Here's a moral question for you: Is it a crime to perform an experiment to test a theory when you know innocent people will die as a result of the experiment?

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and self described neoconservative who published an article in the Washington Post on November 19th, 2006¹ in which he explains how the so called neocons rejected the liberal philosophy of fighting the growth of Islam-o-conservatism by attacking the so called "root causes" such as poverty and hopelessness. This rejection is in spite of hard evidence on the ground that the growth of Islam-o-conservatism mirrors those areas that had or have failed governments such as the Palestine Territories, Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, and the tribal areas in northern Pakistan among others. In each of these places where the government let the people down, Islamic charities stepped in followed by radical Islamic conservative Imams preaching against the West and encroaching Western culture and for a return to fundamental Islamic traditions. Although the evidence is overwhelming that people are willing to give up their personal freedoms for basic needs and services such as security, food, shelter, education, and healthcare, the Neocons reject this evidence.

Their theory, and Mr. Muravchik is unapologetic that the it "was just a hypothesis", was that spreading Democracy would turn back the growth of Islam-o-conservatism. The Neocons, having infiltrated our government at the highest of levels and managed to dominate the Bush Administration's foreign policy debate pushed for an invasion of Iraq to test their theory. Long before recent book by George Tenet, the director of the CIA during the run-up to the Iraq War, it's been common knowledge that administration had already decided to go to war with Iraq, long before the facts were in. We know that on September 14, 2001, George Bush assembled his advisors to discuss how to react to the attacks of September 11th and everyone agreed it was likely the work of Osama Bin Laden who was known to be in Afghanistan. In spite of this, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense under Rumsfeld and a leading neocon, presented a case to invade Iraq. Although it's dangerous to speculate on motivation, it is clear that Mr. Wolfowitz was thinking of something other than weapons of mass destruction or avenging the victims of 9/11. One can only speculate that his motivation was to test the neocon hypothesis that democracy could combat the rise of Islam-o-conservatism. He and his fellow neocons knew that war with Iraq would ultimate result in the death of both soldiers and civilians, and although they grossly underestimated the extend of the blood and treasure required, they felt that the cost in lives and dollars was worthy price to pay to test their hypothesis.

To begin with, the hypothesis itself was poorly thought out and its failure was preset from the beginning. Besides ignoring the plethora of evidence on the ground, the neocons made two fundamental mistakes in their thinking. First, they were using cold war accounting. In the cold war there were the alliance western democracies led by the US facing off the communist block of countries led by the Soviet Union. In between were the other forms of government, usually some form of military dictatorship, whose alliance the two sides fought over. Unfortunately, after the fall of the USSR, we are in a new world where being a democracy doesn't necessarily mean a pro-US stance, and being communist doesn't necessarily mean an anti-US stance. Hard line, anti-US factions have taken control in free and fair elections in the Palestinian Territories, in Latin America, and in Iran, while the US is on friendly terms with Vietnam and China, both hard line communist countries. Creating democracies in the middle east wasn't going to necessarily ensure an anti-Islam-o-conservatism stance. Secondly, democracy is the PhD of governments. There are plenty of other forms of government that are free of Islam-o-conservatism, that are able to provide basic security and services to their people. And, although these governments may not be as efficient as a democracy, they are successful. Democracy is an advanced state of a successful government, and not a panacea for all that ails.

Which brings us back to the original question. Was it moral to conduct an experiment to test a hypothesis where you knew innocent people would die? If not, one must ponder the consequences. Looking back into history, the last known example of this that I can recall is the case of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele. Dr Mengele was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau who performed human experiments on prisoners that often resulted in death. Ultimately, Dr. Mengele was branded a War Criminal but never caught. If it was immoral to conduct tests that results in the deaths of innocents, what should the consequences be? Is it possible that the war in Iraq was a criminal act? Negligent homicide? Premeditated murder? Can a country or group of individuals be tried for convincing a government to perform unethical and immoral acts? Unfortunately, this only raises more questions than it answers.

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Sources

¹ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/17/AR2006111701474.html