When is war justified? Here is my answer:
- An American war can be justified if the purpose is to defend the Homeland, or to oppose states that commit crimes against humanity, which include wars of aggression, sponsorship of terrorism, and extermination or enslavement of the state’s own people.
- War for the purpose of advancing American ideology, influence, or economic advantage, or to champion one side in another country’s civil war or revolution, is almost never justified.
- When there is or might be a threat that could justify war, war must be the best resort (though not necessarily the last). War is not justified if there are wiser ways to manage the threat. It is almost always wiser first to gather more information, second to weigh the costs, benefits and risks of all options, and then decide for war only if it comes out on top.
When the American government takes the nation to war, it sends its young people to face mutilation or death. This sacrifice can only be justified for the purposes of defending the homeland or for opposing crimes against humanity elsewhere. Regimes that launch wars of aggression, sponsor terrorism or commit crimes against their own people declare themselves moral outlaws. The American government has a moral right to ask Americans to make the ultimate sacrifice to oppose and if necessary eliminate these regimes. Furthermore, a unilateral American war for these purposes may be justified, whether or not other nations support us.
On the other hand, there is no moral basis for the President to ask Americans to die to promote American ideology, influence, or economic advantage. Our abhorrence of the political principles of Communism, Wahabism and Khomeinism does not justify a Commander in Chief in sending Americans to die to eliminate regimes that rule according to these principles. Communist Cuba, Wahabite Saudi Arabia and Khomeinist Iran do not constitute a threat to the moral order simply because of the ideas by which these states are governed. No matter how detestable Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Chavez’s Venezuela (actually, I don’t have much of a problem with Chavez), military intervention to oust these rulers cannot be justified. The Vice President and the Editorialists at the Wall Street Journal have every right to die to uphold their belief that such regimes should be eliminated, but they have no right to ask anyone else to do so.
Civil war and revolution are struggles over power, ideology and/or wealth among people who share a nation. American military intervention to influence the outcome of a civil war or revolution can only be justified where one side is or can be expected to commit crimes against humanity. Military intervention to achieve victory for the side America favors for reasons of ideology, allegiance or economic interest is never justified.
These are the necessary conditions to justify war. But they are not sufficient. Even when we face (or believe we face) a threat that could justify war, war must also be the wisest policy for managing the threat. Vice President Cheney's "1% doctrine" -- which says that if a potential national security threat has a 1% chance of becoming reality, the nation should pay any price to stop it -- is complete nonsense. The policy-maker’s greatest enemy is uncertainty. As Donald Rumsfeld memorably noted, policy-makers know that there are things they don't know. It is too bad he didn’t understand that, when we think we see a rogue but aren’t sure how dangerous he is, the best policy is to gather more information. So long as the expected value of new information is high and the expected cost of delaying military action is low, the wise policy-maker continues to investigate. When the reverse becomes true, he decides for war.
With these thoughts in mind, here is how I rate wars that America should have fought, should not have fought, should consider fighting, and should not even consider fighting. Lest what follows be read as an exercise in America-bashing, I take it as fact, and applaud without qualification, that no nation in any era has ever made greater sacrifices than America to oppose crimes against humanity, even when these were of little consequence for our own security.
Wars America Should Have Fought
The Second World War (1941-5). USA's entry into WWII was justified even before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese and German wars of aggression against their neighbors and the Nazis' genocidal intentions made both outlaw regimes. These had to be eliminated, and there were no non-military alternatives for doing so. Notwithstanding the enormous toll on American troops in Europe and Asia, America's participation in WWII was both just and wise.
The Cold War (1946-1990). Stalin’s campaigns of internal extermination and external domination in the aftermath of WWII left no doubt that his was a rogue regime that could justify an American war of elimination. From Truman to Reagan, however, American presidents recognized that the military options for opposing Soviet Russia were not smart. Instead, successive American administrations wisely opted for a policy of containment, hoping that the “contradictions” of the Soviet system, especially in the realm of economic policy, would sooner or later result in its disintegration. This proved to be the case.
