Jesus tells us to judge a tree by its fruits-advice that is not easy to apply when the tree is growing and the fruits have yet to appear. The tree that is the Bush administration’s Iraq policy has branches that in turn have branches. Some of these branches will actually bear fruit, but what kind of fruit is a matter of considerable uncertainty. Still, the tree already has a certain shape, and we can make some reasonable judgments about the quality of the likely fruits.

The Iraq project has been at the center of this administration’s attention for more than a year. I call it the "Iraq project" rather than something more specific because its purpose and justification have varied widely as it has come to greater definition. Thus the major objective has wobbled between getting Saddam Hussein to surrender his weapons of mass destruction and effecting regime change in Baghdad. It has also been a matter for political dispute whether the project will be a unilateral work of the United States, a common task for a comparatively small coalition, or a broadly endorsed enterprise of a global majority. As I write this in late February, I am in the predicament of not knowing how the story will turn out. Precisely for this reason, it is valuable to pause and assess.

• There are, I would argue, six varied and highly complex branches of the Iraq project. The first is an exercise in coercive diplomacy. On this branch we can see the two objectives, interrelated but distinct, of Iraqi disarmament and regime change. If Saddam Hussein were to yield or to fall, these objectives would be within reach without the costs and sufferings of even a short war. Deposing and disarming Saddam are worthwhile goals, and achieving them would make a better future for the people of Iraq, for the region, and for the world at large. About this there are no important divisions between the administration and most of its critics. Should the administration achieve these goals without war, its campaign of pressure and threat would count as a beneficial and responsible exercise of power. Nothing less than coercion would have concentrated the minds of Saddam Hussein and of the world’s political leaders. If the administration succeeds in disarming Iraq or in engineering the removal of Saddam Hussein, it will deserve accolades, even if one harbors serious reservations about the way it got there.

• The second branch of the tree grows from the need to use force. Assessing the Iraq project as a war involves assessing it first as an effective means of achieving the goals already mentioned. If the Iraq project graduates from coercive diplomacy to war, as it gives every indication of doing, it is likely to achieve the objectives of disarmament and Saddam’s removal without great difficulty, but not without some significant negative results. At the very least, thousands of people will be killed; and considerable damage will be done to the infrastructure of Iraq and to the ability of many of its people to survive. If Saddam and his followers are able to mount a substantial resistance, then Iraqi casualties will be much higher, American casualties will become significant, oil production facilities are likely to be damaged, chemical and biological weapons may be used, greater violence may break out between Palestinians and Israelis, friendly governments in Jordan and Pakistan may be destabilized. Most of these possible developments will do very little good for anyone and are likely to make a bad situation worse. Military optimists assure us that they are unlikely to happen. Yet, if they do, a sizable proportion of the public will decide that the undeniably worthy goals of the project are not worth the negative outcomes. If these consequences are avoided, the administration will point to the accomplishment of its short-term goals at minimal cost as an undeniable gain.

Still, war is not simply a more-or-less effective and costly way to achieve certain objectives; it is in urgent need of moral assessment and justification. The West, both in its major religious traditions and in the normative structure of international law, has insisted that any war must meet the moral criteria proposed in just-war thinking. All I can do here is offer an impression of the consensus among my colleagues who work on these issues. Briefly, it runs thus: No just cause for war has been established. There has been no direct attack by Iraq on the United States and its allies. There is no proven link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. There is no grave and imminent danger of the sort that might justify a preemptive strike. There are alternative methods of containing Saddam and eliminating the threat he presents. In sum, the criterion of last resort is not met. The criterion of proper authority has been met internally: the policy is set by the president and has been approved by Congress. Still, there is dispute about the need for international authorization. Everyone agrees that UN authorization would be a powerful source of legitimacy, but not everyone thinks it is necessary, either legally or morally. There is a high probability of success, given the overwhelming military and technological resources of the United States. Assessment of the comparative justice of the two sides clearly favors the United States, but the historical record also reveals that the United States has been far from consistent in its treatment of Saddam Hussein. The requirement of proportionality covers many of the issues already touched on; it will clearly be satisfied if things go well, but it may not be if things go badly. The administration announces that it will take care to minimize civilian casualties; and technological progress makes the norm of noncombatant immunity easier to observe than in the past, especially in regard to aerial warfare. But the likelihood of fighting in urban areas seems to ensure that there will be many civilian casualties. Threats that we may use nuclear weapons in response to Iraqi use of chemical and biological weapons indicate a likelihood that proportionality will not be observed in the conduct of the war. Based on this reading of the issues, the war should not be considered just, even though its objectives have considerable moral and political merit. The fruits of this branch then are mixed, but will, in the absence of a clearly recognized just cause, be poisonous.

