Moral considerations always hover within all of our conversations about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but unhappily, rarely, only rarely, do they make explicit appearance for attention.

Unless those conversations occur in places where moral considerations are privileged, they are more often minor elements, or assumed, implied parts of political calculations, or economic ones, or even theological ones.

Last September, however, Fordham University convened a conference “Exit or No Exit? Morality and the Withdrawal from Iraq,” taking up those moral considerations head-on in relation to just one aspect of the war: its end.

Participants included Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sohail Hashmi, and Gerard Powers. The moderator was this region’s own Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs columnist for a metropolitan newspaper of some note.

Rubin allowed a comment from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies stand as the session’s theme:

“The U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq and what it leaves behind than how it entered.”

The transcript of the seminar has only recently been released, but you can find it here: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=961


Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence