{"id":3845,"date":"2010-02-01T16:28:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T21:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3845"},"modified":"2010-02-01T16:59:20","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T21:59:20","slug":"the-ends-justify-the-means-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/02\/01\/the-ends-justify-the-means-2\/","title":{"rendered":"5. Iraq and the UN Security Council: &#8220;the ends justify the means&#8221;&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"justify\"><sup><em>Niccolo Machiavelli never actually said &quot;the ends justify the means&quot;. The Italian words that are often mistranslated as such, &quot;si guarda al fine&quot;, can be found in The Prince, Chapter XVIII: Concerning the way in Which Princes Should Keep Faith. The phrase is better translated as &quot;one must think of the final result&quot;, and was written in regards to the lack of a true judge of whether a prince&#8217;s words convey mercy, faithfulness, integrity, kindness, and piety. Italian has already been mentioned, so let&#8217;s go further back in time to Latin. The Latin phrase &quot;exitus acta probat&quot; translates into English as &quot;the outcome justifies the deed.&quot; Needless to say, such a concept existed well before the time of Machiavelli&#8230;<\/em><\/sup><sub>[<a href=\"http:\/\/everything2.com\/title\/The+ends+justify+the+means\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>link<\/strong><\/a>]<\/sub><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">Not that it really matters who first said that &quot;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">the ends justify the means<\/font><\/strong>,&quot; it remains one of the most frequently evoked political rationalizations in history. In discussions of the invasion of Iraq, it&#8217;s use is monotonous.<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&mdash; When no WMD&#8217;s were found in Iraq, Amhad Chalabi, head of the Iraq National Congress, a major source of the damning prewar intelligence on Iraq said, &quot;<em>We are heroes in  error&#8230;.As far as we&#8217;re concerned, we&#8217;ve been entirely  successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans  are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.<\/em>&quot;<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&mdash; Said George W. Bush in response to the absence of WMD&#8217;s in Iraq, &quot;<em>You&#8217;ve got to understand. Saddam Hussein was a bad man.<\/em>&quot;<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&mdash; and Cheney [over and over], &quot;<em>&#8230; there has not been another attack on the United   States. And that&#8217;s not an accident, because we&#8217;ve done a hell of a job here at home in terms of homeland security.<\/em>&quot;<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&mdash; Tony Blair last week, &quot;<em>But on the terrible civilian death toll in Iraq of an estimated 100,000  people, he insisted: &#8216;It wasn&#8217;t the coalition forces who were doing the  killing. It was the terrorists. But the Iraqi people today are better off than they were in 2003.&#8217;<\/em>&quot;<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">And we will continue to hear that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of the picture. That&#8217;s what Bush, Cheney, and the Neoconservatives will say until the end of days. Things like &quot;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">regime change<\/font><\/strong>&quot; and &quot;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">the ends justify the means<\/font><\/strong>&quot; are hard to argue against because in many ways, the world really might be better off with Saddam Hussein and his sons not in it. In this case, and additional piece of the problem is that the &quot;correct means&quot; &#8211; some way to insure safety in the face of a tyrant like Hussein &#8211; are not sufficiently developed on the world stage. Said <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.iraqinquiry.org.uk\/media\/43909\/100129-blair.pdf\"><strong>Tony Blair<\/strong><\/a> last week:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><em>RT HON TONY BLAIR:<\/em> <em>Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons, who were going to follow him, in charge of Iraq, people who used chemical weapons, caused the death of over 1 million people, what we now know is that he retained absolutely the intent and the intellectual know how to restart a nuclear and a chemical weapons programme when the inspectors were out and the sanctions changed, which they were going to be. I think it is at least arguable that he was a threat and that, had we taken that decision to leave him there with the intent, with an oil price, not of $25, but of $100 a barrel, he would have had the intent, he would have had the financial means and we would have lost our nerve.<\/em><\/sup><\/div>\n<p>   <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><em>RT HON TONY BLAIR: &#8230; By then, we had been four months with Saddam and, you know, you can take different views and of the Blix reports, and Hans Blix obviously takes a certain view now. I have to say in my conversations with him then it was a little different. But you have to make a judgment: is this person really seriously cooperating with the international community or not? As we now know, incidentally, he wasn&#8217;t. I do emphasise also the fact that he and there is also evidence in the Iraq Survey Group, which is actually quite important, about what Iraqi scientists were being told by the Vice President of Iraq. He gathered them all together as the inspectors went in and, as you know, the inspectors were supposed to be given all the information, any materials they had. What he was saying was, &quot;If you have any materials in your possession, you had better not have&quot;. Now &#8230;<\/em><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">Notice that Blair uses two rhetorical devices in his argument &#8211; a hypothetical, &quot;<em>Supposing we had<\/em>&quot; and some future knowledge, &quot;<em>what we now know is<\/em>.&quot; One might easily use the same rhetorical devices on the other side of the equation &#8211; &quot;<em>Supposing we had stuck with the renewed inspections until it was clear the weapons weren&#8217;t there<\/em>&quot; and &quot;<em>What we now know is that Saddam was not a real danger to anyone&#8217;s national security.<\/em>&quot; Hypotheticals and hindesight aren&#8217;t powerful logical tools because they can always be generated to fit one&#8217;s bias. But they still come down to &quot;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">the ends justify the means<\/font><\/strong>.&quot;<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">In the case that&#8217;s on the table, all of these arguments reduce to something that neither Bush, nor Cheney, nor Blair will own up to. <strong><font color=\"#200020\">The UN Security Council passed UNSCR 1441. They were fed up with Saddam Hussein too. Then Colin Powell showed up and made his presentation. They were as unconvinced as I was. They saw in that pitiful presentation that we had no documented, credible evidence that suggested that the level of danger required invasion <u>because it didn&#8217;t<\/u>. All of the whining that the UN didn&#8217;t act is inoperative because the overwhelming evidence is that the UN Security Council was <u>absolutely correct<\/u>, it did not seem that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That&#8217;s what the UN is there for, and it did the right thing. I guess they thought we had ulterior motives [me too].<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">And the &quot;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">the ends <u>don&#8217;t<\/u> justify the means<\/font><\/strong>.&quot; In this instance, the current form of international law was right on the money &#8211; leave it up to the UN Security Council. They did a good job and they were the ones that got it right. We&#8217;d still have to be vigilant with Hussein. He&#8217;d still be a problem. That&#8217;s just the way it is with bad men. And as for all of the Bush, Cheney, Bolton, Blair arguments? They&#8217;re arguments for &quot;regime change&quot; by force. That&#8217;s against the law &#8211; even the law we have already, even before the ICC defines the crime of aggression&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Niccolo Machiavelli never actually said &quot;the ends justify the means&quot;. The Italian words that are often mistranslated as such, &quot;si guarda al fine&quot;, can be found in The Prince, Chapter XVIII: Concerning the way in Which Princes Should Keep Faith. The phrase is better translated as &quot;one must think of the final result&quot;, and was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}