The Korean war (1950-3). In this civil war, the Communist north invaded the non-Communist south with the support of Communist China. This was not a war of aggression by one state against another, nor enslavement or extermination of people by their own government. At the time, however, Americans could be forgiven for believing that Russian and Chinese Communism posed not only an ideological challenge to western democracies, but also a security threat. The Soviet Union's post-WWII seizure of central Europe through proxy regimes propped up by the Red Army, followed by Mao Tse Tung's 1949 proclamation of the People's Republic of China, made Korea look very much like the next proxy war in a global struggle for domination by military means. And because there were no non-military alternatives for defending south Korea,the Truman administration was justified in asking Americans to die there.
The Raid on Iran (1980). In November 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime occupied (or, strictly speaking, allowed a radical student faction to occupy) the US Embassy in Teheran and held sixty-three American diplomats hostage in violation of international law. Khomeini’s motive was to improve his chances of emerging on top in the Iranian revolution. Yet this action unquestionably qualified his as a rogue regime, and American military action to liberate the hostages (but not to eliminate Khomeini) was justified. The Carter administration attempted diplomacy, and considered a number of military options, include invading Iran with ground forces. Wisely, this option was rejected in favour of a clandestine, night-time commando raid to free the hostages. Unfortunately, after the mission was launched, sand-storms disabled two of its eight helicopters and the commander decided to abort. The hostages were freed unharmed the day after Carter left office in January 1981. Carter’s management of this crisis was an exemplary exercise in wise policy-making in circumstances where war is justified.
The First Gulf War (1990-1). By his unprovoked invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein declared himself a rogue ruler and a first order threat to the region. Since there were no non-military alternatives for ejecting Saddam from Kuwait, Bush 41 was justified in sending Americans into war against Saddam. (I go further: had Khomeini asked for American military support when Saddam invaded Iran in September 1980, American intervention on the Iranian side would also have been justified.) Bush wisely assembled a coalition of sufficient strength to eject Saddam from Kuwait, and then wisely refrained from attempting to eliminate Saddam’s neutered regime altogether, recognizing the incalculable cost and risk of attempting to replace it with anything better.
The Taliban War in Afghanistan (2001-?). By refusing USA's request for the hand-over of Bin Laden and his band of al-Qaeda plotters who had carried out the 9/11 attack on the USA, the Taliban regime declared itself to be an outlaw that had to be eliminated. Had the Taliban agreed to hand over Bin Laden and his men, there would have been no justification for war, notwithstanding the Taliban’s detestable political culture. Given the Taliban's refusal, the USA had no non-military alternative for dealing with the threat they posed to US national security.
Following the elimination of Mullah Omar’s regime and al Quaeda’s presence in Afghanistan, it is questionable whether it was wise for America to attempt to “win the peace.” Even if the Bush administration had not foolishly drained resources away from Afghanistan to fight in Iraq, it now appears unlikely that there will ever be peace in Afghanistan unless the Taliban is made a part of it. Perhaps a wiser alternative would have been for the USA to withdraw from Afghanistan after toppling Omar’s regime, making it clear to any successor regime that it, too, would be obliterated if it allowed al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization to use Afghanistan as a safe haven, or if it failed to cooperate unconditionally with intrusive international inspections to verify that this condition was being met.
Wars America Should Not Have Fought
The First World War (1917-1918). WWI started by mistake, and went downhill from there. There were neither rogues nor any security threat to the USA. If we entered the war to end the slaughter, it was justified. But if we entered the war to emerge with enhanced power and influence on the international stage (this was in fact the result), there was no justification for Americans to die in Flanders' fields.
The Bay of Pigs (1961). In early 1961, the USA planned, funded, armed and launched an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles to eliminate the Castro regime. The invasion ended in death and disaster for the invaders. Even if it had been successful, it would not have been justified. Castro posed no meaningful security threat to the USA until 18 months later, when Cuba started preparing to receive Russian missiles capable of striking targets in America. At this point, war on Cuba was certainly justified, and President Kennedy would undoubtedly have attacked if he had not managed to resolve the missile crisis with Russia through diplomacy.
The Vietnam War (1964-1975). By 1964 it was no longer credible to argue that the global contest between Communism and democracy had a security dimension. In the fourteen years since the Korean war, the Communist side had succeeded in adding only Cuba and a few African states to its roster. (Nasser's Egypt was an ally of the Soviet Union, but had not embraced its system.) In Vietnam, the north's Communist regime sought to impose itself on the south, with meddling from Communist China and the Soviet Union. This was not a war of aggression by one state against another or an attempt by a govermment to enslave or exterminate its own people (that came later in Cambodia). It was a civil war between conflicting political ideologies. The Vietnam war was lost at home once a majority of Americans realized that their sons were dying in Vietnam for an idea, not to defend against a security threat to America or prevent crimes against humanity. Even only with foresight, there was never a justification for a single American to have died in Vietnam.
