Making a Moral Decision: President Bush’s Choice
Writing an article titled “The Moral Case Against the Iraq War”, published in the May 31, 2004 issue of “The Nation”, Paul Savoy takes a moral stand against the war in Iraq. In making his case, he demonstrates that the Bush administration used the same moral reasoning that Raskolnikov used in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” to morally justify the war in Iraq. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, argued this cost-benefit analysis in making the moral case for war in the New York Times Magazine before the invasion: "The choice [was] one between two evils, between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant's grip." Ignatieff concluded that killing people was the better choice if the United States was willing "to build freedom, not just for the Iraqis but also for the Palestinians, along with a greater sense of security for Israel." {Later, in his speeches, President Bush echoed the sentiments of Michael Ignatieff as justification for the invasion of Iraq.}
“This is the moral reasoning of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Invoking the lesser-of-two-evils defense to justify his killing an old pawnbroker and stealing her money, Raskolnikov argues: "Kill her, take her money, dedicate it to serving mankind, to the general welfare. Well--what do you think--isn't this petty little crime effaced by thousands of good deeds? For one life, thousands of lives saved from ruin and collapse. One death and a hundred lives--there's arithmetic for you."
{30,000 - 100,000 dead Iraqis and freedom for 25 million.}
“What is overlooked by those who believe the benefits of the war outweigh the costs is that killing even one innocent person to benefit others violates the most basic human right--the right to life. The right to life is one of those unalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. "Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual,"
“Even more horrifying than the torture of Iraqi prisoners by their American captors has been the unnecessary suffering and death inflicted on the Iraqi people by the war itself. One of those children on whose unavenged tears the edifice of freedom has been built in Iraq was 12-year-old Ali Ismael Abbas, who was so badly burned in a US missile attack on Baghdad that his entire torso was black, his arms so mutilated that, as New Yorker correspondent Jon Lee Anderson described the hospital scene, they ‘looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.’ His family, which included his pregnant mother, his father and his six brothers and sisters, were all killed by the blast. Some of their bodies were so unrecognizable that all Anderson could see in morgue photographs was a collection of charred body parts and some red flesh“.
“The remains of other family members were mutilated grotesqueries. ‘[His mother's] face had been cut in half, as if by a giant cleaver, and her mouth was yawning open.... The body of his brother was all there, it seemed, but from the nose up his head was gone, simply sheared off, like the head of a rubber doll. His mouth, like that of his mother, was open, as if he were screaming.’”
“Viewed in the light of our own moral ideals, as embodied in our constitutional tradition, the right to life is so fundamental that killing the innocent to advance the cause of freedom of electoral choice or any other purpose, however worthy, must be regarded as wrong. We denounce terrorists because when the freedom of self-determination they seek is weighed in the balance against the right to life of innocent people, it is the right to life that our collective conscience has decided should prevail.”
“Terrorism is simply a criminal technique for coercing a political agenda by killing innocent people. And it should make no difference whether the people who do the killing are freedom fighters like Palestinian suicide bombers, who purposefully kill civilians, or freedom fighters like the American liberators of the Iraqi people, who aim at military targets but who know with substantial certainty that they will incidentally kill civilians. In the eyes of the criminal law, a person is regarded as intending the death of another when he either has the purpose to cause the death of the victim or when he knows that death is substantially certain to result from his acts.”
“Freedom and democracy for Iraq are ‘worth fighting for, dying for and standing for,’ President Bush declared in a November 2003 speech, but no one asked the Iraqis who were killed in the war whether they were willing to sacrifice their lives as part of a demonstration project to create a democratic revolution in the Middle East. The very minimum that people have a right to expect from any effort to graft democracy onto their nation is that the donor nation honor the principle of no extermination without representation.”
After reading this article, please feel free to make comments, both pro and con, on the stand that Paul Savoy took against the moral reasoning used by our leaders in invading Iraq.
