Most people think war was a mistake

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, December 12, 2006

When incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was asked by Sen. Carl Levin whether we were winning the war in Iraq, Gates answered, “No, sir.”

Gates’ response was a sober reminder that the war has fallen well short of its stated goals and that we will not prevail in Iraq in any meaningful sense of the word. But Gates’ comments should also serve as an indictment of the ideology that put us on the path to war in the first place. The supporters of the invasion promoted the idea that American power could be a force for positive change in the world. What they meant, however, was that war was the necessary tool for their foreign policy ambitions. They dressed up unprovoked aggression as “preemption” and used clever public relations strategies to enlist public support.

In the short term their plan succeeded, but now, most people have seen through the charade and believe that the war was a mistake.

That’s a good start, but it’s not enough.

At the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II, Justice Robert H. Jackson denounced aggression as the “Supreme International Crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Jackson was right and his words ring as true today as they did 60 years ago.

We need to examine the underlying causes of the war and extinguish the poisonous ideology that exalts aggression and discards the suffering that it inevitably causes.

Mike Whitney

Snohomish