The War in Panama (1989). The Bush 41 administration invaded Panama in 1989 and seized its dictator, Manuel Noriega, to bring him to the USA where he was tried and convicted for the crime of drug trafficking. Criminality certainly confers rogue status on any regime, but it is the nature of the crime that counts in deciding if a war is justified. Drug trafficking does not rise to the level of a crime against humanity, and therefore the death and mutilation of Americans to depose a regime for this crime is not justified. Neither would a war to eliminate Noriega have been justified if he had shut down the Panama canal. Seizure of the canal would have been a crime against property, which also fails to qualify as a crime against humanity. For the same reason, there was no justification for war against Nasser when he seized the Suez Canal in 1956. US President Eisenhower wisely declined to join the UK, France and Israel in their unjustified invasion of Egypt.
The War in Iraq (2003-?). It was not unreasonable to suppose in the fall of 2002 that Saddam Hussein might pose a triple threat -- to his own people, to his neighbors, and to the USA. Saddam had exterminated many thousands of Kurdish Iraqis in the 1980's and Shiite Iraqis in the early 1990s. He had proven his willingness to initiate wars of aggression against neighbors (Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990), and he had proven his intention to acquire nuclear weapons. (When UN inspections began after Saddam’s defeat in 1991, inspectors were stunned to find out how advanced his nuclear weapons program was.) In short, the man had declared himself an outlaw three times over, and there was no reason to believe he had changed his spots. The man was obviously a rogue. The only question was whether he was dangerous.
Enter the Vice President, with his specious argument that Saddam had aided and abetted al-Qaeda's attack on 9/11, his perverted idea of crafting intelligence to fit policy, and the glaring stupidity of his 1% doctrine. Rather than ask intelligent questions about how to deal with a proven rogue who was likely sooner or later to again become a real threat, Cheney simply declared that "the dangers of inaction exceed the dangers of action." As if anyone were proposing inaction, and as if there were no other alternatives.
The wiser alternative for managing the threat of Saddam Hussein in the fall of 2002 was obviously to get better information. The members of Congress who today are blaming Cheney and his colleagues for misleading them into authorizing war in October 2002 have a bigger mistake to answer for. The masses of information available to those members at decision timemade one thing crystal clear: because intrusive inspections in Iraq had ended in 1998, the intelligence community had zero first-hand knowledge with which to evaluate the threat of Saddam's regime in 2002. The members of Congress who voted to authorize war cannot be excused on grounds that they were brainwashed. They must explain why they decided to go to war on a hunch (whether their own or Cheney's) rather than gather more information. If it was because they believed Cheney when he said "inspections don't work," shame on them. Inspections had not worked in Iraq in the 1980's because they were not "intrusive." Intrusive inspections had worked so well in the 1990's that Saddam eventually could no longer tolerate them and threw the inspectors out.
What would have happened if, instead of going to war in March 2003, the USA had allowed Hans Blix's inspectors to continue their work? One of two things. Either Saddam would have continued to cooperate with Blix (as he had been doing unconditionally since December 2002), the truth of no WMD would have been fully revealed, and there would have been no justification for war. Or Saddam might sooner or later have reverted to his mid-1990's policy of frustrating and evading the inspectors. In so doing, Saddam would have declared himself to be as dangerous as Cheney claimed. The case for war would then have been based on certainty rather than on hunch. The objective of war would have been the achievable one of eliminating a known security threat, not the unachievable one of creating a democratic Iraq, hostile to Iran and Syria, friendly to Israel and the west. If in the aftermath of Saddam's elimination, Iraq had descended into civil war, this would not have been America's responsibility. America would have acted only in self-defense and to rid the region of a dangerous rogue regime. Having achieved this, America could have backed away without reproach, reserving the right to intervene again if any successor regime refused to allow intrusive inspections.
The War in Somalia (2007). If you do not believe that the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in January 2007 was in fact an American invasion, with American boots on the ground and American planes in the air, I can provide plenty of press reports to disabuse you.
