Habemus Presidentam

I am going to get extremely pedantic and say that the proper wording of the subject heading would be “habemus praesidentem.”

And as long as I’m doing pedantic nitpicks, while I somewhat agree with your general point, it seems to me that finding and catching OBL in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan would have been pretty tough no matter how many troops had been on scene.

What is the value of making the existence of tyranny an intolerable state affairs for any people anywhere? And by ‘intolerable’ I don’t mean ‘unfortunate’, ‘regrettable’, ‘sad, but what are you going to do, the oppressed will always be with us’–I mean literally ‘not to be tolerated’. I mean ‘to be actively resisted and undermined and overturned’.

Have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made tyranny universally intolerable rather than just regrettable? Well, no–obviously not on CT, for starters. But a great deal of progress, sorely needed progress, has been made in that direction.

Another point–the calculus used Quiggin’s post, by it’s very nature, plays into the hands of the terrorists and the tyrants. Why? To the extent that health, safety, and malnutrition are problems in Iraq now, they are so despite the best efforts of the coalition forces and because the insurgents are directly targeting water and sewer systems, power grids, and medical personnel (dozens of health care professionals have been murdered leading many, many more to flee the country). And yet, the more death and misery the terrorists cause by such methods, the more Quiggins are lead to conclude, “this was a ghastly mistake”. But, of course, having such a conclusion advanced by western opinion leaders is what the insurgents are after. When they note such arguments in the western press (and when they see, for example, their staged murder of election workers awarded the Pulitzer Prize), they can only conclude that their efforts are having the desired effect and should be continued.

Quiggin calls for intervention in Darfur, but why does he think the same “not worth it” calculus would not ultimately apply there, too? All the militias would have to do, after all, is kill more people (it doesn’t really matter who, does it?) wreak more havoc, and cause more misery after an invasion and all of that added misery will then be put down as a consequence of the invasion, blamed on the invaders, and all right thinkers on CT will judge it, too, to have been a mistake, no?

If the Janjaweed follow
If the decision to invade had been made in support of a domestic insurrection, this kind of trade-off might be justified, but it was not for the US to make this kind of decision.

Eisenhower’s decision to invade France, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc in 1944 was not made ‘in support of a domestic insurrection’. And as with Saddam, Hitler’s killing in those areas had mostly ended years before–most people were living fairly normal, peaceful lives under the Nazis. Because of the crude weaponry of the time, many, many more invading troops died and vastly more civilians were killed by friendly fire than in Iraq or Afghanistan, and far, far more civilian infrastructure was destroyed by allied bombing. And yet, there was a time when those on the left had no doubt that the defeat of fascist tyranny was worth it.

I’m sorry, but there were several domestic insurrections. One (in the Shiite south) occurred in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and was brutally put down. Another was partially successful in the Kurdish north and was ongoing. In fact, in the course of the invasion, the coalition forces continued to support this domestic insurrection and it was wildly successful, seizing control of most of northern Iraq without a large commitment of coalition troops. There were also smaller domestic insurrections, like the Marsh Arabs, most of whom were crushed.

Does this mean that we are forbidden from aiding domestic insurrections unless they appear to be winning? The Kurds were holding their own as far as I could tell with the aid of American airpower.

One more thing about this sanctions claim of killing large numbers of people. North Korea is under fairly onerous sanctions by most of the world and it suffered more than a million famine deaths. Are these to be blamed on the sanctions regime as well?

Finally, as a last point, I don’t see the difference between an invasion and vigorous peacekeeping, especially if that vigorous peacekeeping involves shooting at indigenous armed units. That almost certainly would be required in Darfur to actually attempt to stop the dying there. So what exactly is the difference between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Darfur in your mind? I see several differences myself: the loss of life and refugee flows in Darfur are much greater than anything seen in Iraq, not to mention the Congo or Chechnya. But I don’t feel like you are explaining yourself well here.