• Third, the administration has argued for the political, social, and economic transformation of Iraq. Will Iraq emerge from war as a stable state that is able to enjoy the promised benefits of this transformation? Will the forces of resistance in Iraq be sufficiently strong over time to prevent or reverse a transformation that will be interpreted by its critics as an exercise of imperialism and economic exploitation? Will the transformation be tainted by its origin in hostile force and by the way it directs the oil resources of the country to its own ends? Will the American people and the American government commit military and economic resources for a sufficiently long time to carry through and to protect the transformation? We have to ask whether the highly attractive fruits of this branch-democracy, prosperity, and an open society-are a likely harvest or whether they are brightly painted fictions. We will not be in a position to know until well after the war is concluded. Meanwhile, we should look at the course of events next door in Iran during the third quarter of the twentieth century, when a modernizing government was installed by the exertion of U.S. power and was subsequently repudiated in the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s. Of course, Iraqis are not Persians; but what if they are more like Palestinians, whose situation has provoked them to profound and continuing resistance?

Fourth, the Iraq project is a proposal for the political, military, and diplomatic transformation of the entire Middle East. This, of course, is an even grander project than the "liberation" of Iraq, and its fruits are even more speculative. It is true that the Middle East would benefit in innumerable ways from becoming more like the Middle West. It would be more prosperous, more stable, more secure, and more able to deal with the aspirations of its peoples and with the rest of the world. The elimination of corruption, the enfranchisement of women, the deradicalization and pacification of religion are all desirable outcomes; and the administration can be given credit for including them on its wish list of objectives. Still, it should be clear that a war on Iraq is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for this imagined transformation. The fruits offered on this branch are customarily found on trees other than those planted by the military. The expectation that the practices and benefits of secular democracy will be unambiguously attractive to people whose beliefs and desires have been shaped by very different cultures and religious traditions is a sign of naiveté. In its more ambitious aspect, the Bush vision also includes the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a task that must be achieved if there is to be lasting stability in the Middle East. The inescapable obstacle to achieving this goal is that, by waging war against Iraq, the United States will only deepen Arab suspicions of our willingness to treat them with respect and fairness.

• Fifth, the Iraq project has to be assessed as an effort to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Here the problem of how to deal with North Korea makes manifest the incomplete and improvised character of the administration’s efforts. If Saddam is ousted on terms that include the destruction of his deadly arsenal, obviously some progress will have been made toward controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction. If this is done in a way that fails to establish an international consensus on how to control such weapons, however, we are likely to find that the progress on this issue is temporary. Still, it is right for the administration’s defenders to reply that some progress is better than none and that Saddam’s weapons must be destroyed. If the administration is right in claiming that there are grave risks to our own national security in a world in which weapons of mass destruction are not closely regulated, then the next step must be to remove such weapons from other areas of acute political conflict. That must mean controlling the nuclear arsenals of India, Pakistan, and Israel as well as North Korea. Failure to resolve the more acute problem with North Korea will mean that any gains from destroying the Iraqi arsenal will be trivial. Consequently, the enduring fruits of this branch will be very difficult to reach.

• Sixth, the administration sees the Iraq project as a step toward a new international order, one explicitly premised on American hegemony. Yet the administration’s reluctance to accept international agreements and its hectoring attitude to international organizations and reluctant allies will lead many nations to see the war as an arbitrary exercise of power. Negative reactions to U.S. policy will not be of decisive import in the short run. The United States is too powerful and too necessary to international order. We remain, in the phrase cherished by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, "the indispensable nation." As we can see from the actions of Russia and China in the current crisis, there is little desire to oppose the United States for the sake of opposition. Surely an important part of the continuing regard for the United States is the confidence of other nations that we will not attack them, that we will resolve our disputes with them in ways that are more than the assertion of our enormous power. A preemptive attack on Iraq and the continued assertion of our right to preempt elsewhere will surely diminish that confidence. The fruits of such conduct and the precedent it sets for other nations are likely to prove bitter.

An image is not an argument; in this essay it is a way of organizing considerations about the war in Iraq, especially those considerations that stretch beyond the just-war framework as it is commonly applied. In my own estimate, the fruits of the tree are mixed and uncertain. The Iraq project, though laudable in some of its goals, falls short of the requirements of justice and is not an apt instrument for bringing about the better world its proponents put before us. [end]