What About Iraq? Consequentialist Reasoning

Cathy Young writes for Reason magazine. I like her writing and her arguments, and she's one of those columnists I read when I have a chance. The other day she published a column in the Globe where she said the jury was still out on Iraq. I thought, still out! I also thought she could be right: you can't tell how things are going to turn out.

The problem with this reasoning is that it's consequentialist. Consequentialist reasoning is where you judge the rightness or wrongness of something based on its consequences. By this reasoning, we don't know yet whether going to war in Iraq was the right thing or the wrong thing to do, because we don't have a full balance sheet yet on all the good and bad consequences of the decision. Consequentialist thinking about the war is totally mainstream. Most of the public commentary on the war fits this model. We shouldn't have gone in there because so many bad things happened as a result. We should have gone in there because we got Hussein and we're bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. The battle of consequences continues, and as the election approaches, neither side seems to have much of an advantage. And as Ms. Young observed, the jury is still out because we're still in the middle of the war.

How about an argument that says we shouldn't have attacked Iraq because it was wrong in itself? We don't need a jury to tell us that an unprovoked attack on another country is wrong. We don't need a jury to tell us that you don't attack a country because they might pose a threat to you in the future. If we're going to go to war on that basis, we should start preparations to march on Beijing right now.

So the moral question on the Iraqi war is easy to answer. The charges about weapons of mass destruction were trumped up, and it was obvious before we went in there that they were. The charges about links between Hussein and Al Qaeda were trumped up, and that charge was so laughable I still can't understand how our leaders could have made it. If they hadn't made that charge, sympathetic historians might have said the war in Iraq was an honest, understandable mistake, in light of 9/11. Having suggested the connection, having persuade people it was true, historians will have to see the grounds for war as dishonest, the war itself as a vicious fraud.

I should add before I sign off that I use consequentialist arguments myself. You can't make good evaluations without them. The biggest consequence of the war in Iraq, I've argued, is that it makes defeat in our war against Al Qaeda much more likely. We cannot lose that war and survive as a civilization. This misstep in Iraq will be with us for a long time, and if we do lose the war against Al Qaeda, historians will see the attack on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, as the first step toward defeat. That's a big consequence.

So please don't conclude that I regard consequences as unimportant. Rather, we should evaluate consequences and the thing itself. Sound judgment depends on good reasoning in both areas. We've had a lot of analysis that centers on the war's results. That's no surprise, since the analysts are policymakers and others who evaluate policies based on costs and benefits. Cost-benefit analysis is useful for economic decisions, but it's not your tool of choice for moral questions. A decision about war or peace is the supreme moment in moral reasoning. Our decision to initiate war was a grave moral failure. We attacked a nation that was not capable of attacking us, and we let escape an enemy that had clearly demonstrated its ability to attack us. The only way to correct this failure is to admit the mistake, carefully extract ourselves from Iraq, then pursue our real enemy with all vigor. Are we capable of that?