Pragmatism says that if you get away with something, it’s OK. If you rob a bank and don’t get caught, well the robbery worked, so you can say that “robbery in that situation is OK.” If you got caught, well, “it was wrong—to rob that bank.”

That’s the lure that conservatives will use to justify Iraq. The Surge worked, therefore, all is well. The war was justified.

Not so. Certainly, not the way they justified it.

Conservatives want to look at the war’s end result, which has not fully worked its way out. An Islamist dictatorship in Iraq is still the likeliest result of this war. It is baked into their constitution after all, as a faith-based initiative of Bush.

Our nation was trapped limbo, hinging on the Surge’s success or failure, because it determines the good or evil of the war itself. That is the pragmatist trap.

The truth of larger principles must be brought to bear on Iraq from the beginning to now, rather than to look at the last day when the lights on the Iraq issue go out. We must question whether it was right to get on the Titanic, so to speak, rather than debate whether it is right or wrong to throw someone out of an overloaded life boat. The decision at the beginning defines the inevitable: it either leads to or avoids the crisis in the lifeboat.

For example, the benefits of the war were never for America. Perhaps there are no personal benefits to be gained from war—which would make wars unjustifiable. Ultimately, this war was presented to the public as a war to save the Iraqis. Why must Americans die to make the world save for the Iraqis?

If altruism is not justified generally, then no amount of bedpan internationalism will justify the Iraq War marginally. We originally got into Iraq in ‘91 to save the Kuwaitis. As if that was worth a trillion dollars and 4000 lives. Wrong moves breed wrong moves. We can see today the full cost of the 1991 decision. We could see that cost then, if we realized that selfless service to save savages is self-defeating. It does not justify war. That has always been the defining “justification” from the beginning. It was wrong then, and no victory in Iraq could retroactively justify it.

That is why the liberal and progressive opposition to this war comes across as disingenuous and partisan, while paleo-libertarian opposition far more robust and principled, if not, at times, odd to the ear.

Lorenz Kraus © 2008

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