Michael Walzer on Just War in Iraq

Description: Should citizens feel guilty for not joining the army to end the Iraq war?

Question: Was going to war with Iraq necessary or just?

Transcript: I thought it wasn’t and argued against the war that we fought. I did think that the regime of constraint which had been established after the First Gulf War, which involved the no fly zones and the UN inspectors in the country and the embargo on the import of arms. I thought that was a just regime and that we should have sustained that regime. We needed to improve the embargo. We needed what Colin Powel called smart sanctions, because the sanction system was hurting ordinary Iraqi civilians, but there should have been a way--and I have spoken to some of the people who were running the embargo who say there were ways--to deal just with weapons and not to prevent food and medicine from reaching the people. So that system of constraint which I think was working--we now know that it prevented the Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. That system of constraint should have been sustained.

Question: Does regime change justify the war?

Transcript: No, there are a lot of governments that need to be changed in the world. We could all make a list of governments that wouldn’t be missed, but the use of military force across an international frontier; that needs to have a greater justification than a dictatorial or oligarchic or tyrannic or even a brutal government. If there is mass murder in progress, I think it is just to go in. I think we should have gone in to Rwanda. I think somebody should be doing something in Darfur. I think it was right for the Vietnamese to go into Cambodia and shut down the killing fields. But the mass killing was 12 years in the past, in 2003 and it was an odd thing for the United States to say “oh, I just remembered they were killing people 12 years ago we better invade.” And that's...you really need to justify a war. You need a very extreme situation, and that didn’t exist in 2003, because the regime of constraint was setting very, very powerful limits on what Saddam could do. And it was a successful regime, so the war was unnecessary and an unnecessary war is an unjust war.

Question: Are American citizens morally responsible for the Iraq war?

Transcript: I don’t think that responsibility...I think jus ad bellum, the justice of a war, and therefore the violation of jus ad bellum, aggression, is the crime of political leaders. I don’t think it makes much sense to hold a civilian population responsible. First of all, a very substantial portion of the civilian population voted against the government, and many of those who voted for the government did so for reasons that had nothing to do with foreign policy. They were voting their domestic interest or their domestic ideology. They weren’t even thinking about the Middle East. They probably couldn’t locate Iraq on a map, so I don’t like that kind of broad diffusion of responsibility. I think it’s best to think of responsibility in quite narrow and particular terms.

Question: What must happen for the U.S. to pull out of Iraq justly?

Transcript: If the people who want us to stay like the Kurds or the Sunni chiefs are right, that is if our staying there holds is in some way connected to their physical security, then we have to stay for as long as that connection holds. If leaving means that the Kurds will once more be subjected to a massacre or that the Sunnis who now find themselves having ruled or having supported at despotic regime for sort of so long, now find themselves a small minority--20% of the country--subjected to radical persecution or ethnic cleansing or massacre, that would be a very very bad outcome. And if our staying there helps to prevent that we need to stay there. At the same time, we need to set some terms for disengagement, and we have to inform the Iraqis that on some, over some time frame, perhaps vaguely defined, we are going to leave and they had, have to begin, and we have to hope there neighbors will help them, begin establishing a stable arrangement. It’s not likely to be in anything like the democratic political regime--a stable arrangement which guarantees the security of the different groups and we have to be working toward that kind of stability. It’s a minimalist goal now. We are not going to create a Swedish social democracy in Baghdad. We are not going to create...we are not even going to create a Chicago politics in Baghdad. It’s going to be something in from our perspective, from the perspective of liberal Democrats, it is going to be something much worse, but it can’t be disastrous for the Iraqi people given what we have already subjected them to.

Question: Should citizens feel guilty for not joining the army to end the Iraq war?

Transcript: I don’t think you have to go over there, and I also don’t think it makes a lot of sense to be marching, shouting "bring the troops home right now." We did that in Vietnam. In Vietnam we came to the belief that a victory of the north was, had been, effectively ratified, chosen by a majority of the Vietnamese in the south and that they would establish a tyrannical government, but it would be a government. And there would be some kind of stability and we had no business continuing the war. But in Iraq withdrawal doesn’t mean there will be a government, even a tyrannical government. It probably means a kind of civil war,and not the easy kind where you have two sides fighting. It could be a civil war with many sides, because nobody in Iraq has only one enemy. It is a much more complicated and much more frightening political situation, and so unilateral or immediate withdrawal is wrong. So what we should be defending is something..it's very hard to march with a banner. It's a very complicated politics that we should be defending, a politics of a commitment to disengage but not until we have, so of speak, gotten the permission of the people who are most at risk of being killed.

Question: Is that signal possible?

Transcript: Well, I think at some point, if we manage to find the right things to do, there will be a growing sense among Kurds and Sunnis and that they are okay, that they are not in imminent danger and we will, they will tell us.

Recorded on: 2/27/08