One of the current narrative threads concerning the situation in Iraq is that, even if we're winning, it wasn't worth the cost in blood and treasure. But how does one assess what price would be worth paying to accomplish what we have accomplished? Was the Revolutionary war worth the cost? How about the Civil war, or WWII, or Korea? How could anyone answer those questions at the time? They're difficult enough to answer even now. How do we assess how many American lives and how many American dollars are just the right price to:
- Liberate 25 million people
- Remove a bloodthirsty mass killer who was a threat to the entire region and a supporter of terrorism.
- Induce Libya and, if the NIE is to be believed (I'm skeptical), Iran to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions.
- Hand al Qaeda a crucial defeat on a battlefield of their choosing and kill tens of thousands of terrorist torturers and mass murderers.
- Gain an important ally (or quasi-ally) in the region.
The nay-sayers counter with the claim that we've lost prestige around the world, but where's the evidence of that? The left-wing European media despises us, of course, but then they always have. The European people themselves, however, have chosen Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and Nicholas Sarkozy to lead their countries, and all of these are pro-American leaders, the latter two even moreso than their predecessors. In South America Hugo Chavez's anti-American rhetoric is not being particularly well-received even by the people who elected him in Venezuela. In Australia staunch ally Prime Minister John Howard was defeated, but his successor, Kevin Rudd, is also pro-American.
In any event, so what if we're not loved? It's a sad fact of human nature that people who envy or who feel indebted to someone tend to resent the one they envy. Machiavelli was right when he said that it's better to be loved than hated, but it's much better to be feared than loved. When people perceive you as strong and willing to use your strength they'll fear and respect you even if they don't love you. If they perceive you to be weak they will despise you, especially if they envy and resent your success, and will work to destroy you.
The important thing is to use one's strength to make the world a more just place and to do it with as much compassion as circumstances allow. If people despise us for our efforts to bring about justice that's unfortunate but it shouldn't dissuade us.
The question concerning Iraq, then, is not whether it was worth the cost. Anyone who gives a yes or no answer to that question at the present moment doesn't know what he's talking about. Only time will give us the answer. What we can ask at this juncture, though, is why, given what we presently know, anyone would be convinced that the answer is no.Having said that, the most important question we need to ask about Iraq is whether we have increased the amount of justice in the world by doing what we did. If the answer to that is yes, then all the arguments over WMD, etc. are unimportant. What we did was good. Whether the good achieved in this instance was worth the cost only time will tell.
RLC
