It seems that Barack Obama is going to take his time withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Actually this shouldn’t surprise anyone, given that Obama is as much a welfare-state man as George W. Bush.
Welfare state, you ask? What does devotion to the welfare state have to do with Iraq?
Most Americans exuberantly supported the invasion of Iraq based on a theory of self-defense. Through a clever use of propaganda, innuendo, and implication, the president, vice president, and other high U.S. officials led Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein was about to unleash weapons of mass destruction, including mushroom clouds, on the United States. Thus, while Americans knew that the invasion would kill and maim countless Iraqis, they justified such killings as a necessary thing to do to defend the United States from an imminent WMD attack by Iraq.
However, when it became clear that the WMD threat was bogus, many Americans remained exuberant supporters of the invasion and occupation. What they did is simply shift the principal rationale for killing Iraqis from one of self-defense to one of welfare — that is, helping the Iraqi people to establish democracy, something that they were having trouble doing on their own.
Thus, once it became clear that the WMD threat had been baseless, there was no remorse over the killing, maiming, and torture of Iraqis up to that point. Instead, Americans quickly accepted the president’s alternative justification for invading Iraq: We’re doing it to bring democracy to Iraq and, therefore, it’s okay to continue killing Iraqis in the pursuit of that goal.
Through it all, there was never an upper limit to the number of Iraqis who could be killed in the attempt to bring democracy to their country. All that mattered was the greater good of Iraqi society. The sacrifices that had to be made by the Iraqi people to achieve that goal were only of secondary concern.
Hardly a week goes by without some newspaper article or speech referring to the 4,000 American soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq. Every Sunday in churches across America, ministers exhort their congregations to pray for the troops in Iraq. The troops are considered to be heroes for risking their lives in the attempt to bring democracy to Iraq.
Yet, when do you ever hear any laments for the millions of Iraqi victims of the invasion and occupation — that is, those who have been killed, maimed, tortured, and exiled? Hardly ever. They are simply considered the necessary costs of bringing democracy to their country. And no price is too high to pay in terms of Iraqi deaths and injuries to achieve that goal.
As we witness President Obama dragging his feet on ordering an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, we shouldn’t forget that the principal justification that President Clinton relied upon for the brutal sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people during his term in office was the same welfare-state function that Bush ultimately relied upon to justify his invasion. When asked by “Sixty Minutes” whether the deaths of half-a-million children from the sanctions had been worth it, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright provided the Clinton’s administration’s welfare-state position:: “We think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” She was referring to the price that Iraqi children had to pay in the U.S. attempt to bring regime change to Iraq.
That’s what passes for morality in the mind of the welfare-statist — the propriety of sacrificing some for the greater good of all. It’s that perverse “morality” that has been used to justify more than 15 years of death, maiming, torture, and destruction in Iraq.
