reasons, I certainly would have preferred that my particular reasons had been at the top of the Administration's list of justifications. However, I think it's also reasonably clear that there weren't really better options available because,

1. So far as I am aware, no intervention has ever been permitted for humanitarian intervention reasons alone: it always has to be supported by some national-security interest pretext, no matter how flimsy (and thus I think back to what I quoted of Michael Walzer and his claim that even invasions which could clearly be justified for humanitarian reasons would have been unlikely to receive any kind of international support). It seems like the only real difference is that the United States, in trying to do this, takes on a higher profile than, say, Vietnam invading Cambodia.

2. I'm not going to take the position of arguing that the Bush administration's difficulties in the last few months (and periodically before that) articulating what exactly the goal of being in Iraq is hasn't hurt the long-term viability of staying until things are reasonably back to normal. I do, however, generally disagree with the implied counterfactual: that if Bush had based his arguments primarily on humanitarian motivations, this would generate more public support for 'staying the course.' My experience with public-opinion-and-war literature is somewhat limited, so I can't really speak ex cathedra, but my suspicion is that more prosaic reasons might have prevented the war from ever being really popular in the long haul. Also, despite arguments about the need to respect the norms of the democratic process, I can't really see how it's the case that what is right to do, or continue doing, is actually related to what people want to do (but that's the philosopher in me talking).