Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves.
Jan NarvesonTags: politics peace war iraq pacifism iraq-war realism saddam-hussein thuggery liberal-hawk
Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
Roger ScrutonTags: iraq despotism north-korea saddam-hussein kim-jong-il international-sanctions iraq-sanctions
I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.
Adam MichnikTags: war iraq iraq-war saddam-hussein donald-rumsfeld
First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain.
Daniel KofmanTags: war foreign-policy iraq repression iraq-war despotism afghanistan iran north-korea syria antiwar-movement interventionism war-in-afghanistan-2001-present axis-of-evil foreign-policy-of-the-us
Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.
Norman GerasTags: morality justice liberalism united-states law george-w-bush iraq socialism iraq-war leftism international-law ba-ath-party ba-athism ba-athist-iraq saddam-hussein stalinism nato anti-americanism opposition-to-the-iraq-war anti-war-movement pro-war-left
As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.
José Ramos-HortaTags: peace war tyranny united-states genocide iraq pacifism iraq-war 2004 vietnam nobel-peace-prize united-nations international-law tanzania 1978 cambodia cambodian-vietnamese-war idi-amin khmer-rouge pol-pot uganda uganda-tanzania-war
Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.
Ann ClwydTags: morality law genocide iraq iraq-war international-law saddam-hussein al-anfal-campaign moral-responsibility kurdish-genocide responsibility-to-protect
Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses.
Michael RobothamTags: iraq financial-crisis
The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.
Robert D. KaplanTags: war idealism iraq noninterventionism bosnia interventionism realpolitik humanitarian-intervention
Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of National Review and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the National Review blog in November 2006: 'I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy'. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.'
Ledeen, however, wrote in August 2002 of 'the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein' and when he was interviewed for Front Page Magazine the same month and asked, 'Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?' Ledeen replied: 'Yesterday.' There is obvious, substantial risk in falsely claiming that one opposed the Iraq War notwithstanding a public record of support. But that war has come to be viewed as such a profound failure that that risk, at least in the eyes of some, is outweighed by the prospect of being associated with Bush's invasion.
Tags: politics war foreign-policy hypocrisy cowardice iraq iraq-war revisionism 2006 2002 2003-invasion-of-iraq saddam-hussein opposition-to-the-iraq-war anti-war-movement neoconservatism american-enterprise-institute frontpage-magazine michael-ledeen national-review
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