If you can believe it, people are still arguing about how prominent the humanitarian justification for the Iraq War was prior to the war. There's a lot to be said here, but I'm not going to say it. Rather, let my modest contribution to this debate be simply to point out that there is a big difference between offering a humanitarian justification for a war and actually fighting a humanitarian war. The former has been an important part of selling wars for an awfully long time, including, e.g., the Spanish conquest of the New World (souls were apparently saved on that occasion, you know). The latter - a rare, rare beast indeed - has a very special character. That's because if it's genuine, the goals shape the conduct of the war in all kinds of ways.
My modest suggestion, then, is that even if Bush and Blair had sold their respective publics on the war entirely on humanitarian grounds, the war itself would still not have received a proper public defence. Because whatever the justifications offered for this war publicly, the war itself had goals that were not primarily humanitarian, and those goals have shaped the character of the war and the occupation. They have meant that whatever was argued for, what was delivered was far from a humanitarian war. Rather, we got a war with some decent humanitarian results, mixed in with an awful lot of suffering. Please see my take on the occupation to see what difference I think this makes.
So although trying to nail down precisely how much pre-war weight Bush publicly gave to the humanitarian justification for war is a worthwhile project for some purposes, and I wish the people doing this the best of luck, even the best case for Bush on this count still has him offering a dishonest argument for the war he waged.
Posted by Chris at May 4, 2005 02:05 PM