Rousseau, Hobbes, and Haditha
Jun 9, 2006
by Nathanael Blake (
The Left finally got its Iraqi My Lai. After years of screeching for sordid sustenance like fledgling buzzards, they have what they wanted: a nice mess of massacred civilians. Wait, amend that to a nice mess of civilians massacred by Americans. Those slaughtered by the "insurgents" have never been of much interest to liberal opponents of the war.
Nor are they concerned with what actually happened in Haditha, where a unit of Marines appears to have intentionally murdered innocents. The only proper response is horror and condemnation, and everyone is expressing that, with some cautiously adding the caveat, "if the allegations are true." There is no war crimes lobby defending the targeted killing of women and children.
One might then wonder why, if weâre all in agreement on that, this is becoming fodder not merely for the news headlines, but also for the opinion pages. The answer is provided by the editorial board of the New York Times: "This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad menâ¦it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field."
Haditha is the biggest stick liberals can find, and theyâre going to beat the hated cowboy presidentâs warhorse until it is deceased and decomposing; and should it be buried, they will disinter it and resume the thwacking.
However, one question should be put to them as they merrily batter away: are American soldiers really such moral idiots that they took the loosening of interrogation rules as carte blanche for baby killing?
The liberal approach to our soldiers is disgustingly condescending. Maureen Dowd explains that, "American troops are under spectacular emotional pressure." President Bush, not the murdering Marines, is the real culprit; he created the environment that drove them to atrocity. Is this illogic induced by political opportunism and an antipathy toward Bush that gladly embraces the irrational? Of course it is. But there are more fundamental influences involved as well. Consider the opening of Dowdâs column, "Before the war, America railed against the Iraqi leader for slaughtering innocent Iraqis. Now the Iraqi leader is railing against America for slaughtering innocent Iraqis."
Ms. Dowd, of course, is paid to put things out of perspective, but this view isnât confined to the Timesâ resident spinster. Many Americans are determined to prove that their nation is no better, and probably worse, than others. For them, the sins of America and Americans are enough for a declaration of moral equivalence. Now no sensible conservative denies that America has serious faults â it is populated with humans, after all. But then, thatâs the point of difference.
For conservatives, who take a dour view of human nature, events like the Haditha massacre are inevitable, and the blame must rest on individuals. War crimes are entirely natural, if by natural we mean what people do. This does not make them right, and they should be punished severely, but no system shall ever entirely prevent them, for the problem lies within the human heart.
However, liberals believe that people are inherently good, and that in the state of nature humans would not do such things. The conservative view is that of Hobbes, the liberal view that of Rousseau. As the famous opening of The Social Contract put it, "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." And his disciples have added, "Man is born good, but everywhere he is made bad."
James Burnham wrote that, "Modern liberalism, contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve the goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define âthe good society.â"
Thus, when horrors such as Haditha arise, the blame must be affixed on social structures. And the denunciation takes on the aspects of a moral ablution, for by rejecting the corrupt system, liberalismâs moral purity is confirmed. We conservatives wonder at the lack of proportion liberals display by the vehemence of their condemnations, but it is entirely consistent with their premises. Atrocities demonstrate the system to be flawed, and because an ideal system is possible, they need not temper their criticisms.
Rousseau proclaimed that, "Theorists are led into error because, seeing only States that have been from the beginning wrongly constituted, they are struck by the impossibility of applying such a policy to them." That is, all the observed limitations of human society need not reduce our optimism for what can be done in the future.
For liberals, the institutions and leaders behind the war, not the men behind the trigger, must bear the blame for Haditha.
