Defending Ideals

War, Democracy, and Political Struggles

Drucilla Cornell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135933678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this book, Drucilla Cornell examines the crisis on the left and asks how we can turn back toward more left-wing ideals. She looks at the meaning of freedom through various lenses as well as the dissolution of feminism. She discusses and critiques such major thinkers as: Amartya Sen, Adorno, Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, Richard Falk, and Paul Berman among others.

1Living and Dying in Iraq: Killing Talk and the Limits of Just War

“Smoking Baghdad” was a special insert in the Sunday edition of The New York Post that came out two weeks into the invasion of Iraq. It was some 20 pages graphically depicting a city in flames. My guess is that “smoking” was meant to be a play on words, to smoke someone being a somewhat dated expression for killing. We were smoking Baghdad, literally consuming the city in flames and killing those who lived there. Interspersed with these horrifying pictures of a magnificent city being destroyed were quotes from the military strategists who planned “shock and awe.” As Harlan Ullman, one of the strategists behind shock and awe, claimed, “the missiles will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad livable.” He continued, “We want them to quit; we want them not to fight . . . You take the city down . . . You have the simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima—not taking days or weeks but minutes.”¹

I live in New York City and can remember only too vividly the horror of the horizon of smoke and fire that filled the New York sky on September 11, 2001. And I can remember the terrible fear that came with not knowing if there would be another attack. But the people in Baghdad did know there were going to be other attacks from the United States. Waiting day after day, night after night in fear as the search for Saddam Hussein continued. There is no way to protect against the kind of bombardment that the United States was pursuing as part of its strategy, which is of course part of the point. It is a strategy that is meant to bring out the paralysis of helplessness. The bombardment begins with no relief in sight, with nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.

In her diaries of the first Gulf War, the artist Nuha Al-Radi describes life under the 42-day bombardment that the people of Baghdad endured in that war. She and her family lived outdoors in an orchard because the outdoors, in fact, seemed to be the safest place, as it was away from burning houses and shattering glass. “With the first bomb, Ma and Needles’ windows shattered, the ones facing the river. It's a good thing their shutters were down, otherwise they could both have been badly hurt. One of poor Bingo's pups was killed in the garden by flying glass—our first war casualty.”²

After that scare, it seemed to them safer to stay outside. The first day, electrical power went down. By the fifth day, water had become scarce. Then, toilet facilities no longer functioned. “We are now all going to the loo in the orchard, fertilizing it and saving ourselves some water which no longer flows out of the taps.”³ Water became scarcer and scarcer, until it finally ran out. “We've now been without water for one week. My hands and nails are disgusting. Everyone has a sooty face. No one bothers to look in the mirror anymore. Needles is the only one who still looks neat and clean. Raad says that in Jadiriyah they have no more day; the sky is permanently black from the smoke of the Dora refinery as it burns. It has been burning from the first day of the war. Poor Suha and Assia; how are they surviving?”⁴

Phone service was gone. The only way to know the fate of loved ones in other parts of Baghdad was to physically go there. As gas became a rare commodity, people set out on bikes, on foot, using whatever means they had to ease the anxiety they felt over not knowing whether loved ones were still alive; they desperately needed to see the faces of their loved ones. But because Baghdad had been built around a river, the bridges were crucial for these desperate trips. Despair set in when the bridges were hit.

They have started hitting the bridges again. Jumhuriya Bridge is now apparently in three pieces. Countless industries, textile factories, flour mills, and cement plants are being hit. What do they mean when they say they are only hitting military targets? These are not military installations. As for “our aim never goes wrong” . . . who will save us from these big bullies?⁵

Nuha Al-Radi then personally went to see the Jumhuriya Bridge and movingly tells of the experience. “I saw the Jumhuriya Bridge today. It's very sad to see a bombed bridge. A murderous action, for it destroys a link. Everyone is very strangely affected by the sight of a bombed bridge. They cram along the sides, peering down into the craters and holes, looking very sad and crying.”⁶

