Comments Elsewhere

Quoth John: ‘If a bank robber walks into a bank and points a fake gun at the teller screaming, “Give me the money in the safe within five seconds or I will kill you,” and the teller proceeds to shoot the assailant, it is self-defense because the teller thought her life was in danger.’

But there are three features here which make the situation you posit saliently different from the situation between Iraq and the United States.

1) The bank robber with the (unbeknownst to you) fake gun is making a specific, credible threat.

2) There’s no good way of determining whether the gun is real or not without using force.

3) There’s no good way of stopping the bank robber from using the gun against you if it does turn out to be real.

But (2) and (3) are manifestly not the case for Iraq. Here as elsewhere there’s an obligation to defend yourself by the least aggressive means that can be counted on to work—if the bank teller could have just as safely disarmed the bank robber with a karate chop, or could have discovered a fake gun quickly and without risk, then it would be murder to just shoot the bank robber without first availing herself of these means. And for all the faults of his ideas about foreign policy ideas (and oh, there are many!) Kerry is right about something here in relation to Iraq: if the goal was to ensure that Hussein disarmed himself of NBC weapons, then it’s quite clear that there was a way to achieve that goal without bombing the hell out of Iraq—that is, letting the inspections work. Bush presented no clear case whatsoever that inspections were failing; he just obstructed them and then decided around March that it was time for war.

What about (1)? Even if there were credible reasons to believe that Hussein had or was actively developing NBC weapons (and I find that much more dubious than you seem to, given what we now know about the politically-driven intelligence procedures leading up to the war), was there any specific, credible threat of using them against the United States? I certainly don’t recall that Hussein made any such threats; the administration’s case seemed to be founded on the speculation that he might have given weapons to terrorist groups that have made specific threats against the U.S.—a shaky speculation which we knew by the outbreak of the war to be completely unfounded, and which has only been confirmed as such since then.

As for Jefferson’s foreign policy, it’s certainly the case that he would have despised both Bush’s unrestrained warmongering and Kerry’s longing for as many entangling alliances as possible. His hope for the spread of liberty worldwide (as, for example, in his early support of the French Revolution) makes for some superficial resemblence between him and the “Freedom is on the March” crew, but of course he would have absolutely detested the imperial and militaristic means by which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. have gone about it.

Jefferson also would have detested the notion that the United States hs no obligation to make a credible case to honest observers around the world (which is what Kerry protested—rightly or wrongly—that we had not done in the case of Iraq) that taking arms was both legitimate and being used as a last resort. I take this to have been Roderick’s main point (however ineptly put by me).