POLITICS SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
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The headlines of the last few months make it clear that there are going to be no free passes for America when it comes to getting its troops out of Iraq. The recent bombing of a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, like the internal warfare in Sunni-dominated Anbar Provice, shows how many Iraqi security problems persist.
But as President Obama continues the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, he should do more than pay attention to conditions on the ground. He should also keep in mind how badly withdrawals from occupied countries have gone in the past, and take to heart the historical lessons these failed withdrawals teach. Though many experts have attempted military, strategic, and political analyses of how and when the United States should withdraw, there has been little attention paid to moral considerations in answering that question.
In the same way that we think of just and unjust wars, we need to think of just and unjust withdrawals. Ethical understanding and historical reflection have too often been the exception rather than the rule when great powers withdraw from the countries they occupied.
Nations carefully plan for wars. They mobilize support for them. But typically they rush into withdrawals, which they commonly see as signs of failure. Think, for example, of Great Britain's hasty retreat from India in 1947 and the estimated one million people who died following partition. Occupying powers typically behave as the British did, putting the safety of their own troops and civil servants, and the reputations of their political leaders, before any other considerations.
There is good reason to challenge this historical pattern, especially when we think of the stakes in the Middle East today. We need to acknowledge that when one country occupies another, it acquires obligations--and this is true whether the initial occupation was a good idea or a bad one. In either case, social life has been disrupted. Even the displacement of a brutal and repressive regime brings death and destruction in its wake, uproots many people, damages the economy, shuts down schools and hospitals, subjects the local population to foreign rule, if only for a time. When foreigners depart, they must make sure that their departure doesn't produce further disastrous disruptions.
In practice, withdrawal can involve all sorts of difficulties. As in Algeria and Gaza, the occupying power may even have to battle its own colon or settler population, which does not want to depart--putting its own soldiers at risk to produce a decent ending to the occupation. But in all cases, an ethical withdrawal requires an occupying power to adopt two fundamental guidelines:
First, make a good-faith effort to leave a stable government behind. Occupiers commonly claim that they are acting for the benefit of the country they are occupying. But even if they can't make good on that claim, they must try to leave the country no worse off than it was before they came. They don't have to, and often can't, establish a liberal or social democracy, but they should aim for a government that is legitimate in the eyes of its own people and that is capable of providing basic services--including law and order. And for the sake of that, they should be willing to offer ongoing financial and technical aid after they leave, even if the country they are leaving is not likely to be a reliable ally in the future.
Second, do whatever is possible to safeguard the people most at risk in the country now on its own. Years ago, the philosopher John Rawls argued that distributive justice requires paying close attention to the least well-off people in your society. By analogy, justice in withdrawing requires paying close attention to the safety of the most vulnerable people who remain behind. This clearly wasn't the policy of the French in Algeria or of our own country in Vietnam. Careless exits leave many people at risk, who are killed, like the Algerian Harkis, or forced to flee, like the Vietnamese “boat people.” Departing powers must help such people restart their lives in safety, enabling them to re-establish themselves at home or providing neighboring countries with subsidies to shelter them.
If people are at risk because they worked for (“collaborated” with) an occupier, as in the case of translators, drivers, guards, informers, and many others in Iraq, it is especially necessary is to offer them and their families asylum. Great Britain's behavior after the American Revolution provides a classic example of an imperial power doing the right thing. Over several months and hundreds of sailings through early December 1783, Britain removed thousands of Loyalists and sympathizers from its former colonies, sending 29,244 evacuees from New York to Nova Scotia alone.
The Obama administration cannot undo the mistakes that the Bush administration made or the crimes that it committed in Iraq. But it can do the next best thing. It can mitigate their consequences for the Iraqi people and provide a model for how a modern occupation should end. To be sure, executing a just withdrawal, with appropriate concern for the Iraqis left behind, may require a significant allocation of time and resources, not to mention the lives of many additional U.S. soldiers. America's moral obligation to Iraq need not be only consideration in making these decisions. But its withdrawal from the country should not be as thoughtless as its entry.
