Habermas on Iraq

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is an edited translation, by Gary Davis of the Habermas list, of
Habermas's response to the invasion of Iraq. I don't have time to
comment at the moment, but it may interest listers.



[Translation of: "Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?" in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 April, 2003, p. 33; translation by habhamaf;
division of the article into 50 paragraph topics/themes (for easy
response referencing) by Gary Davis, who is very wrapped up in a
discussion <http://homepage.mac.com/gedavis/JH/GD_on_JH_on_Iraq.html>
of the article, which appeared in English translation as fewer, mostly
very long paragraphs, indicated below by separator lines.]

______________________________________________________________



What does the felling of the monument mean?

by Jürgen Habermas



Let us not close our eyes before this revolution in world affairs: the
normative authority of America lies shattered



1 The whole world watched that scene on the 9th of April in Baghdad,
followed the American soldiers placing the noose around the neck of
the dictator, watched the tyrant being felled from his pedestal in a
most symbolic act, before a jubilant crowd. First the apparently
immutable monument wobbles, then it falls. Before it crashes
liberatingly to the ground, gravity has to overcome the grotesquely
unnatural horizontal position in which the massive figure, gently
see-sawing up and down, is poised for one last disturbing second.



2 Like the perception of a picture-puzzle 'flipping', so the public
perception of the war seems to switch with this image. The morally
obscene spread of shock and fear amongst a mercilessly bombarded,
starved and helpless population transforms itself on this day, in the
Shiite quarter of Baghdad, in the enthusiastically greeted liberation
of citizens from terror and repression. Both perceptions contain a
kernel of truth, even if they evoke contradictory moral feelings and
attitudes. Must the emotional ambivalence lead to contradictory
judgments?

______________________________________________________________



3 On the face of it everything is clear-cut. An illegal war remains an
offence against international law even if it leads to consequences
which are normatively desirable. But is that the end of the story?
Undesirable consequences can negate a good intention. Couldn't perhaps
favorable consequences unfold, retrospectively, a legitimating
influence? The mass graves, the subterranean cells and the reports of
the tortured leaves no doubt about the criminal nature of the regime;
and the liberation of a tormented population from a barbaric regime is
a high good, the highest under the politically desirable goods. In
this respect the Iraqis pronounce, whether they celebrate, loot,
suffer apathetically or demonstrate against the occupiers, a judgment
upon the moral nature of the war.

______________________________________________________________



4 With us [in Germany] two kinds of reactions have become apparent in
the political sphere.



5 The pragmatists believe in the normative power of the factual and
place their faith in a practical judgment which, with an eye on the
limitations which politics imposes on the realization of morality,
pays its respects to the fruits of victory. In their eyes carping
about the justification of the war is fruitless, since this has now
become a historical fact.



6 The others, whether capitulating before the power of the factual out
of opportunism or out of conviction, brush what they hold to be the
dogma of international law aside with the argument that the latter -
full of post-heroic squeamishness against the risks and costs of
military force - refuses to acknowledge political freedom as the true
good.



7 Both of these reactions are off the mark, since they give in to an
affect against the ostensible abstractions of a 'bloodless moralism'
without clarifying for themselves just what it is that the
neo-conservatives in Washington are offering as an alternative to the
domesticization of state force by international law.



8 For the neo-conservatives confront the morality of international law
not with realism or with the bathos of freedom but with a quite
revolutionary perspective: when international law fails then the
politically successful hegemonic enforcement of a liberal world order
is morally justifiable even when it seeks recourse to means which are
indefensible in the light of such international law.



9 Wolfowitz is not Kissinger. He's much more a revolutionary than a
power-cynic. Certainly, the superpower reserves for itself the right
to act unilaterally - and bring to bear, if necessary, even
preventively, all available military means - to strengthen its
hegemonic position against possible rivals.



10 But global power ambition is not an end in itself for the new
ideologues. What distinguishes the neo-conservatives from the school
of the 'realists' is the vision of an American world political order
which has jumped the reformist rails of the UN policies on human
rights. It does not betray the liberal goals, but it does break the
civilizing bounds which the charter of the United Nations placed with
good reason upon the process of goal-realization.