Great post! On the question of opportunity costs,
I looked at the figures claimed for the vaccination
programs sponsored by the Gates Foundation, and
they’re just under $2000 per life saved (or $50
per extra year of life). Now you couldn’t
necessarily scale that up from the current $1.5B
to $100B at the same level of effectiveness – but
if you could, that $100B would save 50M lives, or
roughly twice the whole population of Iraq.

Also the figures I’ve seen for Saddam’s killing of
Iraqis are roughly 300K over 25 years, i.e.
12000/year. With the Lancet’s estimate of 100K
excess deaths in 18 months, many due to US
bombing, it’s hard to argue that Iraqis are
safer than they used to be. And for the 50% of
Iraqis who lack penises, many freedoms and
opportunities which they did have under the
secular Baath regime have already disappeared.

In short, a disaster for almost everyone.

MW, please excuse me if I’m misconstruing your position, but it looks like you’re trying to posit a universal obligation to “do something” about every tyrannical situation everywhere. You must be aware that this simply isn’t possible. We in the US have neither the will nor the ability to make it happen. If you mean something else, please elucidate the statement:
‘to be actively resisted and undermined and overturned’.
By whom? Them? Us? Them with our military/monetary/moral support?
Further, I don’t see why an investigation into where our limited military resources might do the most interventionist good is a bad thing. I don’t know much about Darfur, but if we’ve made up our minds to go on a humanitarian military adventure, it’d be nice to see some sober analysis of where we can get the most bang for our bucks and bullets. But when you go into the process with your heart already set on overturning a given nation, you’re kinda throwing any chance at rational debate out the window. And as Quiggin said, such predetermination tends to slay one’s credibility and reduce the chances of securing a broad base of support for future interventionist engagements. This is why means are important.
Finally, congrats on Godwinning the discussion so early on. I could enumerate the many, many differences between Saddam and Hitler all day, but I’ll leave you to ponder just one: what evidence do you have that the former’s agenda was in any way expansionist, let alone fundamentally so? Remember, you were talking about the Nazi occupation of other sovereign nations they’d overrun by force . . .

mw:
“What is the value of making the existence of tyranny an intolerable state affairs for any people anywhere? And by ‘intolerable’ I don’t mean ‘unfortunate’, ‘regrettable’, ‘sad, but what are you going to do, the oppressed will always be with us’—I mean literally ‘not to be tolerated’. I mean ‘to be actively resisted and undermined and overturned’.”

Which Iraq and Afghanistan had zero relevance. Afghanistan was basically retaliation for 9/11; the administration’s interest waned as soon as that was done (actually, before).

Iraq was a war of econommic aggression, and for domestic political gains.

The GOP shouted ‘WMD’ and ‘Al Qaida’ for Iraq; ‘democracy’ was stuck in the fine print, and only promoted into the headlines as the first two reasons became (how should I put it?) ‘no longer operational’. And that after the administration’s plans for imperial rule collapsed.

In other countries, we see the same old story, supporting some dictators while objecting to others, based soley on realpolitik and money.

dgf: “congrats on Godwinning the discussion so early on.”

Could we lay all this absurd crap about “Godwin’s Law” to rest, please? There are very good reasons why WW2 and the Nazis are so often invoked in discussions about the moral dimensions of geopolitical issues. They provide a crucial touchstone for all kinds of arguments. If it can be shown that someone’s argument commits them to a principle that would obviously yield the wrong answer when applied to the fight against Hitlerism, that is as good an indication as one’s going to get that there’s something wrong with the argument. Wittering on about Godwin’s law is simply an underhand atempt to exclude from the debate a large number of perfectly legitimate considerations that speak in favour of violently resisting evil — and this is so regardless of whether such violent resistance is, in fact, justified in any given case. In fact, an important first step on getting clearer, in any given case, about whether such resistance is justified, would be to expose invocations of “Godwin’s law” for the cheap playground subterfuges they are.

And as with Saddam, Hitler’s killing in those areas had mostly ended years before—most people were living fairly normal, peaceful lives under the Nazis.