The Bush administration's objective in invading Somalia was to eliminate the Islamic Courts regime that had been taking control of the country away from warlords and their militias over the previous six months. Their justification was that regime change was necessary because the Islamic Courts regime was giving safe haven in Somalia to al-Qaeda militants whom the CIA suspected of masterminding the bombing of the USA embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Assuming CIA's suspicions to be correct, war would only have been justified if it was the only way to prevent al-Qaeda from operating in Somalia. I suspect, however, other means of achieving this object, for example demanding that Islamic Courts allow teams of CIA investigators to enter Somalia and search for the suspects, were not even considered. I suspect that Cheney again implemented the 1% doctrine: Islamic Courts, being an Islamist regime, would sooner or later sponsor terrorism. It therefore had to be eliminated, even at the cost of returning Somalia to the chaos of warlord rule. The American war on Somalia may have been clever in the short term because it was cheap (all of the casualties were Ethiopian) and because the administration does not appear to be interested in policing the aftermath. But it was not justified, and it was also stupid in the long term. I expect that Islamists will some day rule Somalia, and they will know America as their mortal enemy.
Wars America Should Consider Fighting
A War in Pakistan. The second front in the struggle to win the peace in Afghanistan should not have been in Iraq, but in Pakistan. It still should be.
An American war in Pakistan would certainly be justified if we could devise a smart way to fight it. Pakistan’s “semi-autonomous provinces” of Baluchistan and Waziristan are a place for recruiting, training, arming and staging Taliban and al Quaeda fighters for service in Afghanistan, Britain and who knows where else. They are also a safe haven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership. This is well known and increasingly well-documented, and denials by Pakistan’s leaders are not credible.
America should give Pakistan this ultimatum: Pakistan’s army and police must occupy provinces in sufficient numbers to establish absolute control, shut down all madrassas and replace them with secular schools, seal the border with Afghanistan, and arrest, try and imprison the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership. If Pakistan refuses, USA should demand that the UN Security Council impose total, global economic isolation on Pakistan. If any of the Veto Five on the Security Council blocks this, the USA would be justified in invading the Northwest Province to do the job itself.
Whether this would be wise is another matter. It is unrealistic to expect that a foreign invader could pacify and sanitize these provinces. I do not have any useful ideas on how this could be accomplished. However, I believe that continuing to treat the Pakistani government as a friend and ally in the fight against terrorism is a mistake.
A War in Sudan. The al-Bashir regime in Sudan easily qualifies as a first-order rogue since it is responsible for exterminating many thousands of its own people in the Darfur region of the country. While this is a civil war in which the Darfuris are seeking autonomy from Khartoum, and outside intervention would not be justified if the government were leaving civilians alone, this government is not.
The USA should demand that the Security Council authorize a blockade on oil exports from Sudan’s Red Sea ports until Sudan agrees to declare the Darfur region an international zone under UN protection, withdraws all government forces from Darfur, and provides all assistance requested by the UN in destroying the Janjaweed militias. At the same time, the USA should announce that it will sell crude oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to any holder of a contract for Sudanese crude oil (i.e. the China National Oil Company). If this proposal is blocked in the Security Council (most likely by China), the US should impose this blockade unilaterally. In the unlikely event that the Chinese navy decides to attempt to lift the blockade, I would welcome the terms of a confrontation in which China tries to justify using armed force to defend the al-Bashir regime's campaign of extermination in Darfur.
The War America Should Not Even Consider Fighting
A War in Iran. Several reasons are being mooted for an American war on Iran. Each of them could justify coercive diplomatic action. None could ever justify war.
1. Iran might shut the Strait of Hormuz.
Twenty percent of the world oil market's daily ration passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Were Iran to shut the Strait for more than a few weeks, there would be far-reaching economic consequences -- possibly chopping several percentage points off global economic output. The longer the disruption lasted, the less the economic impact would be, because markets adapt. Iran would almost certainly shut the Strait in response to an attack by the USA, Israel, or one of the Sunni monarchies. But in this case Iran's action would be the result of war, not a justification for war.
