Subject: HAB: PART I  - Habermas on Irak
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 09:58:34 -0300


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PART I

Translation of: "Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?" in: *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*, 19.4.2003, p. 33. 

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J=FCrgen Habermas:  *What does the felling of the monument mean? Let us not close our eyes before this revolution in world affairs: the normative authority of America lies shattered*


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 liberating 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. 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?  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. 
With us [in Germany] two kinds of reactions have become apparent in the political sphere. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.  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. 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. 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. 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 ius ad bellum was abolished and the sovereignty of individual states curtailed. With that, classical international law had at least taken one decisive step in the direction of a cosmopolitan legal order. 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. Let's not kid ourselves: America's normative authority lies shattered.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Today the normative controversy is dividing the
West itself. 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.

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