Elshtain’s Alleged Venal Sins

Writing in the University of Chicago’s magazine, the political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain explained her defense of the Iraq war against two critical letters (scroll down the page about three-quarters of the way). One of them is particularly ad hominem , of the “find it sad that a professor of ethics would” sort. (The other suggested that Israel was a better target for a preemptive war than Iraq.)  Prof. Elshtain is a member of the First Things board.

She begins by rejecting the writers’ description of the Hussein regime and the war, and then writes:

On the humanitarian justification for the war, I was describing my own position, not issuing a universal truism. But my position was shared by some of the great democratic heroes of our time, folks like President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, whose health was broken during the years he spent in communist prisons, and other leaders of the new democracies erected on the ashes of the Soviet system. I suspect that because these democratic heroes had such a recent experience of tyranny, they were far more sensitive to the fact that the Kurds had been gassed by Saddam; that the Shi’a had been slaughtered with impunity in numbers over 100,000; and other pertinent facts-not opinions, but facts.

And given her astonishing claim that what the U.S. has done has “caused greater suffering,” I suggest Athey take a look at Samantha Power’s award-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide , and its discussion of Saddam’s regime and the poison gas used on the Kurds.

She closes with a reflection on the kind of letters to which she was responding — one had declared she must have “twisted the evidence” to say what she’d said. In this kind of disagreement,

Rather than registering a disagreement, one attributes the worst possible motives to the person with whom one disagrees. This has a corrosive effect on our political discourse. One thing I have come to understand as a lifelong student of politics, is that Clauswitz’s famous “fog of war” pertains to politics more generally, a realm in which decisions are made in the absence of perfect and transparent evidence.

Politics is a realm of approximation and imperfection where, hopefully, things turn out right at least part of the time. Apparently, Mr. Glynn cannot abide ambiguity and uncertainty, so he must resort to charges of venal sins.