People increasingly poured into Al-Radi's orchard as their houses were hit. But the noise was so deafening that some in her group even wanted to sign up for the shelters. When Al-Radi finally went to the shelter closest to her orchard, she was told to sign in by six o’clock as per curfew, and that she would only be let out the next morning. Although the conditions were cramped, with no toilet facilities and even no windows, she convinced her ever-growing group to stay despite the hardship, feeling so exposed as the bombs and rockets landed all around them. And then came “[a] turning point in the war. They hit a shelter, the one in Amiriya. They thought it was going to be full of party biggies but instead it turned out to be full of women and children. Whole families were wiped out. Only some of the men survived who had remained to guard their houses. An utter horror and we don't know the worst of it yet. The Americans insist that the women and children were put there on purpose. I ask you, is that logical? One can imagine the conversation at command headquarters going something like this: ‘Well, I think the Americans will hit the Amirya shelter next. Let's fill it with women and children.’ What makes the Americans think they are invincible? In their very short history they've had more than their share of blunders and mistakes. Imagine my going to check up on our shelter two days before they bombed the Amiriya. Who would want to use the shelters anymore? My neighbors say they now prefer to live with the noise.”⁷

As the bombing continued day in and day out, “what makes life livable” indeed completely disintegrated. The bombings in 1991 were not “shock and awe.” The pathos of the weakness of the Iraqi missile defense is summarized in Al-Radi's sorrowful and yet ironic statement on day 31:“[t]he score today is 76,000 Allied air raids versus 67 Scuds.”⁸ Al-Radi repeats the oft-quoted estimate that the United States ultimately dropped five times the firepower of Hiroshima on Baghdad. The Iraqi defenses could do nothing to protect against such an onslaught. Indeed, the launching capacity for the scuds was clearly poor. The Al-Radis, in fact, had their closest call when a scud launched from one part of Baghdad blew up over their house and orchard. “It must have been about 9 p.m. and we were all in the kitchen washing up in the flickering candlelight after dinner. . . . Suddenly there was a terrible noise and a bright light coming closer and closer, a sun homing into us through the kitchen windows, a white, unreal daylight illuminating us all. The floor was shaking so violently that we thought the house was coming down on our heads. We crouched on the floor, and suddenly without our knowing how, the door opened and all six of us were outside in the garden. An immense fireball was hovering over us, a fireball that appeared to be burning the tops of the palm trees. Suddenly this giant flaming object tilted, turned upwards over our heads and went roaring up into the night sky. . . . We discovered later from the BBC that it was a Scud missile, launched from a mobile truck. It landed in Bahrain. At the time we couldn't decide whether it was a plane, a missile or a rocket, or even whether it was coming or going. For the first time since the war began, I thought it was all over for us. I’m sure that if its trajectory had been a few metres different we would have been incinerated. It was like watching a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral except this was no television and we were underneath the blast.”⁹ On the 40th day, Al-Radi describes her exhaustion and her sadness. “Nights and days full of noise, no sleep possible. What will happen to all of us now? For forty odd days and nights—a biblical figure—we've just been standing around with our mouths open, swallowing bombs, figuratively speaking, that is. We didn't have anything to do with the Kuwaiti take-over, yet we have been paying the price for it . . . We're living in an Indian movie, or rather like Peter Sellers in The Party, refusing to die and rising up again and again, another last gasp on the bugle. In comparison, we come up every now and then with a Scud. Indian movies never really end, and I don't think this scenario will end either. If it were not such a tragedy, it would be quite funny.”¹⁰

With this account, am I simply trying to prod the imagination so that we can envision what it might be like to live under “shock and awe” as a much more intense bombardment than the one Al-Radi endured? Am I instead trying to help us to come to terms with why “they” might hate us other than the oft-repeated phrase “they hate us for our way of life”? It is actually a combination of both, with an emphasis ultimately on why we, as citizens of the United States, must confront what has been done in our name and in the name of the just war tradition, which I will discuss more in a moment. For we do need to hear Al-Radi, as she struggles with the visceral reaction she has to Westerners. Al-Radi was trained in the West and as an internationally proclaimed artist, she has traveled all over the world. Although she was raised as a Muslim, she is not a follower of Islam. As an artist, democracy and free expression are crucial to her. As an unmarried independent woman, she has never accepted any conventional feminine restrictions, imposed by the Muslim religion or otherwise, on her life. During her years in Iraq where she grew up, none were enforced by the state. Sometimes we forget that for all of Hussein's brutality toward his enemies, women participated in all professions in Iraq. Those who wore any kind of veil did so only by choice.

