More on the Iraq War: Struggling for Humanism

by Bill Creasy

This essay was written for the April 2004 and June 2004 issues of WASHline. It is reproduced without editing.

Speaking for myself, opposition to the Iraq war is based on humanist principles. The goal of the US policy should be to unite the human race to recognize that terrorism is a criminal activity. The goal should be to get all nations to prosecute and arrest terrorists as law-breakers. Islamic nations must be allies in this goal.

The problem with the Iraq war is that it has alienated the countries and the people that the US needs as allies. It has made the US look like a rogue nation with no respect for international law. And if the US can break rules, why shouldn't everyone else?

I hope for the best in Iraq. I hope their new constitution is accepted, a good government is established, and our troops can leave the Iraqis in peace. However, even if these good outcomes are achieved (and I'm not optimistic that they will), it still wouldn't justify starting a pre-emptive war and invading a nation without any evidence of any imminent threat by the country or anyone in the country. There is no way to justify such actions under any accepted international law.

Jihad, or struggle, is a central concept in Islam. Modern science has a central concept that is related in some ways: evolution. Economics has another: capitalism. For all three, a basic premise is competition. Perhaps Islam is more compatible with modern science than Christianity is, since many Christians, and Christian theology, have trouble accepting evolution or reconciling with the nature of competition. Of course, both evolution and jihad, when applied to human society, are concepts that can be subject to interpretation.

For those fundamentalist Islamists who define jihad as a military conflict, perhaps they should learn a lesson from the past few years. The U.S. Army invaded Iraq, which had perhaps the largest military of any Muslim country. The war was started essentially on the whim of the President, with little international support and mixed national support. It has hardly made a ripple in the U.S. economy. Even so, the U.S. military rolled over the Iraqi military and destroyed the government in a month, making it a decisive military victory. The terrorists may destroy a building or a train, but they aren't invading the U.S. and they aren't achieving military victories. If that is their definition of jihad, then guess what? We win. The U.S. is simply the world's only superpower.

(I'm not suggesting that the invasion was a good idea. Peacekeeping and rebuilding is another, more difficult problem. Someone still needs to think about the best way to run an occupation, and they should have thought about it before the invasion started. The controversy over treatment of Iraqi prisoners is the latest evidence.)

But warfare isn't all there is to evolution, and it shouldn't be all there is to jihad. The best kind of success in a competition is to arrive at a win-win situation in which both sides cooperate and are better off. This is the only way to make a lasting improvement in the human condition. Everything else is a transfer of goods from one person to another with no net gain.

Improvement in the human condition is a humanist goal. As humanists, we should assume that most other people in the world want the same thing: a better life for themselves, their family, and their friends. There are extremists and political power-monger who will say otherwise, and Warraq has found several extremist statements. We have to assume that most people are rational enough, once they see past the political rhetoric, to see their own best interests.

So what should humanists do to encourage these people? It is easy to say that we should confront Muslims to argue that their religion is outdated and their ideas are wrong. Not surprisingly, they will find this to be an insult to their society and history.

A better approach is to find the aspects of their religion that are humanistic, and encourage those aspects. We can argue against ideas in the religion that are illogical or destructive. We shouldn't pretent to agree with supernaturalistic assertions.

But there has to be a line beyond which we don't tell them to reject immediately their entire culture and belief framework. This approach doesn't mean we have less conviction about our own ideals, but rather that we have an awareness of the psychology of someone who is raised in a culture. It is important to criticize ideas, rather than people, and to make allies rather than enemies. By using this approach, we may be able to arrive at a win-win situation. It may be less than complete victory for either side, but it will be a benefit to everyone.