A THOUGHT ON POST-FACTO JUSTIFICATION Having finished my second exam (American Legal History) I've decided to allot myself one post's worth of pontification. If you've had enough of my BS, please move on to the amusing anecdotes about Yankees baseball you'll find below. Of course, if you'd had enough of my BS, you would have long ago removed me from your "favorites".
Anyway, while viewing the Professor's blog this morning, I came across this story, which suggests that there might actually be something widely-held-but-officially disbelieved idea that Iraq had something to do with the September 11th attacks. (I know, I know: it's FrontPageMag. Believe me, if I could get it in the Atlantic Monthly, I would.)
I got to thinking: what if it's true? If the Ba'athist government of Iraq actually did help facilitate the September 11th attacks, does that change our analysis of whether of not the war was justified? Can information subsequently acquired justify a war that would otherwise have been unjustified? Or are we stuck with the information we had at the time (which suggested that there was no link, or at least no reliable evidence of one)?
And yet, if we're stuck with what we knew at the time, doesn't that suggest that the apparent absence of any WMDs can't be used to impeach the justification for the war? After all, almost everyone believed the Iraqis had some WMD capabilities before the war. That belief was reasonable, it just happened to be false. If a war can't be justified by new information discovered after the fact, why can a war be proved unjust by subsequent discoveries?
One could, I suppose, devise a theory of just war in which that could be the case, in which a war's justification could never be increased from where it was prior to the conflict, but could be decreased by subsequent developments demonstrating that pre-war assumptions used to justify war (like the presence of WMD stockpiles) were shown to be false. Such a system might get the incentives right, decreasing the likelihood that parties which subscribe to that just war theory would start wars.
Of course, the whole point of the Bush Doctrine is that the state of affairs I've just described (civilized states extremely reluctant to make war unless attacked or virtually certain of imminent attack) does not get the incentives right, at least not in a post-9/11 world in which it's clear that an imminent threat need not be take the form of massed armies or an approaching armada, and that an actual attack can kill thousands of innocent civilians.
I am not a smart man: I don't know which (if either) of these positions is the right one. I just kind of wish we had had this debate two years ago, when we were preparing to mass troops on the Kuwaiti border, and not now, while we're occupying a medium-sized country (or worse, never). Oh, to live in a more philosophic country. But alas...
In the meantime:
BUSH IS A NAZI! ASHCROFT IS THE DEVIL! RUMSFELD WASHES DOWN THE LIMBS OF IRAQI BABIES WITH A TALL GLASS OF SWEET CRUDE OIL!
KERRY PLANS TO TURN THE WHITE HOUSE INTO A TIME-SHARE AND RENT IT OUT TO THE VIET CONG, AL-QAEDA, AND PLANNED PARENTHOOD!
ahh, that feels much better.
Anyway, while viewing the Professor's blog this morning, I came across this story, which suggests that there might actually be something widely-held-but-officially disbelieved idea that Iraq had something to do with the September 11th attacks. (I know, I know: it's FrontPageMag. Believe me, if I could get it in the Atlantic Monthly, I would.)
I got to thinking: what if it's true? If the Ba'athist government of Iraq actually did help facilitate the September 11th attacks, does that change our analysis of whether of not the war was justified? Can information subsequently acquired justify a war that would otherwise have been unjustified? Or are we stuck with the information we had at the time (which suggested that there was no link, or at least no reliable evidence of one)?
And yet, if we're stuck with what we knew at the time, doesn't that suggest that the apparent absence of any WMDs can't be used to impeach the justification for the war? After all, almost everyone believed the Iraqis had some WMD capabilities before the war. That belief was reasonable, it just happened to be false. If a war can't be justified by new information discovered after the fact, why can a war be proved unjust by subsequent discoveries?
One could, I suppose, devise a theory of just war in which that could be the case, in which a war's justification could never be increased from where it was prior to the conflict, but could be decreased by subsequent developments demonstrating that pre-war assumptions used to justify war (like the presence of WMD stockpiles) were shown to be false. Such a system might get the incentives right, decreasing the likelihood that parties which subscribe to that just war theory would start wars.
Of course, the whole point of the Bush Doctrine is that the state of affairs I've just described (civilized states extremely reluctant to make war unless attacked or virtually certain of imminent attack) does not get the incentives right, at least not in a post-9/11 world in which it's clear that an imminent threat need not be take the form of massed armies or an approaching armada, and that an actual attack can kill thousands of innocent civilians.
I am not a smart man: I don't know which (if either) of these positions is the right one. I just kind of wish we had had this debate two years ago, when we were preparing to mass troops on the Kuwaiti border, and not now, while we're occupying a medium-sized country (or worse, never). Oh, to live in a more philosophic country. But alas...
In the meantime:
BUSH IS A NAZI! ASHCROFT IS THE DEVIL! RUMSFELD WASHES DOWN THE LIMBS OF IRAQI BABIES WITH A TALL GLASS OF SWEET CRUDE OIL!
KERRY PLANS TO TURN THE WHITE HOUSE INTO A TIME-SHARE AND RENT IT OUT TO THE VIET CONG, AL-QAEDA, AND PLANNED PARENTHOOD!
ahh, that feels much better.
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