“If you want peace, work for justice.” Pope Paul VI’s dictum may not be the right tool for the job. For there to be a real and stable peace in a fractured society like Iraq, there must also be a certain amount of mindful forgetfulness and permissible injustice that creates space for forgiveness . . . or at least a truce.

This seemingly abstract concern implicates very practical issues: in this case, what to do with all the ex-Baathists and insurgents running around Iraq. If there is to be any prospect of peace in Iraq, the answer, I think, is for a great many of these troublesome people to be ignored, amnestied, and allowed to rejoin public life.

Historically, the European wars of Christendom were not total. Leaders could surrender with honor; indeed, they could often remain in power after capitulating on practical matters, such as the ownership of the Alsace-Lorraine or the Crimean Peninsula. But our ideological age is the age of total wars, crusades for democracy, and the demand for “unconditional surrender.” This ambitious view of war demands ambitious schemes of punishment, the purifying violence that comes from revolutionary zeal. Idelogues demand punishment not just for Saddam and his cronies in the deck of cards, but also the tens of thousands of Ba’athists who ran hospitals, banks, schools, Iraqi Army battalions, and the like.

In the immediate wake of the coalition victory in Iraq, a strategic clash emerged between those who advocated aggressive “de-Ba’athification” and those who sought to limit social dislocation to reduce civil unrest. The pragmatic military commanders actually were on the side of mercy, as they were generally willing to work with former Ba’athists, so long as the former regime officials did not actively oppose American forces. In the end, however, the conception of victory as an American-run social and political revolution triumphed. This approach was encouraged by everyone from Ahmed Chalabi to Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Bremer sent thousands of ex-Ba’athists onto the street without jobs and without any stake in the new Iraq. He also made a unilateral decision to fire the Iraqi military en masse–once again, without pay or any plan for reeducation–shortly after US forces entered Baghdad in 2003.

The tension between the two approaches are marked. On the one hand, no one, especially the victims, would be comfortable letting Saddam’s former henchman maintain the same power, prestige, and influence they had under Saddam’s rule. At the same time, no one wants to see them so embittered and hopeless that nihilistic violence becomes their most natural course. The historical examples of military victories that effected social revolutions are pretty diverse, including the Allied victory against the Nazis and the Union Victory over the South. In both cases, however, the participants in the losing regime were frequently not brought to justice and were soon back in power. Amnesties and forgiveness figured prominently in restoring social peace.

The wartime rhetoric of pious avengers and wicked evil-doers gave way to the practical need among the victors (and in particular the victors’ army) to restore the vanquished to productivity and hope. This was done for practical reasons. Often the top officials were invested in the departed regime because they were skillful or ambitious and not because of any ideology. Reinvesting them in the new order discouraged them from taking part in retribution, obstruction, and active resistance. In the case of the Nazis in particular, the exigencies of the Cold War encouraged a minimalist account of Nazi guilt. Instead of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Germans were treated (and treated themselves) to an account where the SS and Hitler and his band of “criminal conspirators” were chiefly to blame, and the Germans were considered Hitler’s victims alongside the Jews and Slavs who were earmarked for total extermination. In the South, it was “brother against brother,” where the enemy fought for a noble Lost Cause.

Of course, these identity myths are inaccurate and even blasphemous towards the violence these regimes inflicted upon their actual victims. In the forests of Poland and the deserts of Iraq (and, indeed, the cotton and indigo fields of the South), mountains of corpses cry to heaven for vengeance. Yet, life must go on today for the living. Criminal justice may rightly be blind, but social justice never can be. Perhaps these examples are useful only insofar as they show the dimensions of the problem in Iraq, where Americans and Iraqis must attempt the imperfect task of securing some measure of justice on this Earth while also trying to keep the pass. Indeed, isn’t a nation doubly obliged to set aside perfect justice when it attempts to impose revolutionary social change on an ancient nation with only a fraction of the troops needed to administer an ordinary occupation?

I was compelled to pen these observations after digesting Peter Galbraith’s recent criticism of 101st Airborne Division Commander David Petraeus for Petraeus’s willingness to continue working with former Ba’athists to keep the town of Mosul orderly and functional. Petraeus figures prominently in most accounts of the war as an enlightened practioner of counterinsurgency, who posted on the barracks walls the challenge, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO WIN IRAQI HEARTS AND MINDS TODAY?”

Yet Galbraith wrote, “It has become conventional wisdom that Petraeus was right when he worked with the old regime while Bremer was wrong when he barred the Ba’athists from power. But we have to ask what message was being conveyed when those who heroically resisted Saddam Hussein were ignored while those responsible for atrocities – either directly or by their complicity – continued to rule. In the end, Petraeus’s strategy failed in Mosul. He inadvertently armed the insurgents, and Mosul remains one of Iraq’s most dangerous cities. Shawkat founded a newspaper that used Iraq’s new press freedoms to protest against this new form of the old order. He was murdered after ignoring a succession of death threats.”

One wonders if anything approaching an objective standpoint is even possible with which to judge Petraeus, his Shiite accusers, the Ba’athist functionaries, and everyone in between. In addition to the ethnic and conflicts between the different groups–Kurds, Christians, Arabs, Turkomen, Shiites, Sunnis–there is also the conflict between the living and the dead. If you believe in perfect earthly justice, the utopian perfection will come only when the just and the righteous slay, condemn, ostracize, and kill the unjust. A certain notion of honor says that the living must willingly sacrifice themselves to restore the honor of the dead. But who will be left? And who are the victims? Muqtadar al Sadr and his Mehdi Army, who were once prosecuted by Saddam? Or Ansar al Sunna, the al Qaeda wannabe terrorists fighting from the Kurdish mountains who also sustained Saddam’s wrath?

I have nearly lost any hopes I ever had for a unified and successful Iraq. And I know the orbit of individual moral responsibility that Iraqis who prospered under the old regime is quite high. But I also know that no regime will ever meet all of the demands of Iraq’s different groups for justice and, in some cases, simple revenge. You cannot have a nation where a third or more of its people are rotting away in prison.

Iraqis have a surfeit of historical memory and an exaggerated awareness of the wrongs done to themselves and their tribes. This indeed is the typical albatross of any society with too great a sense of honor. The answer to this dilemma is a certain kind of forgetfulness done not out of disrespect for the dead, who cannot be returned, but out of a respect for the living. And it is this kind of wisdom that transcends the simple arithmetic of neoconservative ideologues and Shiite nationalists who have set in motion the conditions for Iraq’s continued turmoil all in the name of a justice. Justice? Tell that to the more than 2,000 people murdered in sectarian violence . . . in the month of July . . . in Baghdad alone.