History, Social Contract Justiy War
By Adam Goldwyn '03

Editor,



Some Truths and Morals are absolutes. With regards to a sovereign nation's moral responsibility to its constituency, Jefferson articulated these absolutes as "certain inalienable rights: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In short, it is an individual's right to absolute self-determination, except insofar as that individual surrenders personal liberties to a larger sovereign entity. The primary reason an individual acquiesces his or her personal sovereignty to a larger organization of individuals is this and nothing more: that that larger body provides the individual with the best chance for his or her own self-determination. Which is to say that larger groups of people aid the individual in the basic human desires of self-preservation, reproduction and the satisfaction of material needs.

Equally important, it is the responsibility of the free men and women of the world to liberate others from oppressive and dehumanizing social conditions which have not been entered by choice, but by a monopoly on violence held by an elite few. Such was the call for the Union armies of the Civil War, such was the call for the GI's sent to die in Europe to turn back the moral repugnance of Nazi Germany. Such was the call of the British at Waterloo, such was the call of Indian nationalists against British colonizers, such was the call for Mandela against the Apartheid State of South Africa.

Finally, in such cases where an opposing government poses a threat to another, it is the responsibility of that government, if needs be, to send its soldiers to war. With regards to the United States' responsibility to the self-preservation of its constituency, we are faced with an Iraqi government which may or may not have weapons of mass destruction and has repeatedly spat upon any effort to monitor these programs by the unanimous vote of an international body called the United Nations. I will simply pose two hypotheticals: if Iraq has biological or nuclear capabilities, on which countries will they use them? And if the power dynamics were such that the United States and Iraq were in an exact role-reversal, would they offer us the same courtesy that we are currently offering them? The opposition to this war by the Arab states stems as much from their own anti-Americanism as their fear of a popularly run government in proximity to their own and the pressure from their own populaces to imitate those new practices in a region dominated exclusively by autocratic and monarchical regimes

The point is simply this: that America is justified in its war against Iraq for the following reasons: our system, flawed as it is, is fundamentally superior to the Iraqi system in allowing the individual's right to self-determination, thus giving it a moral obligation to act against an unjust system, especially when that system poses a real threat to our own, as well as its neighbors, for which history has shown Iraq has an affinity. Any government which fails in either of these regards is either lacking in its responsibility to those individuals who have entered into that social contract, or, in the case against Iraq, a failure much more perplexing: a lack of moral courage to sacrifice the liberties (i.e. the lives of our volunteer, professional army) we enjoy in order to bring them to others.

Dictatorships in this world are a dime a dozen, but sometimes, they go too far in spreading their doctrine of fear and coercion. It is then that the armies of the free world must risk much that the words of Winston Churchill retain their essence: "Never have so many owed so much to so few."

Any knee-jerk reaction for peace in the face of a morally repugnant Iraqi regime speaks of a spineless appeasement policy whose latest success was the Munich Pact in 1938, in which, after meeting with Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that he had achieved "peace in our time." This appeasement policy resulted in seven years of armed conflict, two atomic bombs, one Holocaust, millions of military and civilian casualties and billions of dollars wasted. Let us neither underestimate our enemy nor our moral responsibility. Let us neither repeat the mistakes of history nor be accused by future generations of failing to grasp the severity of our situation.