On the 33rd day of the war, Al-Radi sees a Westerner for the first time and fights back her reaction to him. “Hisham came this morning to pay his condolences on Mundher's death and to say hello. He has been in Suleimaniya all this time; apparently a lot of people went there to get away from the bombing. He was followed by Tim Llewellyn, the first foreigner I have seen since the war began. I have cousins who are married to Brits but they have been here so long they are tainted. One does not think of them anymore as foreign. When I saw Tim at the bottom of the drive, I literally bristled. I wonder if he felt it? I’m happy to say that by the time he had come up our long drive I had gotten over my hostile feelings. After all, one cannot blame individuals for what their governments do. Otherwise we would all have to answer for the mess we're in, and we surely had no hand in this matter. Tim brought faxes from Sol, Dood, and Charlie, our first contact with family and friends. A break in our isolation.”¹¹

The question “why do they hate us?” has been frequently asked since 9/11. But within the question, the “they” has been hopelessly vague. Does it refer to the highly educated Saudi men who drove the planes into the World Trade Center? Does it refer to Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda? Does it refer to the Iraqis? Does the question presume the existence of something called the Arab world, which lumps together many different peoples, languages, and traditions, that hates us? Or is the question only why do the followers of one particularly conservative and militant brand of Islam, Wahhabism, hate us. Wahhabism is the sect of Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia, but were the hijackers of the planes on 9/11 Wahhabis? We do not know that for sure because they left no notes or messages behind. But when we ask why “they” hate us, we need to be careful as to whom we are speaking of in the Arab world so that we can at least begin to discuss whether any of that bitterness and rage is warranted and, if so, what are we, as U.S. citizens, called to do about it. I am not speaking of Bin Laden himself, for he clearly calls for the execution of U.S. citizens and the citizens of other Western governments who support U.S. foreign policy wherever and whenever they can be targeted. He is undoubtedly a criminal with whom negotiations are impossible. We know why he hates “us,” saying over and over again that “we” are “infidels.” But I am more interested in beginning to make distinctions in that huge amorphous “they,” for Al-Radi's embattled rage has absolutely nothing to do with Bin Laden. It is time that we in the United States begin to see the distinctiveness of cultures and peoples, and divergent interpretations of the Muslim religion in that utterly amorphous “they” that George W. Bush many times evokes. Al-Radi's rage clearly did not come from any jealousy or distaste for modernity and democracy. However, her bitterness toward the senior Bush administration remained. “Well, Mr. Bush said no to the overtures of Tariq Aziz. I never thought he would say yes anyway. It doesn't serve his purpose. What a brave man, he passes judgment on us while he plays golf far away in Washington. His forces are annihilating us . . . I can't stand the Voice of America going on about American children and how they are being affected by this war. Mrs. Bush, the so-called humane member of that marriage, had the gall to say comfortingly to a group of school kids, ‘Don't worry, it's far away and won't affect you.’ What about the children here? What double standards, what hypocrisy! Where is justice?”¹²

Her question is addressed to all of us who are citizens of this country. Although I will later point out the limits of just war theory, we still need to remember that at the heart of the just war tradition is the demand that the aggressors—citizens of the aggressor state included—take responsibility and accept that they can be held accountable to those upon whom they have waged war. Jean Bethke Elshtain summarizes the notion of the citizen in just war theory as follows: “Just war thinking as a form of civic virtue cannot endorse the unleashing of aggressivity sanctioned by armed civic virtue in a time of total war. Indeed, what is demanded instead is deep reflection by Everyman and Everywoman on what his or her government is up to. This, in turn, presupposes a “self” of a certain kind, one attuned to moral reasoning and capable of it; one strong enough to resist the lure of seductive, violent enthusiasms; one bounded by and laced through with a sense of responsibility and accountability.”¹³

