Zseni wrote:

Then the last panelist spoke. He was an Iraqi dissident named Kanan Makiya, and he said, ''I'm afraid I'm going to strike a discordant note.'' He pointed out that Iraqis, who will pay the highest price in the event of an invasion, ''overwhelmingly want this war.'' He outlined a vision of postwar Iraq as a secular democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens. This vision would be new to the Arab world. ''It can be encouraged, or it can be crushed just like that. But think about what you're doing if you crush it.'' Makiya's voice rose as he came to an end. ''I rest my moral case on the following: if there's a sliver of a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.''

I don't like that reasoning at all. It's creepy. There's a sliver of a chance, five to ten percent, that if we took over any country at all we could bring them about to our way of life. Hey, it could work in North Korea. It could work in Bosnia or Vietnam.

It could work in El Salvador, or in Ethiopia.

It could work in China or Saudi Arabia.

How unhappy do the citizens have to be to qualify for this once-in-a-lifetime offer? Is there an overarching moral obligation to people over nations - i.e. that we can abridge the sovereignty of any country whose citizens are sufficiently miserable? It sounds excellent on paper - a huge-scale version of taking abused children from their abusive parents - but before we rush in on such a basis shouldn't we kinda sit down and figure out first off whether there isn't so way to save the children which doesn't involve blowing up their house and family in the process, and secondly what "abusive" really looks like, and thirdly doesn't this also mean we have a moral obligation to prevent such regimes from ever rising in the first place?