Michael Walzer, professor emeritus of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and Nicolaus Mills, professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, are co-editors of the forthcoming book, Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq.
10 comments
Michael Walzer represents "liberalism" at it most vapid, hypocritical and foolish. According to Michael we can betray our allies so long as we as we make an effort (yeah, right) to rescue the vicitims of our betrayal. Barack Hussein Obama has in effect declared war on the state of Israel. If a second holocaust occurs there that will Michael Walzer say? No doubt he'll piss and moan and whine and say it's all American's fault.
- bulbman1066
September 25, 2009 at 1:50am
M/W: In the same way that we think of just and unjust wars, we need to think of just and unjust withdrawals. george: Unbelievable. In the past 6 years hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens have been butchered or horribly maimed by forces Bush unleashed in that country. Literally, over a million citizens were driven from the country as refugees. Countless hundreds of thousands of lives devastated or destroyed. Baghdad's communities are effectively walled off---Shia or Sunni. The phoney democracy prevails in the Green Zone but throughout the land the religious fanatics are instituing one or another new rendition of sharia. Here's how M/W encompass that: Even the displacement of a brutal and repressive regime brings death and destruction in its wake, uproots many people, damages the economy, shuts down schools and hospitals, subjects the local population to foreign rule, if only for a time. george: A rather antiseptic choice of words, don't you think? The sort of "analysis" one might expect from, say, abstractionist pundits? Or an abstractionist commander in chief. The one we've got now, for example. george walton But the Intellectuals in the mainstream press are still hell bent on resolving [theoretically the next obstacle to "peace": A "just" withdrawal of Amercian troops. Then the inevitble march through the history of western civilization to show us how it was done before. M/W: We need to acknowledge that when one country occupies another, it acquires obligations--and this is true whether the initial occupation was a good idea or a bad one. george: And how does this apply in turn to, say, Israel on the West Bank? But we're not talking about that just or unjust withdrawal are we?
- iambiguous
September 25, 2009 at 2:37am
oops. Let me put the pieces in the right order this time. M/W: In the same way that we think of just and unjust wars, we need to think of just and unjust withdrawals. george: Unbelievable. In the past 6 years hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens have been butchered or horribly maimed by forces Bush unleashed in that country. Literally, over a million citizens were driven from the country as refugees. Countless hundreds of thousands of lives devastated or destroyed. Baghdad's communities are effectively walled off---Shia or Sunni. The phoney democracy prevails in the Green Zone but throughout the land the religious fanatics are instituing one or another rendition of sharia. Here's how M/W encompass that: Even the displacement of a brutal and repressive regime brings death and destruction in its wake, uproots many people, damages the economy, shuts down schools and hospitals, subjects the local population to foreign rule, if only for a time. george: A rather antiseptic choice of words, don't you think? The sort of "analysis" one might expect from, say, abstractionist pundits? Or an abstractionist commander in chief. The one we've got now, for example. But the Intellectuals in the mainstream press are still hell bent on resolving [theoretically] the next obstacle to "peace": A "just" withdrawal of Amercian troops. Then the inevitable march through the history of western civilization to show us how it was done before. M/W: We need to acknowledge that when one country occupies another, it acquires obligations--and this is true whether the initial occupation was a good idea or a bad one. george: And how does this apply in turn to, say, Israel on the West Bank? But we're not talking about that just or unjust withdrawal are we? george walton
- iambiguous
September 25, 2009 at 2:40am
Bulbman, you are being ridiculous, and George, you are not much better about responding to what Walzer actually said. Walzer is not commenting on whether keeping troops in Iraq is a good idea or not. He begins with the historical observation that "Nations carefully plan for wars. They mobilize support for them. But typically they rush into withdrawals...." Walzer is starting with the *factual* premise that America has committed to removing all its combat forces by the end of 2011. The Iraqi government remanded this of the U.S. George Bush agreed to it, if you don't recall, and Obama is continuing with that plan. Right or wrong, it is what the Iraqis want; want the Democrat and Republican consensus it; and what most Americans want (Gallup polls for the last three years show 60% support for withdrawal on a timetable.) I take Walzer to be saying that this withdrawal is happening and, given that, it should be done ethically. Isn't it better to have a thoughtful, planned, ethically guided withdrawal than the alternatives he discusses? Neither of you comment on the substance of his guidelines given these political facts.