Neither would war on Iran be justified if Iran shut down the Strait without provocation. The President has no right to ask Americans to die to save several percentage points of global economic output. There are useful things the US government could do to protect Americans against the economic losses that would result from a prolonged shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, but war is not one of them. Most usefully, the government could impose a whopping and irrevocable tax on gas prices at the pump. If the Strait were to be shut, the government should sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which currently holds enough oil to offset a Strait of Hormuz shutdown for45 days.
2. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism.
The USA, some European states and Israel have accused Iran of sponsoring terrorism either directly or by proxy through Lebanese-based Hezbollah. While Hezbollah is officially classified as a terrorist organization by the USA government, there is scant justification for this. Two often-cited examples are the Lebanese Hezbollah attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the Saudi Hezbollah attack on the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996.However, since both were military operations against active-duty soldiers, neither can accurately be described as terrorism, which is violence against civilians to achieve political ends.
Lebanese Hezbollah’s missile attacks against Israeli towns and cities in the summer war of 2006 also do not qualify as terrorism. These were retaliatory operations with a deterrent intent. If this was terrorism, then so also - on a much grander scale -- were the 1945 British fire-bombing of Dresden and the American destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. This analogy cannot be rejected on the grounds that Hezbollah "started" the summer war of 2006 by seizing two Israeli soldiers. That incident was just another episode in a running conflict between Israel and the Shiite community in Lebanon that had begun with Israel's 1983 invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon to drive out the PLO (Sunni Palestinians led by Yassir Arafat).
Argentina alleges Iranian responsibility for a suicide attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aeries in 1992, and a Jewish community center in 1994. Iran denies these charges as well. These allegations justify demands by Argentina that Iran cooperate in all ways requested by the investigators seeking to determine who was behind the attacks. An Iranian refusal to cooperate with these investigations would qualify the regime as rogue, and would justify imposing international sanctions. The same applies to Iranian allegations of CIA complicity in the February 14 and 16, 2007 bombings by Sunni terrorists in the Iranian city of Zahedan, as well as a series of Sunni terrorist bombings in the Iranian city of Ahvaz in 2006. If the Bush administration does not cooperate in all ways requested by Iran to investigate possible CIA involvement in these attacks, the Bush administration would qualify as rogue, and international sanctions would be justified.
3. Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map.
Iran's leaders from Khomeini to Ahmadinejad have declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map." But rogues are rogues because of what they do, not what they say. Iran has not launched a war of aggression in modern times. The most plausible way to interpret Khomeini's map-wiping rhetoric (which Ahmadinjed is merely parroting twenty-five years later) is as a call for the reversal of the UN's 1947 resolution to partition Palestine and create sovereign Jewish and Arab states. Neither Khomeini nor Ahmadinejad has ever asserted the right or intention of Iran itself to destroy Israel. Neither of them has ever declared "Iran will wipe Israel off the map." What they have both said is that Israel has no right to be on the map. In other words, they have denied Israel's right to exist.
An American war on Iran is not justified merely because the ruling regime denies Israel's right to exist. If the statement that Israel should be "wiped off the map” is a statement that the UN partition resolution was unjust, should be rescinded, and should be replaced by a resolution establishing a single state in Palestine, then it is a statement of political ideology. The truth, wisdom and realism of the proposition that a Jewish state in Palestine should not exist are debatable. But there is no justification for Americans to die to eliminate regimes who accept that proposition. Of course, individual Israelis do have an unconditional right to exist, and an Iranian regime that challenged this would constitute a first-order threat, justifying a war of regime change in Iran the minute there was any evidence that the regime intended to act on this belief.
4. Iran is developing nuclear weapons in violation of international law.
Compared to some other signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran’s violations are de minimis. For example, Article VI requires signatories who are already members of the nuclear club to pursue negotiations on a treaty of general and complete disarmament.Although this obligation was entered into thirty-nine years ago, none of the signatories has complied. Article I of the treaty prohibits signatories from doing anything to encourage or assist non-nuclear weapons states in acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless Israel figured out how to produce uranium, enrich uranium and fashion a bomb all by itself, or unless Israel was aided by Pakistan, one or more NPT signatories must have violated Article I to help Israel develop the bomb.
Furthermore, compared to some non-signatories of the NPT, (e.g. Israel, India and Pakistan) both the transparency and the proven goals of Iran’s nuclear programme are whiter than white.
Iran’s primary obligation under the NPT is to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to verify that Iran’s nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes (electric power and medicine) under a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement. This agreement allows the IAEA to conduct inspections of declared facilities with advance notice.
