Classical Liberal Freedoms and the Iraqi Experiment: A Brief Essay

The war that is coming has within it a test of the fundamental tenet of classic liberalism: that the natural state for human beings is liberty. Rousseau wrote that “man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (The Social Contract) and while I have issues with his solution to this problem (I would argue that Rousseau’s work has totalitarian overtones), I would concur with the basic idea that the natural state of humanity is one of freedom and liberty. As Locke noted, men are born into “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man” (The Second Treatise of Government). These types of assumption, often unconscious, under gird American political culture and American political thought. And while I will freely grant this is not the primary purpose, nor the main motivator for the conflict, as national security lays claim to those titles, I would point out that the calls for the liberation of the people of Iraq are not hollow sloganeering. We do, fundamentally, believe that humans ought to be free..

Indeed, success in this war is based on the core belief that human beings, including the citizen of Iraq, desire freedom, and that freedom is the birth-right of all. There is a belief at the center of policy-making in Washington that the US military will be greeted and celebrated by the Iraqi people as liberators, not conquerors. Success, after the bombing stops, is based on this assumption that the people of Iraq want to be free, will welcome being free, and will able to act freely once the tyrant has been removed.

As such, the coming conflict is a great experiment in the question of what human beings are born to. It is a grave experiment, one that will be furthered by violence, and hence not to be taken lightly. This is not a sterile, controlled event that can be reset if problems arise.

Of course, freedom has its own problems, not the least of which is that humans are self-interested, and often use freedom to seek after the wants of self, rather than of the community (see Hobbes and Hume, amongst others).

And democracy, per se, does not solve all these problems. Mill notes (in On Liberty) that: “[t]he will of the people , moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people: the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority…” and those in such positions can abuse power as easily as a tyranny of one.

So, even if the experiment in liberty is successful, a second experiment will unfold, and that will be finding a way to structure the relationships among free peoples, Kurds, Shiites, Sunni and so forth, in an institutional structure that both promotes freedom and dulls the impulse to solely self-interested behavior.

This entire affair is, as Thomas Friedman has noted, a major gamble. I concur it is a gamble worth taking, and one that has potentially very positive results. However, it is a monumental undertaking, the scope of which has not been fully appreciated by many observing the events that are unfolding. The events of the next several months are going to set the stage (indeed, the turmoil in the UN is already setting the stage) for international relations for decades to come.

Posted by Steven Taylor at March 11, 2025 10:39 AM | TrackBack