- bstiltner
September 25, 2009 at 2:12pm
By the way, I am sorry that I kept talking about Walzer (whom the other commenters lashed into), overlooking the co-author Mills. Walzer is the more well known of the two, and he's certainly had something constructive to say in recent years about justice *after* a war. --Brian @ Deep Down Things (http://freshdeepdown.wordpress.com)
- bstiltner
September 25, 2009 at 2:26pm
bulbman: wait, what? Your comment has so little to do with the actual piece in question that there can be no reply. Except for this sentence: "Barack Hussein Obama has in effect declared war on the state of Israel. If a second holocaust occurs there that will Michael Walzer say? No doubt he'll piss and moan and whine and say it's all American's fault." If you honestly believe the first sentence that you wrote -- and one could certainly be forgiven for not believing it -- then it *would* be America's fault, right? Or at least its government's fault, which is what most people usually mean by that.
- frippo
September 25, 2009 at 3:12pm
stiltner: Walzer is not commenting on whether keeping troops in Iraq is a good idea or not. He begins with the historical observation that "Nations carefully plan for wars. They mobilize support for them. But typically they rush into withdrawals...." George: The tactical plots and plans are not MY point. Instead, I aim to suggest the M/Ns confine their abstractions [and, as academic intellectuals, that's often all they employ] TO the tactical accouterments of war and the transition to "peace". But you can't discuss "just" or "unjust" tactics until you discuss the motivation behind the strategic plots and plans. Here, M/N may as well be on the TNR staff. They are just two more mainstream pundits who refuse to delve into those who own and operate both American economic and foreign policy assumptions. They live in their moral ivory towers where words hardly ever have to fitted empirically into the worlds below. They're not ethicists, they're scholastics. Although in America that is often just another way of saying the same thing. At least Randy Cohen is forced to dig down into the nitty gritty of actual circumstantial contexts. george
- iambiguous
September 25, 2009 at 3:50pm
Sounds fine, but "providing neighboring countries with subsidies to shelter [those who cooperated with Americans]?" Ha! Imagine Syria spending that money on the Iraqi refugees rather than lining their own pockets, or, funding Hezbollah.
- Juniper
September 25, 2009 at 4:52pm
Walzer's Idea is all very well in Theory, but how will it go down in practice? The population of Iraq is about 31 million. That suggests that reasonable number of adjuncts America needed in the country was between 300,000 to 600,000 at a minimum. Are the American people prepared to accept 600,000 refugees from an Arabic country in a short period of time? I doubt it. I have a feeling that America's Iraqi servants will end up like their counterparts in South Vietnam in 1975 or Iran in 1979 - abandoned to their fate. (yeah, i know the US government eventually accepted in several hundred thousand Vietnamese boat people, but that was after they had risked their lives in the South China Seas - what tribulation will the Iraqis be forced to undergo before they are let in, I wonder?)
- kiltubberr
September 26, 2009 at 4:51pm
George: "They are just two more mainstream pundits who refuse to delve into those who own and operate both American economic and foreign policy assumptions. They live in their moral ivory towers where words hardly ever have to fitted empirically into the worlds below." Brian: That's often a problem with academics, and being one myself, perhaps I am defensive... but you are painting with a broad brush. Weren't many academics very helpful in raising a critical voice against the pretensions of Bush's arguments for war? Walzer was one of those. He refers even in this essay to the "mistakes and crimes" of the Bush administration. I don't know what you are expecting of the authors in such a short essay. Unfortunately, kiltubberr is right that the big problem here is the gap between nice theory and the politicians' and public's willingness to do right by the Iraqis whose country we broke. --Brian @ Deep Down Things (http://freshdeepdown.wordpress.com)
- bstiltner
September 28, 2009 at 12:45pm