Sometimes, military force is justified

Did someone designate November as Repudiate-Your-Iraq-War-Vote Month? Or maybe just Quagmire Month? Or Let’s-Get-the-Hell-Out-of-There Month?

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., kicked off the anti-war trend at the end of October in a speech at Georgetown University. “Knowing what we know now,” he declared, “I would not have gone to war in Iraq.”

Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., issued a similar mea culpa recently: “I was wrong. … It was a mistake to vote for this war.”

On Wednesday, President Clinton weighed in: “It was a big mistake.”

Uh-huh. I guess they noticed that voters think so, too. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted in mid-November, most Americans similarly regret the whole darned thing: 63 percent of respondents said they disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, 60 percent declared that it was “not worth going to war” and 52 percent wanted the United States to withdraw “now” or “within 12 months.”

Accordingly, Senate Democrats introduced a measure last week demanding that the White House create a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Whee! Looks like it’s finally time for all responsible politicians – or, at least, presidential hopefuls – to promise that we’ll withdraw from Iraq ASAP.

Somehow, though, I can’t entirely share the festive mood that Let’s-Get-the-Hell-Out-of-There Month seems to have induced in many of my friends.

It’s not that I don’t think we should come up with an exit plan, pronto. I do. As it stands, we almost certainly are doing as much harm as good in Iraq. At least, that seems to be what the Iraqis think. In an August poll, a whopping 82 percent of Iraqis declared themselves “strongly opposed” to the presence of U.S.-led coalition troops, and 67 percent said they feel “less secure” as a result of the occupation.

Despite the many legitimate reasons to demand a responsible Iraq exit plan, I feel a little queasy about the isolationist instinct that seems to lie beneath some of the anti-war claims.

After Vietnam, many people on the left decided that all uses of American military power are inherently wrong. And the Clinton-era fiasco in Somalia – when 19 Marines were killed, prompting a U.S. pullout – left even many moderates convinced that nothing but the most dire threat to our national security justifies risking the lives of American troops. This same sentiment has been voiced a lot recently in the debate about Iraq.

Let’s not forget, though, that even when there is no urgent national security issue at stake, the use of American military force sometimes might be justified and morally necessary.

I’m talking about humanitarian intervention. Had we intervened in Rwanda in 1994, for instance, we might have stopped the genocide that killed nearly 1 million innocent civilians. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo saved thousands of lives. Today, stopping the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, might require outside military intervention.

The doctrine of humanitarian intervention has been discredited by the Bush administration, which tried to use it as an alternative justification for the Iraq war when its trumped-up weapons-of-mass-destruction case fell apart.

Unquestionably, the doctrine should be invoked only with extreme caution. Regime change is not a good enough reason to use military force, and neither is promotion of democracy.

But in the relatively rare situations in which we can use our military to stop egregious and ongoing atrocities, such as genocide, we should.

So enjoy Let’s-Get-the-Hell-Out-of-There Month. The war in Iraq was unjustified and ill-conceived from the start and has caused untold suffering for Americans and Iraqis alike. If our political leaders finally have acknowledged that – and started to discuss seriously when and how to withdraw our troops – we should be glad.

But we also should heed the words of Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School: Let’s not “throw the baby of genuine humanitarian intervention out with the bathwater of Iraq.”