Er, Jews?

A comment on one part of the original post: the argument that the Iraq War was wrong because the money it cost would have done more good if spent in other ways, e.g. on health care for the poor.

This argument applies a very strong and unusual condition for justified war, one that is not present in the standard theory of the just war, much of which is reflected in international law. This theory contains a proportionality condition that says a war is justified only if the harm it will cause is not out of proportion to the relevant good it will do. But the requirement here is only that the war do, say, more good than harm; it is not that the war do the most good possible, or more net good than anything else the warring government could do. That stronger demand, which JQ’s post seems to assume, would make almost any war other than a war against Nazism unjustified.

Take the 1991 Gulf War. It had a just cause — removing Iraq from Kuwait — and let’s assume there was no acceptable way of securing that end by negotiation. Then JQ’s argument seems to imply that the war was wrong if the money it cost would have done more good if spent on health care for the poor, which it presumably would have. The point is just that almost no one argues this way; the normal proportionality demand is just that a war do more good than harm itself, not that it do the most good possible. Maybe the stronger demand is justified and the standard theory mistaken. But it should at least be acknowledged that the demand is very nonstandard.

And what’s the current figure for money which was simply unaccounted for? ISTR it was ~$9B.

In terms of dollars/year, it makes the Oil for Food scandal look petty.

It seems you can evaluate the Iraq war in at least
three different ways, and whichever way you prefer,
it’s a disaster:

1) Realpolitik. We’ve crippled the volunteer army,
spent a fortune, alienated many allies, and
created a situation which is likely to lead to
blowback – at worst a failed state, at best a
regime dominated by Shiite Islamists and friendly
to Iran.

2) Just War. Disproportionate harm, clearly not
a last resort – arms inspectors were at work,
weapons were being destroyed, negotiations were
very possible. Probable outcome worse than
what we started with (at least for Sunnis and
all women).

3) Humanitarian. Massively expensive, has killed
a lot of people. Infrastructure in terrible
condition – less electricity than pre-war,
higher infant malnutrition, massive crime.

Pro-war people like to play three-card monte with
these justifications, but it’s a failure on all
three.

To be honest for you I’m not sure if the intention was to ever actually catch Bin Laden. If they caught or killed him he becomes a martyr. If he’s on the loose he can scare the bejezzus out of everybody here in the States. It was never politicaly adventageous that he be caught. I tend to agree with Michael Moore- one of the main reasons that Afghanistan was target after 911 was it’s utility.

If you like sharp political humor and would be interested in literary in-depth articles aboutthe anti-war movement check out “Farmer Ted’s Almanac & Mercantile” http://www.farmer-ted.com. Follow the contents to dick of the week…the voting is still open although Bill O’Reily is in the lead.

>Your #2 shouldn’t count. #2 was only possible
>because the US had amassed forces on the Kuwait >border leaving Saddam the only option to let the >inspectors BACK in.

But Saddam was not “playing games” in March 2003:
he had submitted a 12000-page documentation of
his weapons programs, and I’m not aware of any
proven inaccuracies in that; he was letting the
inspectors go anywhere they wanted; and he was
even destroying his slightly-over-the-limit
medium-range missiles. The inspectors were going
where they wanted, and finding nothing: in
particular they were following the CIA’s
intelligence and finding it all to be useless.

Of course we could have left our troops in Kuwait
another month or two while the inspectors finished
their work. They wouldn’t have been happy about
it: but you think they’re happy now ? Military
force should be used in service of political
objectives – if you start a war because you can’t
think how else to keep the military busy, then the
tail is really wagging the dog.

I don’t understand why you’d want coerce Egypt into having free elections. Algeria has free elections under similar circumstances, fundies won and bloody civil war followed. Hundreds of thousands died. Why do you think you know what’s good for Egypt?

Also, I don’t understand the importance of capturing bin Laden. How’s that going to change anything?

Thanks.

