Mr. Friedman here shifted focus. “What’s really killed the Republican Party isn’t spending, it’s Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.” Mrs. Friedman–listening to her husband with an ear cocked–was now muttering darkly.

Milton: “Huh? What?” Rose: “This was not aggression!” Milton (exasperatedly): “It was aggression. Of course it was!” Rose: “You count it as aggression if it’s against the people, not against the monster who’s ruling them. We don’t agree. This is the first thing to come along in our lives, of the deep things, that we don’t agree on. We have disagreed on little things, obviously–such as, I don’t want to go out to dinner, he wants to go out–but big issues, this is the first one!” Milton: “But, having said that, once we went in to Iraq, it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.” Rose: “And we will!” ~Tunku Varadarajan, OpinionJournal.com

Via Jim Antle at 4Pundits

One might ask: “Who is this ‘we’ that they keep talking about?”  It is a bad habit that Americans, myself included, frequently fall into, mistaking our government for something that actually represents, no, worse yet, embodies ourselves, as if the state were the hypostasis of America in which “we” as a people are made real.  When it does something, “we” are doing something.  This is simply wrong.  When agents of the government are doing something, agents of the government are acting.  “We” are not. 

There are all kinds of reasons for why people in a mass democracy fall into these habits of thought, most of them bad: there is the often good impulse to identify with your countrymen who are fighting in a war, but then there is the rather ugly impulse of defining who you are by what your government does and by how much power it is able to wield over other peoples and the troubling habit of feeling morally obliged to side with the iniquitous policies of your government, to which you did not consent in any way, once they are underway.  At the root of this is the sloppy thinking, popular at The Claremont Institute and other such hives of pseudo-intellectualism, that a country, its people and its government are effectively identical and you can speak about any one of them and automatically be referring to the other two.  The unfortunate phrase “my country, right or wrong” only makes sense if you have already made the bizarre leap of making your country and your government into the same entity, when they are at the very least distinct and may in certain circumstances be violently opposed.  Your country cannot be “right or wrong,” because “the country” does not act but simply exists as your land.  Only a cretin or a villain would embrace what that statement really means: “My government, right or wrong.”  Your people, on the other hand, may commit themselves to the wrong course of action, whereupon it is incumbent on you to resist that course and try to persuade your people to turn away from that path.  You might say, “My people, right or wrong,” but you should not mean by this that you are willing to let your loyalty to your people trump all regard for justice. 

Which brings me to Mrs. Friedman’s odd distinction: “You count it as aggression if it’s against the people, not against the monster who’s ruling them.”  So even though most of the Iraqis who have died and who continue to die during this war are from among “the people,” which is to say civilians without strong ties to the regime, while “the monster” is alive and sits in a jail cell and has done for years, the invasion was not an act of aggression?  What would aggression against “the people” look like?  But this is in any case a specious distinction.  Aggressive war is always an act of one state against another–it is always aimed ultimately at the ruler or ruling class.  The difference in the age of mass warfare is that a government is willing to include some large part, if not all, of the general population as part of the ruling class’s support structure.  As wars have become more and more “democratic,” aggression has typically become even more odious in the eyes of public opinion because it necessarily means making war on another people as well as another government, because modern warfare has effectively broken down the distinction between the two.  This is more difficult to justify with propagandistic appeals to liberation and deliverance of the very people your government will be targeting.  With the rise of precision weapons and the targeting of pathetically weak states in relatively small-scale wars for hegemony, the human costs of aggression have been reduced in recent decades and can be made to seem almost incidental.  Because the targeted weak states are often rather nasty despotisms, though despotisms that could not do much to anyone else, there is a greater willingness to overlook the butchery of aggression so as not to spoil the general enthusiasm for “freeing” a subject people.  But, however you’d like to slice it, most of the people who are attacked in modern war, no matter how precise the weapons, are “the people.”  To launch a war of choice, as Mr. Bush did, is to announce your moral indifference to the deaths among “the people” that will inevitably result.  To a launch a war without just cause, as Mr. Bush did, is to engage in aggression against another people, however you would like to dress it up in fine language and sentiment. 

Modern war targets “the people” because we as modern people have all embraced, tacitly or openly, the idea that the state and “the people” are one and the same.  When Americans talk about what “we” are doing in Iraq, they are labouring under the same delusion that justifies the acceptable losses of “collateral damage” that come from bombing the civilian populations of an enemy state.  When Mrs. Friedman says that “we” will make a success of Iraq (whatever that might mean), when she means that the government will achieve some objective or other, she effectively denies her own distinction between the people and former government of Iraq so crucial to her denial that the attack on Iraq was the very plain aggression that it was and continues to be.