Abstract

Tautology in Action

The author argues that the self-reinforcing logic the Bush administration has offered for continuing the military occupation of Iraq is flawed. A new justification for our war on Iraq has been born out of the war itself. No one will have forgotten that the war was launched to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq (weapons that have turned out not to be there); to end support of Iraq for Al Qaeda (also missing); and to build a democracy in Iraq as a glowing lesson in governance for the whole Middle East (a democracy that looks more and more like a mirage). But now we are invited to set aside all these disproven or failing prewar justifications and embrace a new, postwar one: We must stay in Iraq because, having once gone in, we cannot afford to fail. The claim has a certain argument-stopping plausibility. It seems to mark the boundaries of a new mainstream consensus. It has cross-appeal to war opposers and war supporters. War supporters are saved from having to confess error. For some war opposers, too, the new justification is plausible, because it seems to acknowledge a responsibility toward the Iraqi people. Helping Iraq now becomes the cost to be paid for the mistake of going to war in the first place. If the United States were to restrict itself to supplying technical and humanitarian support, there could be no argument. Probably, there is also a humanitarian argument for providing stop-gap security. What the United States chiefly proposes to provide for the Iraqi people is not in fact humanitarian aid. It proposes to provide them a democratic government. With every day that passes it becomes clearer that the Iraqis do not wish to receive a new government from American hands. But the United States is not Iraq and what is good for it might well be a disaster for Iraq.