Ends, Means, and Iraq

One of my favorite professors at Swarthmore just posted an interesting commentary on people who kind of sort of supported the Iraq war but now say they didn't. (Specificially, people like Ignatieff who made arguments to the effect of "good war, bad administration, bad plan"-- I think this is very different than saying "good cause, bad war...")

Burke argues that you can't build a liberal society through war and military occupation, and then examines the pyschological process through which the idea of doing just this has been so appealing. People look to strengthen the liberal secular modern state through military action even though that is antithetical to its liberal foundation.

I'm no utilitarian but I have a weakness for ends-justify-means style arguments. People often say that acting in an ends-justify-means paradime means that the means cheapen or ruin the ends. Other than the obvious (a mother shouting at her child to be quiet, bombing campaigns to stop violence), I've never been able to dig into this argument. It always seemed to boil down to afterschool special lessons "The cookie won't taste good if you lie to get it" or the undeniable and unavoidable "Winning World War II without killing anyone would have resulted in a much less bittersweet victory." I think this post made me appreciate how the wrong means can entirely invalidate the ends.

Burke's post is about the United States attempting to create liberal societies through military action, but it also made me think about the way a country could become iliberal through an effort to domestically impose liberalism or secularism. I struggle a lot with the relationship between church and state in the United States but I think ultimately our premise allows for more individual freedom (and also more room for error) than laicism as practiced by France and Turkey and most of Europe. Enforcing secularism through headscarf bans is decidedly iliberal.