Paul O’Neill

All I have done is watched the 60 Minutes interview and some of the follow up discussions, so I am no expert here at all. But I am a citizen and a somewhat articulate one at that, so it may be worth hearing me about.

There is something odd about what I did hear about the alleged Bush plans to invade Iraq and divvy up its oil regions. The plan was hatched by Bill Clinton & Co. and then, yes, considered by Bush as possibly a worthy endeavor. What this tells me is that neither Clinton foreign policy wonks, nor Bush had anything against using the U.S. military to embark upon foreign military ventures entirely in the absence of aggressive actions against the citizens of the United States of America.

Now that seems to me to matter most, not whether the invasion plans were forged before or after 9/11/2001. There was, after all, no credible link between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein even after U.S. intelligence experts started to look for it. In the politics of the entire fiasco, neither Democrats nor Republicans come off as innocents.

And that is no great surprise. After all, Bill Clinton didn’t hesitate to take the U.S. military to the Balkans, not once but twice. The only thing Clinton and the Democrats have going for them, if you can so characterize it, is that they have tended to link such military excursion to humanitarianism, while the Republicans, given their perhaps deserved, perhaps not so deserved reputation of favoring prosperity, are more credibly associated with military adventures serving various economic vested or prospective interests. Which is more just? Which is more decent?

Considering the prevailing moral climate, in which doing stuff for your fellows is always considered more ethical than doing things for yourself, the Clinton bunch comes off looking better, I am sure. Even if they are duplicitous in their self-identified altruism, it seems to be much easier to get away with the "But I did it for you" line, than with the "In my best interest" line.

None of this related even remotely to the current posturing of the bunch of Democrats making so much hay out of the fact that Bush took the U.S. military to war against Iraq. There is no evidence at all that Clinton wouldn’t have done the very same thing, except for the fact that the grass roots of the Democratic party needs to have this altruistic, humanitarian excuse for war – recall Wilson wanting to "make the world safe for democracy."

The Republicans, and their neo-conservative gurus, tend to play a different tune even when it comes to exporting democracy. Democracy abroad is good for us, since democracies tend not to go to war against each other! And a peaceful world is, for them, supposed to be good for us, for promising trade, however much it also suits the folks over there. So, once again, for some folks the Republican rationale for war is less ethical than the Democratic one.

For my money, of course, neither excuse works. Going to war so as to secure one's good is wrong, just as it is wrong to go to war so as to help others. The only just war is a defensive war.

As usual, I take it back to ethics in interpersonal relationships. I may not beat up others either for my or their good, only if they attack me first (or are clearly about to do so). It is sheer paternalism, condescension, to impose on others what one (possibly quite rightly) deems to be good for them. But the other approach is also wrong: to attack people, rob them or assault them, because we may advance some goals of our own, isn’t justified either.

In short, we are not to treat other adults as our own children, whose well-being is our responsibility up to a certain stage of their lives, nor as our serfs or slaves. And when one takes this simple but true ethical principle into international relations, it spells out "defensivism," not interventionism, be it for humanitarian or self-interested reasons.

If you will notice, Democrats never lay out this line of opposition to Bush. Which is not surprising, given their history of allegedly humanitarian imperialism. So, the question before us as citizens and possible voters is, which of these meddlesome folk are a safer bet in Washington. As far as I can tell, neither, only I tend to be in a super-minority on that score.

January 17, 2004

Tibor Machan [send him mail] holds the Freedom Communications Professorship of Free Enterprise and Business Ethics at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, CA. A Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, he is author of 20+ books, most recently, The Passion for Liberty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

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