11 The world organization is certainly not yet in a position, today,
to force deviant member states into offering their citizens a
democratic and rule-of-law based order.



12 And the highly selectively pursued human rights policies are
subject to the proviso of implementability: the veto-power Russia
needs not fear an armed intervention in Chechnya. Saddam Hussein's use
of nerve gas against his own Kurdish population is but one of many
instances in the scandalous chronicle of the failure of the community
of nations, which looks the other way even in cases of genocide.



13a All the more important is hence the core function of
peace-keeping, on which the existence of the United Nations is based -
i.e. the enforcement of the ban on wars of aggression, with which,
after World War II, the jus ad bellum was abolished and the
sovereignty of individual states curtailed.

______________________________________________________________



13b With that, classical international law had at least taken one
decisive step in the direction of a cosmopolitan legal order.



14 The United States - which for half a century could claim to be a
pacemaker on this road - has, with the Iraq war, not only destroyed
this reputation and given up the role of a guarantor power in
international law; with its violation thereof she sets future
superpowers a disastrous example.



15 Let's not kid ourselves: America's normative authority lies
shattered.

______________________________________________________________



16 Neither of the two conditions for a legally justifiable use of
military force was fulfilled: neither the situation of self-defense
against an actual or imminent attack, nor an authorized decision by
the Security Council in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter.



17 Neither Resolution 1441 nor one of the seventeen preceding and
('used-up') Iraq resolutions could count as sufficient authorization.
Something which the alliance of the war-willing confirmed
performatively, for that matter, by first of all seeking a 'second'
resolution, and then withdrawing it when it became clear that they
would not be able to count even on the 'moral' majority of the
non-veto members.



18 Finally the whole procedure was turned into a farce by the
President of the United States declaring repeatedly that he would act,
if necessary, without a mandate of the Security Council.



19 In the light of the Bush Doctrine, the military build-up in the
Gulf lacked from the outset the character of a mere threat. This would
have presupposed the avertibility of the threatened sanctions.



20 The comparison with the intervention in Kosovo also offers no
exoneration. It is true that an authorization by the Security Council
in this case was not reached either. But the retrospectively obtained
legitimation could be based upon three circumstances: on the
prevention - as it seemed at the time - of an ethnic cleansing in the
process of taking place, on the imperative - covered by international
law - of emergency assistance holding erga omnes for this case, as
well as the incontrovertibly democratic and constitutional character
of all the member states of the ad hoc military alliance.



21 Today the normative controversy is dividing the West itself.



22 Admittedly, a remarkable difference in the argumentative strategies
between the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon powers had begun
to manifest itself already then, in April of 1999. While the one side
drew from the disaster of Srebrenica the lesson that military
intervention was necessary to close the gap between efficacy and
legitimacy which earlier missions had revealed - to make headway in
the direction of a fully institutionalized world civil rights - the
other side was content with the goal of spreading its own liberal
order elsewhere in the world, by force if necessary. At the time I
ascribed this to differences in the respective legal traditions -
Kant's cosmopolitanism on the one hand, John Stuart Mill's liberal
nationalism on the other.



23 But in the light of the hegemonic unilateralism which the policy
theorists of the Bush Doctrine have been pursuing since 1991 - as
Stefan Frühlich showed in this newspaper on 10th April - one could
surmise, with hindsight, that the American delegation was already
pursuing the negotiations of Rambouillet from this novel perspective.
Whether this is true or not, George W. Bush's decision to consult the
Security Council is at any rate no longer based on a desire -
internally long since regarded as superfluous - for authorization by
international law. This backing was sought only because it could have
increased support for the "Coalition of the Willing" and allay
reservations within the domestic population.



24 At the same time we should not read the new doctrine as an
expression of normative cynicism. Functions like that of the
geo-strategic consolidation of spheres of power and of resources which
such a policy may also fulfill may tempt one to adopt a
critique-of-ideology approach. But this conventional explanation
trivializes the break - inconceivable even a year-and-a-half ago -
with the norms to which the United States has been committed until
now.