Whatever one thinks about the Gulf War, it was frequently justified with the rhetoric and under the rubric of just war theory. Al-Radi's challenges us to think about how we can live with the hypocrisy and the double standard in which Iraqi lives are not accorded the same dignity and status we give to our own. To give such status to one's enemies may indeed be seen as the heart or core of the long process of the legalization of war that ultimately culminates in just war theory. So all those who take just war seriously have to at least confront the seriousness of the charge that the double standard provokes great hostility in those who are subjected to it, as it would provoke in ourselves if we felt we were not accorded dignity.

Richard Falk has succinctly defined the four principles of just war theory as follows:

Discrimination: any use of force should discriminate between military and civilian targets, and unconditionally avoid targeting the latter regardless of military necessity; civilian innocence should be respected without exception in the course of the waging war.

Proportionality: any use of force should have some reasonable relationship between the responsibility, resistance, and capabilities of the target state and the level and intensity and goals of response by the state acting in self-defense.

Necessity: any use of force should be essential to the attainment of legitimate military objectives; excessive force should be avoided. Humanity: any use of force should uphold international humanitarian law, and avoid any human suffering not reasonably related to necessary and reasonable military objectives.¹⁴

These four principles all turn on both the accordance of the status of human being to citizens of the enemy state, and to ourselves as those who must judge the actions of our government. I do not think the bombing of Baghdad in the first Gulf War was just under just war standards. But at least then the rhetoric if not the practice of just war was still alive and well, even in the administration of Bush Senior. Of course, just war theory can be manipulated and should ultimately be replaced by the ideal of perpetual peace with its correspondingly much more limited notion of what can be legitimate counter-violence. But that is not my point here, although I will return to it shortly. As Jean Elshtain points out, just war theory not only applies to war and its means in armed conflict, but also allows us to question other means of fighting a people once the armed conflict has actually ended. For example, just war theory looks at how peace is established because the enemy, even if vanquished, is still part of humanity. For Elshtain, just war theory demanded that we carefully examine the embargo and sanctions that we imposed on the Iraqi people. As Elshtain eloquently wrote, “[m]y interest in the Gulf War and just war revolved, not so much around whether the central criteria for involvement were or were not met, but with what just war thinking more widely understood might tell us about politics in general as well as about one war in particular. My concern wasn't that just war thinking shouldn't be hauled out on various rhetorical or ceremonial occasions and then shelved once the political moment has passed. I argued that if just war is evoked, then that is the framework that must be applied consistently, not just to the strategy of war fighting but to the endgame as well—to how one handles the post war situation. As of this writing, Iraqi citizens are suffering greatly under a continuing set of economic sanctions that appear to have little effect on Saddam Hussein's ability to hold on to power. Just war thinking would suggest that this form of (apparent) benign intervention, by contrast to actual war fighting, is not in fact ethically pristine, even apart from whether or not it is politically effective. The rush to use embargoes and sanctions that target whole populations, harming the least powerful first, requires more justification than it has received from past and current policy makers.”¹⁵

I am in complete agreement with Elshtain in her epilogue to Women and War. Yes, we must look at the end game of “peace” once the hostilities of actual combat have ceased. And we again, as citizens of the United States, are called to such scrutiny by just war theory. Yet in her latest book, Elshtain attacks Edward Said for exaggerating the effects of the embargo. Elshtain challenges the figure used by Said and many others— including for example the Dominican Order of Nuns, which continues at this writing to be in Iraq—that 500,000 children have died because of improper food and medical care. Usually when that figure is cited, deaths from illnesses caused by uranium shells and other side effects of the bombs dropped during the Gulf War on Iraq are included.¹⁶ Of course, the exact number of casualties is difficult to estimate. But interestingly, when Madeline Albright was confronted with this figure on CNN in 1996 when she was still the U.S. ambassador to the UN, she did not deny i...