Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, April 1, 2008. Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images

In the late afternoon of March 18, one day short of the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a panel composed of three distinguished academics, among them two priests and two military veterans, assembled in Cushing 001 to wrestle with the war and its effects on the Iraqi people before a subdued crowd of 170 students and others, who listened to the panelists quietly, rarely betraying their sympathies. Often during the 90-minute session, the panelists, perhaps inevitably, strayed from the session’s announced topic—“What do we owe the Iraqis?”—into broader questions about the war, prompting panelist Paul McNellis, SJ, an assistant adjunct philosophy professor at Boston College, to complain that he felt “ambushed,” having failed to prepare for so wide-ranging a debate. He had hoped and expected that the panel would treat the war itself as a given, and that panelists could find common ground on ways to go forward, he explained. But it was not to be.

The proceedings began with a 15-minute statement from each panelist. What we owe the Iraqis “is the right question to ask,” said Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, the leadoff speaker, but it has largely been left out of the debate over Iraq, which has centered instead on “our interests and our security,” along with why we invaded and when and how we should leave. But Hehir, a professor of the practice of religion and public life at Harvard, soon moved on to one of those other topics, contrasting the Iraq war, which he said was “not imposed on us” by external events, with Afghanistan, where the United States went to war to defend itself after an unprovoked attack. The Iraq war “lacked justification,” he said, because it was a war of choice—an allusion to Catholic just-war theory, one of Hehir’s scholarly interests.

While the United States created a special obligation to the Iraqis by invading their country, exactly what we owe them must be determined, Hehir maintained, “by consequentialist reasoning”—in other words, by asking what American soldiers and marines can reasonably be expected to accomplish for Iraq. In this connection, he said, recent improvements in security need to be acknowledged, but beyond the provision of security “in the short to medium term . . . I’m not sure the U.S. has a lot to offer.” As an occupying power we’re in a poor position to help Iraq decide its political future, he said, “and I’m not sure you can combine a military presence usefully with rebuilding.”

Next up at the podium, Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel with a Ph.D. in history, began by praising the near-capacity crowd for their moral seriousness. “At Boston University, where I teach,” he said, “an event like this would not draw a crowd like this.” Bacevich, reciting a central belief of the “realist” school of foreign policy, argued that national interests, and not morality, should drive foreign policy decision making—a view that moots the question of what the United States owes the Iraqis. An early and outspoken Iraq war opponent and author of the 2005 book The New American Militarism, which calls for reconfiguring the U.S. military as a purely defensive force, he said, “The president’s moral obligation is to end the war,” which has served our national interests poorly, having caused “massive harm to the American people” in terms of blood and treasure, opportunities lost, and our standing among nations. Though he didn’t mention it, his 27-year-old son, an Army lieutenant also named Andrew, was killed in action in Iraq last year.

“One might argue,” Bacevich continued, “that we have an obligation to [individual Iraqis] harmed by the war.” Actions we might take on their behalf include paying to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure or to shelter, feed, and educate the 2.3 million war refugees now living “in squalor” in Syria and Jordan, Bacevich said, adding that “three years’ worth of our war spending—a half-trillion dollars—could go a long way” toward paying for these multibillion-dollar projects. “We can do those practical things,” he concluded, “but as a practical matter, you know and I know that we won’t. . . . In international politics, moral obligations don’t figure in a large way. They figure at best at the margins.”

In declaring, near the start of his opening statement, that “interests are not a set category, and I don’t think you can define them without a reference to morality, and without a reference to the kind of people we want to be,” Paul McNellis appeared to be aiming his words at Bacevich’s realist foreign policy views. Prepared or not, McNellis made a vigorous, heartfelt defense of his modified pro-war position—in favor of invading but with more troops and better planning. He began with a recap of the period after the first Gulf War when President George H.W. Bush encouraged rebellions against Saddam Hussein and then allowed Saddam’s forces to crush the rebels using attack helicopters. Our obligation to the Iraqi people, along with their mistrust of the United States, goes back to that betrayal, said McNellis, a former U.S. Army Ranger who, like Bacevich, served in Vietnam.

In getting out of Iraq, the United States should avoid two mistakes, said McNellis. “We can stay too involved for too long,” he maintained, “the way we did in Europe and South Korea. . . . That created dependency and resentment of us, and a hollow shell of NATO. If we stayed a long time in Iraq, it would be an insult to Iraqi sovereignty.” On the other hand, getting out too soon, as in Vietnam, would break faith with the Iraqis, McNellis said, and it also could destabilize the Middle East and “produce a humanitarian disaster that could force us to go back in.”

“What we owe [the Iraqis]—and I don’t know how long this will take—is a chance to decide for themselves,” he said, an obligation whose fulfillment should include continued training and support for the Iraqi military. In an e-mail message written after the panel, he added that, now that the American public has largely turned against the war, “there is a danger we may pull out of Iraq before the Iraqis can adequately defend themselves. . . . To suggest”—as some politicians have done—“that we can pull out all our troops within 12 to 16 months is totally irresponsible.”

After opening statements, the panel sat at a table and took audience questions, Bacevich in a brown tweed jacket flanked by the two priests in Roman collars. Political Science Professor Alan Wolfe, who directs Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, the panel’s sponsor, started off the questioning by asking whether we owe Iraq “a moral accounting, in which policymakers are held accountable” for decisions such as de-Baathification and disbanding the Iraqi army, which “resulted in a bloodbath.”

While rejecting out of hand the thought of a criminal tribunal for the war’s authors and managers, Hehir said he’d like to see Americans arrive at a consensus that decision making on Iraq has been “disastrous and incompetent,” an understanding that would help suppress our appetite for wars of choice.

Bacevich agreed with the call for accountability but disagreed with the approach implied by Wolfe’s question. “The problem with attending to things like the decision to disband the Iraqi army,” he said, “is that implicitly you’re buying into the notion that, had we not made that decision, things would have gone swimmingly well. . . . I frankly have my doubts that any occupation would have succeeded.”

McNellis evinced more sympathy for American decision makers, blaming their mistakes on faulty information and poor advice. He also offered a moral defense of the original decision to invade, arguing that Iraq had thwarted U.N. weapons inspectors and that “Saddam was a menace, and a sponsor of many terror groups,” points that had gotten scant attention from the American media, he said.

Later, toward the end of the Q&A session, Bacevich fielded a question about the increase in U.S. troop strength, known as the surge, that dated back to early 2007. While admitting that violence has dropped “to some degree,” Bacevich urged the questioner to “remember the logic of the surge: that more troops would lead to less violence, which would in turn create space for political reconciliation.” With reconciliation among feuding Iraqi factions unlikely “in the foreseeable future,” he said, “we’ve managed to restore a stalemate, and it’s a stalemate that could go on as long as we want it to go on.”

Then, with some emotion, Bacevich added, “When we say ‘we are going to stay in Iraq’—it ain’t you and me we’re talking about. It’s one-half percent of the American population that has gone to Iraq again and again and again and again.” Continuing the occupation, Bacevich said, will only “redouble the burden we impose on our fellow citizens, so morally I see a problem there.”

These words earned the afternoon’s only applause.

David Reich is a writer based in the Boston area.

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