25 We'd be well advised not to spend time on a search for motives, but
rather to take the new doctrine at its word. Otherwise we'd misread
the revolutionary character of a re-orientation based on the
historical experiences of the past century.



26 The historian Eric Hobsbawm quite rightly named the 20th "the
American" Century. The Neoconservatives could see themselves as the
'victors' and regard the controversial successes - the reorganization
of Europe and the Pacific/South East Asian area after the defeat of
Germany and Japan, as well as the transformation of Eastern as well as
Eastern and Middle-European societies after the disintegration of the
Soviet Union - as a model for a new world order. From the point of
view of a liberalistically read post-histoire á la Fukuyama, this
model has the advantage of being able to dispense with the complicated
justification of normative goals: what more could people possibly want
than the world-wide spread of liberal nations and the globalization of
free markets?



27 The road hence is also clear: Germany, Japan and Russia have been
forced to their knees by war and the arms race. Military force is an
all-the-more attractive option today. As in asymmetric wars, the
victor is in any case an a priori certainty. Wars which improve the
world require no further justification. At the price of negligible
collateral damage, they remove unambiguous evil, which under the aegis
of a powerless community of nations would otherwise persist. The
Saddam falling from his pedestal is the argument which suffices as
justification.

______________________________________________________________



28 This doctrine was developed long before the terrorist attack on the
Twin Towers. The cleverly instrumentalized mass psychology of the
shock of 11 September did however first of all create the climate
within which this doctrine could find broad support - if in a somewhat
modified version, that of the "War against Terrorism". That it should
come to a head in the Bush Doctrine is something it owes to the
definition of a novel phenomenon in the familiar concepts of
conventional warfare. In the case of the Taliban regime there was
indeed a causal connection between a terrorism difficult to pin down
and an attackable 'rogue state'. According to this model it is
possible to adapt the classical conduct of war between nations to deal
with that treacherous danger posed by diffuse and globally operating
[terror-]networks. Compared to the original version, this connection
of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against an insidious danger
mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense.



29 At the cost however of then being saddled with a new burden of
proof. The American administration had to seek to convince world
public opinion of contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. This
dis-information campaign was, for all that, successful enough
domestically for 60% of Americans - according to the most recent
opinion polls - to greet the regime change in Iraq as "expiation" for
the terrorist attack of 11th September.

______________________________________________________________



30 But for the preventive use of military means, the Bush Doctrine
does not really provide a plausible explanation. Since the para-statal
violence of the terrorists - the "war in peace" - is not graspable
with the categories of war between nations, it doesn't ground in the
least the need to weaken the notion of national self-defense (strictly
regulated in international law) in the direction of preemptive
military action. Against the globally networked, decentralized and
invisibly operating enemies, what is of use is prevention at a
different operative level. Here what is of use are not bombs and
rockets, not airplanes and tanks, but the internationally connected
national intelligence- and police services; the control of monetary
channels, the tracking down of logistic connections in general. The
corresponding "security programs" impinge not on international law but
on nationally guaranteed civil rights.



31 Other dangers, arising from the failure (America's own fault) of a
politics of non-proliferation of ABC weapons is in any case more
manageable through negotiations than through wars of disarmament - as
the reserved reaction to North Korea shows.



32 That is, a doctrine concentrating on terrorism does not provide,
compared to the directly pursued goal of a hegemonic world order, an
increase in legitimacy.



33 The Saddam felled from his pedestal remains the argument - symbol
for the liberal reorganization of an entire region. The Iraq war is a
link in the chain of a global politics which justifies itself by
claiming that it has replaced the unavailing Human Rights policies of
a used-up world organization. The United States takes over as it were
the mandate in which the United Nations failed. What's to be said
against this?

______________________________________________________________



34 Moral feelings can lead one astray, since they stick to individual
scenes, to specific images. There's no way of avoiding the question of
the justification of the war in general. The decisive controversy
revolves around the question whether justification in the light of
international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global
politics of a self-empowering hegemon.

