Top Stories Wednesday 22 Jan
Today is election day in the Netherlands, so few updates.
Junius addresses the
case against war:
The case for war against Iraq is very weak. It has two components, neither of which stand up to
serious examination. The first is that the US is entitled to make war as an act of pre-emptive
self-defence. This clearly fails both because no-one has established that Iraq represents a
credible threat to the US and because the putatively justifying doctrine, if generalized, would
permit states to engage in actions which no right-thinking person would wish to sanction. Most
obviously, a right of pre-emption as loose as that needed to justify a war against Iraq would also
justify either an Indian first strike against Pakistan or a Pakistani first strike against India.
(We philosophers would therefore say that this principle has counterintuitive consequences.)
[…]
The second main strand is the Saddam-is-evil/democratization argument. Saddam is evil, no question
about that. This is a much better set of arguments in principle, but fails because, given the
dramatis personae, there is no good reason to believe that the war will actually pursue democracy.
I’m not a supporter of the view that it is never justifiable to intervene in the internal affairs of
a sovereign state. Sometimes such intervention can certainly be justified. A case in point was the
ousting of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese (where did Dick Cheney stand on that one, by the way?). But an
intervention in the name of democracy or human rights has to meet a very high bar of justification:
after all this is a highly coercive use of state power which is certainly going to deprive many Iraqis
of their lives, liberties and estates and others of their limbs and loved ones.…