Iraqis tried to overthrow Saddam several times, but were always crushed by stronger force. Saddam maintained his rule through terror, torture chambers, secret police and murder. Mass graves unearthed by the U.S. since 2003 indicate that the number of Iraqi dissidents killed by Saddam could be as high as 300,000. One of them was my uncle, who, for refusing to join Saddam’s political party, was arrested, tortured, and hanged. Saddam’s regime was a government not by consent of the governed, but by brutal, bloody force. So in moral terms, removing Saddam was right. But does that mean it was prudent? Not necessarily.
Political actions must always be guided by two principles: morality and prudence. By prudence I mean caution, foresight, shrewd management of affairs and practical judgment. It is the opposite of recklessness. Thomas West said, “The job of the prudent statesman is to determine the right course in a world in which the immoderate pursuit of moral perfection will more often lead to misery and terror than to justice and happiness.”
If a moral goal is pursued with no regard for prudence, the opposite of the goal is often achieved. That is why our Founding Fathers made a compromise over slavery in the Constitution, causing the document to be criticized by some as “a covenant with death.” Had the Founders insisted on abolishing slavery immediately, the Southern states would not have approved the Constitution. There would have been no Union, the South would have been an independent country free to develop slavery without restraint, and a state more oppressive than apartheid South Africa would perhaps have existed in North America far into the 20th century.
I have started to lean toward the position that removing Saddam Hussein under the terms of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s plan was imprudent. It was imprudent to imagine that there would be no Sunni/Baathist insurgency or Al Qaeda in Iraq after the occupation. It was imprudent to imagine that 150,000 troops would be enough to achieve success, as opposed to the 500,000 advised by several generals. It was imprudent to imagine the war would cost less than $100 billion. It is wrong to commit to an end without committing to the means necessary to achieve the end. That’s called failure. Government by consent of the governed and prosperity could have been brought to the people of Iraq, who were tortured and made destitute by the megalomania of Saddam Hussein. It was morally wrong to have squandered such a moral and humanitarian mission because of such wretched imprudence.
However, keep this in mind. If one embarks on a moral and noble task, but then fails miserably to achieve the task, is that task no longer moral? Imagine the United States decides to send food via helicopter to isolated starving Indonesians after a tsunami, but fails. The helicopter gets poor instructions from ground control, hits bad weather, and crashes to the ground, killing several Indonesians and spoiling the food. Would the task of delivering food to starving people become immoral all of the sudden? No. It remains a great and noble task. We should not dismiss all future attempts to deliver food to starving people. We should fix ground control so that such failure does not happen again, and the results of our previous failure can be reduced, so that possibly, someday, the people will get what was promised to them, and what they morally deserve, as fellow beings in the human race.