Means and Ends

I keep reading and hearing people say that it doesn't matter if we don't find any WMD in Iraq - or even why we can't - because Saddam was such a bad, bad man and getting rid of him was good. In other words, the ends justify the means.

The problem is, of course, if we decide that the ends justify our means, then we have to be willing to accept that others will likewise claim their own deeds are justified by the outcome. I don't think it's in our best interest to do that.

Just as an example, we know that our stationing troops in Saudi Arabia during and after the first Gulf War is part of what made Osama bin Laden and his al-Qeada members so angry at us to begin with. They wanted our Western butts out of their country and off of their Holy Lands. To achieve this goal, they used terrorism, killing thousands around the world, in hopes that they would push us to withdraw our troops. The longer we refused to budge, the angerier they became so that now, the issues are much larger than just that. But, it has still been a long term goal of theirs to get us out of Saudi Arabia, and every terrorist act they've committed has had, at it's core, that goal as part of it's justification.

Every terrorist act. Including the big one - September 11, 2001.

Following the 9/11 attacks, our government decided that they wanted to get Saddam out of office. In his interview with Vanity Fair, and in the DOD transcript of that interview, Paul Wolfowitz acknowledges that, at least in part, the stratigic considerations regarding Saudi Arabia and our troops being there were part of why we decided we needed to take Saddam out.

Once the war in Iraq was "concluded" (such as it is), we announced that we would be removing our troops from Saudi Arabia - helping Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda meet one of their primary goals.

Now, to them, getting us out of Saudi Arabia is a very, very good thing - just as to us, getting Saddam Hussein out of power is a very, very good thing. I am sure there are many Muslims around the world who are overjoyed that we are removing our troops, but I also have no doubt that a great number of them disagree with the tactics al-Qaeda used to achieve that goal. These people don't condone terrorism, they don't condone the 9/11 attacks, or the fomenting of hatred against the US that bin Laden has engaged in. Do we want to give them the message that the end result of finally getting us out of Saudi Arabia - remember, they think it's a very good thing - actually justifies all the lives that were taken in getting us to this point?

I know that I, personally, do not want to send that message. I don't believe that the ends do justify the means. Now I'm sure some of you will say that al-Qaeda's killing of innocent civilians in their terrorist attacks in no where near comperable to Bush or the PNAC crowd lying about WMD or any of the other deceptions they used to get us into the war. But it is also the war, itself, that so many supported based on the claims made by the government, that is part of those "means" that we used to topple Saddam Hussein.

When people say that it doesn't matter if we find WMD in Iraq because the war was justified for other reasons - in particular getting Saddam out of office - they're not trying to justify the end goal (the removal of Saddam), they're trying to justify the war - and are saying that regardless of why we fought the war, the end result of it makes all of the rest - including all the innocent Iraqi citizens we killed or wounded, all the soldiers that have died - and continue to die, even though the war is "over", all of the destruction, all of the looting, all of it - the whole big, ugly, ball of wax, is just hunky-dory because Saddam's gone.

The American people would not have supported the war had we not been told by our leaders that they knew, for a fact, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Saddam had lethal weapons of mass destruction that he could give to terrorists or use against us himself. If we had been told that we needed to depose him because he was an evil dictator who treated his people cruelly (the main reason we are being given now), there would not have been as much support for the war as there was, simply because that description fits too many other dictators, and we're not, as a nation, about to start taking all of them out. Even if we wanted to, we simply can't - we haven't the money or the manpower.

So, the government told us how dangerous the WMD Saddam had were, and we went to war. If that turns out to have been a lie, we can't sit back and just say "oh well, it's ok", because it's simply not. The ends don't justify the means. If we are to do good in this world, we have to do it the right way, or we lose all moral authority to take a stand against anyone else trying to achieve what many might consider a positive goal through negative means. It's bad enough that we've now legitimized pre-emptive wars. We don't need to open this Pandora's Box as well.