In September 2002, Iran informed the IAEA that, in violation of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, it had for several years been carrying out an undisclosed programme of research and development to build 6000 MW of nuclear power generation capacity. None of the concealed activities (including uranium enrichment) was prohibited under the NPT, since all were of the kind normally undertaken in a civilian nuclear programme. What was prohibited under the NPT was to carry out those activities without disclosing them to the IAEA. In other words, Iran’s only violation of the NPT was in failing to disclose to the IAEA that it was doing things that it was allowed to do under the NPT.
Since 2003, according to the IAEA, Iran has cooperated fully with IAEA inspectors in all ways required under the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement. In 2003, Iran voluntarily agreed to more intrusive “Additional Protocol” inspections by the IAEA, but terminated these in 2006 in response to the threat of sanctions by America and some Europeans. Inspections and surveillance under the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement continue. The IAEA’s position as of today is that, while there are a few questions that Iran has not answered satisfactorily, there is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear program is intended for anything other than peaceful purposes. When the US House Intelligence Committee issued a report in December 2006 asserting the contrary, the IAEA immediately and publicly rejected this report. According to Seymour Hersh’s reporting in the November 27, 2006 New Yorker, a classified fall 2006 CIA assessment based on satellite and covertly-planted land-based monitoring devices in Iran also produced no evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear program, much to the disgust of the Vice President.
On February 22, 2007, the IAEA announced that Iran was not complying with the Security Council’s December 2006 resolution ordering Iran to shut down its uranium enrichment programme. Defiance of a Security Council resolution is not, however, a breach of international law. Nor does Iran’s defiance of the Security Council alter the IAEA’s conclusion that there is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear programme is for anything other than peaceful purposes. It remains true that Iran’s only violation of international law to date was its earlier failure to disclose that it was doing things that it was permitted to do under international law.
I have argued elsewhere that there is a smart way to call Iran’s bluff (if that is what it is) with respect to its nuclear intentions (http://www.badgerd.com/Herzog/Make_Iran_an_Offer.htm).The question here, however, is how America should respond if and when we have more than a hunch that there is more than a 1% chance that Iran is about to have a bomb. Would an American war then be justified?
The entry of any new nation into the nuclear club -- as well as the refusal of existing members to shut it down -- is deplorable, and strenuous efforts should be made to prevent the former and achieve the latter. But Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons would not make it a rogue nation. A nuclear-armed Iran would pose an intolerable threat to no-one, including Israel. Iran's bomb would have the same national security implications for Israel that Pakistan’s bomb has for India – eliminating a weapons imparity, and condemning the nuclear pair to live in the same MADness in which the USA and Russia and the USA and China have lived for over fifty years.
5. Iran is killing Americans in Iraq.
The Bush administration has recently displayed evidence that Iran has provided exceptionally lethal weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq, which have been responsible for the death and mutilation of hundreds of American soldiers. But does this justify a war on Iran?
The export of revolutionary, mullocratic ideology has been a central goal of Iranian foreign policy since Khomeini’s triumph in 1979. Iran has taken the side of ideological favorites in civil wars or wars of liberation in Afghanistan in the 1980’s (Muslims versus Russians), Lebanon in the 1980’s (Shiites versus Christians and Jews), Chechnya in the 1990’s (Muslims versus Russians), Bosnia in the 1990’s (Muslims versus Serbs), and Saudi Arabia to this day (Shiites versus Sunnis). This is what Iran has been doing in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. It is not different from what Communist China was doing in Asia in the 1960’s or what Soviet Russia was doing in Africa and Latin America throughout the Cold War – meddling in internal conflicts elsewhere to champion ideological favorites.
With a single exception, American deaths were never justified by the goal of preventing China and Russia from meddling in this way. The exception was the Cuban Missile crisis, where Russia’s meddling crossed the line from peddling ideology to threatening US security. Chinese and Russian arms killed Americans in Vietnam because, rather than meddling in that civil war merely by proxy, America chose foolishly to put boots on the ground. Iranian arms are killing Americans in Iraq today because, once again, we chose foolishly to put boots on the ground. Until Iran crosses the line from meddling by proxy to threatening US security, there is no case for war.
Dan Badger
London
