Everywhere from high school and college campuses to bus stops and dinner tables, we hear a lot about what a "quagmire" and "costly mess" Iraq has become for the United States, now being blamed as a Republican war, for how the Bush Administration handled the occupation—that 'it should've been done this or that way'—and 'now that we're there we can't leave, it's our 'responsibility' to fix the problem we made because it'll only get worse if we leave—those people will kill each other', and so on. What do you say to these arguments that seem to interweave with each other? And what would you suggest in terms of what some might call an 'honorable solution'? International measures, immediate withdrawal—both?
The position of the liberal doves during the Vietnam War was articulated lucidly by historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, when the war was becoming too costly for the
There is no "honorable solution" to a war of aggression—the "supreme international crime" that differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows, in the wording of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which condemned Nazi war criminals to death for such crimes as "pre-emptive war." We can only seek the least awful solution. In doing so, we should bear in mind some fundamental principles, among them, that aggressors have no rights, only responsibilities.
The responsibilities are to pay enormous reparations for the harm they have caused, to hold the criminals responsible accountable, and to pay close attention to the wishes of the victims. In this case, we know their wishes quite well. Poll after poll has yielded results similar to those reported by the military in December, after a study of focus groups around the country. They report that Iraqis from all over the country and all walks of life have "shared beliefs," which they enumerated: The American invasion is to blame for the sectarian violence and other horrors, and the invaders should withdraw, leaving Iraq—or what's left of it—to Iraqis.
It tells us a lot about our own moral and intellectual culture that the voice of Iraqis, though known, is not even considered in the thoughtful and comprehensive articles in the media reviewing the options available to
Is there anyone saying the war was fundamentally wrong?
In the case of
In the media and journals, it is very hard to find any voice that criticizes the invasion or
Dissidents, of course, describe "the supreme international crime" as fundamentally wrong. I haven't seen polls about public attitudes on this question.
What about when it is that people know to undertake more serious or severe resistance efforts after the point at which "the limits of possible protest" are reached? In a letter to George Steiner in the NYR, in 1967, you gave the example of what this might look like, now 60 years ago during the Spanish Civil War, when people found it quite necessary to join international brigades to fight against the army of their own country; or, applied to Vietnam, the possible action one might undertake in such circumstances of travelling to Hanoi as a hostage against further bombing. —That's pretty far-reaching, relatively speaking, to what we see in current resistance efforts today against the war. What's your feeling about the possibilities for such methods today in relation to the
In the case of
As for living with the victims to help them or provide them some measure of protection, that is a phenomenon of the 1980s, for the first time in imperial history, to my knowledge, in reaction to Reagan's terrorist wars that devastated Central America, one of his many horrendous crimes. The solidarity movements that took shape then have now extended worldwide, though only in limited ways to Iraq, because the catastrophe created by Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and the rest is so extraordinary that it is almost impossible to survive in the wreckage—the main reason why reporting is so skimpy; it is simply too dangerous, unlike earlier wars of imperial aggression.