______________________________________________________________



35 The empirical objections to the feasibility of the American vision
boil down to the way world society has become too complex for it still
to be steerable from some central point, based on a politics of
military force. The fear of terrorism experienced by the technically
highly-armed superpower seems to express the Cartesian fear of a
subject seeking to turn itself and the world around it into an object,
in order to bring everything under control. It is a politics which, in
the horizontally connected media of the market and of communication,
begins to fall behind, regressing to the original Hobbesian
primordiality of a hierarchical security system. A nation which
reduces all options to the dumb alternatives of war and peace runs up
against the limits of its own organizational powers and resources. It
also leads the negotiation with competing powers and foreign cultures
in false channels and pushes the coordination costs to dizzying
heights.

______________________________________________________________



36 Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still
have side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally
undesirable. The more that political power manifests itself in the
dimensions of military, secret service and police, the more does it
undermine itself - the politics of a globally operating civilizing
power - by endangering its own mission of improving the world
according to liberal ideas.



37 In the United States itself, the permanent regime of a "War
President" is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law.
Quite apart from the practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its
borders, the war regime is not only denying the prisoners of Guantnamo
Bay the legal rights conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It
confers powers on the security services which encroach on the
constitutional rights of its own citizens.

______________________________________________________________



38 And what about the really counterproductive measures the Bush
Doctrine is likely to demand in case of the by-no-means unlikely
scenario of the citizens of Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and so on making
unfriendly use of the democratic rights which the American Government
has so kindly made them a present of?



39 In 1991 the Americans liberated Kuwait - democratize it they did
not. Most of all it is the superpower's presumptuous trusteeship which
is criticized by its coalition partners, who are, for good normative
reasons, unconvinced by the unilateral leadership claim.



40 There was a time when Liberal Nationalism felt itself justified in
propagating the universal values of its own liberal order throughout
the world, with military backing where needed. This self-righteousness
does not become any more sufferable by it being ceded from the nation
State to a hegemonic power. It is the very universalistic core of
democracy and human rights itself which forbids its universal
propagation by fire and sword.



41 The universalistic validity claim which the West associates with
its 'political core values' - i.e. with the procedure of democratic
self-determination and the vocabulary of human rights - may not be
confused with the imperial demand that the political life-form and
culture of a particular democracy--and be it the oldest--is to be
exemplary for all other societies.



42 Of this order was the 'universalism' of those ancient empires which
perceived the world beyond their borders - shimmering on a distant
horizon - from the central perspectives of their own world-views.



43 The modern self-understanding is on the contrary marked by an
egalitarian universalism which insists on the de-centering of each
specific perspective; it requires the relativization of one's own
interpretive perspective from the point of view of the autonomous
Other.

______________________________________________________________



44 It was American Pragmatism itself which made insight into that
which was good and just to all parties concerned dependent upon a
reciprocal acceptance of mutual perspectives.



45 The reason upon which modern rational law is based is not expressed
in the validity of universal 'values' capable of being owned,
exported, and distributed globally. 'Values' - including those for
which one could expect global recognition - don't hang in the air;
they become binding only in the normative order and practices of
specific cultural forms of life.

______________________________________________________________



46 When in Nasiriya thousands of Shiites demonstrate against Saddam
and the American occupation, they bring to expression that non-Western
cultures must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights
from within their own resources and within an interpretation which can
make a convincing connection to local experiences and interests.



47 For that reason, the multilateral formulation of a common purpose
is not one option amongst others - especially not in international
relations.



48 In its self-chosen isolation, even the good hegemon (presuming for
itself trusteeship in the name of the common good) has no way of
knowing whether the actions it claims to be in the interests of others
is indeed equally good for all.



49 There is no meaningful alternative to the further cosmopolitan
development of an international system of law in which the voices of
all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing.

______________________________________________________________



50 The world organization has not as yet suffered irreparable damage.
Since the 'smaller' members did not buckle under to the bullying of
the larger ones, it has even grown in stature and influence. The
reputation of the world organization can be damaged only by its own
actions: if it should seek to 'heal' by compromise what cannot be
healed.



--



habhamaf@xxxxxx

james daly