Generous reader Rob Sica wrote months ago as follows:

“As a great admirer of your acute work on Nietzsche, I’m particularly well-disposed towards being disabused by you of my long-standing conviction that the humanitarian warrant for the war in Iraq trumps the countervailing considerations of its critics. As far as I can tell, David Rieff’s July 27, 2003 New York Times Magazine article “Were Sanctions Right?” assembles the fundamental data on the basis of which liberals should, in perfectly good conscience, have supported, and continue to support, the war:

* The UN sanctions regime, refracted by Saddam, simultaneously took an increasingly unacceptable humanitarian toll upon the Iraqi people and enabled Saddam to augment the efficiency and severity of his control within Iraq.

* Tightening the UN sanctions regime would have aggravated both of these trends.

* Loosening the UN sanctions regime would have further enabled Saddam to augment the efficiency and severity of his control within Iraq.

Perhaps you might consider this matter worthy of address in your piquant blog.”

Mr. Sica and I have corresponded a bit about this during the intervening months. As luck would have it, Chomsky addresses this argument here. Briefly, Chomsky rejects the third premise, above, and also notes:

“It was predicted by just about every serious specialist that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of terror as well as proliferation of WMD. The first prediction has been amply verified, with terrible consequences and probably more to come, and Iraq itself has admittedly become a ‘terrorist haven’ for the first time. The second prediction is also considered to have been confirmed by many regional specialists and strategic analysts, and is unfortunately all too plausible. There is more. Uncontroversially, the invasion struck a serious blow at the system of international law and institutions that offers at least some hope of saving the world from destruction. And though victors do not tabulate the consequences of their crimes, there is little doubt that the numbers of Iraqis killed is in the tens of thousands. And there is a good deal more.”

I would add only a few observations to Chomsky’s:

first, there is nothing humanitarian about war, since it involves the killing and maiming of human beings–in this case, as Chomsky notes, tens of thousands of human beings (perhaps more, we really don’t know);

second, the circumstances where this kind of guaranteed carnage would be justified by some greater gain for humanity will be rare and, for obvious reasons, ought to be presumptively deemed rare;

third, in calculating humanitarian consequences as a justification for inhumanitarian actions like war, we need to weigh the predictable but collateral consequences, like the damage to the international law system and the legitimization of lunatic doctrines like that of preventive war; and

fourth, in assessing the likelihood of humanitarian consequences from inhumane state actions, it is surely reasonable to weigh the track record of the state actors and their likely motives, especially since, as we presumably all know, state actors will regularly claim humanitarian aims, even when pursuing the more typical state goals of accumulation of wealth and power; in light of that, it borders on the incredible to think the current Administration should be trusted with bringing about humanitarian consequences.

In light of all these considerations, it seems to me that the idea of a “humanitarian” justification for the invasion of Iraq is a cruel illusion, which, if widely accepted, would guarantee greater misery for humanity at large. Fortunately, it appears that this naive post-hoc rationalization for U.S. crimes has won little acceptance, which bodes well for the future, assuming that the international community can find ways to constrain future U.S. misconduct.

UPDATE: Reader WMR writes:

“I wonder if Mr. Sica has also read David Rieff’s article “Blueprint for a Mess” in the NYTimes Magazine, November 2, 2003.

“It is now behind their archive wall, but as I recall, Rieff said that the invasion may well be a greater success as a humanitarian project than as a weapons control project, but it is not much of a success in that regard either, largely because it was never planned to BE a primarily humanitarian intervention.

“Of course, the evidence is that there was little planning of any sort, even military, but if our intentions had been humanitarian, we might have been better prepared to deal with the all-too-predictable civilian situation that evolved. On this understanding, the humanitarian argument can now be little more than an attempt at diversion.”