>I mean exactly that—to be actively resisted where
>possible. Resistance can take many forms.

This makes your preferred policy so vague as to be
meaningless. At one end of the spectrum, Saddam
deserves a $200B invasion; at the other end, the
dictator Musharraf who really *does* have nukes
gets sold F16’s; somewhere in between, we “resist”
Kim Jong Il by doing nothing at all while he builds
up his nuclear arsenal. WTF??

‘I don’t understand why you’d want coerce Egypt into having free elections. Algeria has free elections under similar circumstances, fundies won and bloody civil war followed. Hundreds of thousands died. Why do you think you know what’s good for Egypt?’

I’m sorry???? Being ‘coerced’ into having ‘free elections’? What does THAT mean?

And as for the myths about Algeria: i have noticed they are pretty popular amongst the extreme right (by the extreme right I mean those who believe that fascism is good enough for those feelthy arabs). The reality was somewhat different.

http://www.country-studies.com/algeria/democratization,-october-1988-january-11,-1992.html

AS for the last statement: ‘Why do you think you know what’s good for Egypt?’ it simply beggars belief. The United States RUNS Egypt. What makes George W. Bush think he knows what’s good for Egypt?

Something many seem to be missing is that the administration, in their case for war, tied every reason back to national security. Richard Cownie’s #1, #2, and #3 are all tied to national security. Saddam was both a direct threat and an opportunity to lessen other threats by creating a democracy there. So if it appears three reasons are being used, it is because Iraq was invaded for three reasons.

The people who decided to invade Iraq probably had documents like this in mind when they chose Iraq as a move on the chess board (a fascinating read): http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/

Wrong on so many levels, but at this point who cares.

After months of delay and dispute, the BBC reports that…

Huh. The BBC is usually more efficient than that.

I’d be interested to hear what JQ’s thoughts are on what might have happened had the invasion not taken place.

There are many possibilities and we will never know but looking at how various dictatorships have ended gives at least a range.

For instance, would Iraq have gone through what happened when authoritarian government in Yugoslavia ended? Given that unstable ethnic relations are a commonality then that was a possibility. Or maybe the dictatorships eventual demise would have been relatively less violent.

If Iraq had degenerated into a Yugoslavia-type scenario then the invasion would have had more legitimacy. We cannot now know but I would have thought it still necessary for those that were opposed to consider that alternative.

I just thought more about the civil war scenario,
and realized that might have led to tens of
thousands of deaths, the breakdown of infrastructure
such as electricity, water supply, and sewerage,
destruction of whole towns with hundreds of
thousands of refugees, reduction in oil production,
a rise in child malnutrition, rampant crime,
high unemployment, rise of ethnic militias, and a
weak government unable to maintain law and order.

That would have been just terrible, wouldn’t it ?

Seriously folks, the current situation is
bloody awful; and anything that might be worse
is still a possibility – even a Baathist coup
and a return to dictatorship. That $200B has
just been totally pissed away to no good effect.

This website is worth checking out before deciding whether it was ‘worth it’. Try just sitting and watching it for 10 minutes and then thinking of your local school or hospital, starved of cash. And try and concentrate on just what the numbers mean, i.e. in your own life; what that money could buy YOU.

http://costofwar.com/

I don’t think this is true. The data for coalition casualties shows a sharp drop in the post-election period.

Not really visible in the data; looks more like a spike in the pre-election period to me. We’re averaging 1.67 casualties/day for the months of Feb/Mar/Apr versus 1.7 for the immediate postwar period.

Abb1,
The US gives billions of dollars in aid to Egypt and shouldn’t have the right to attach strings to that aid? Governments have every right to attach their priorities to aid that they give. And what better priority could there be than to let the people of a country decide their own governments, their own fates. Liberty, in and of itself, is a compelling arguement. And attaching requirements of more liberty in exchange for aid seems an immensely fair exchange to everyone involved except the dictators, who have zero rights to their power since all authority comes from the people. And without a democracy, there can be no moral government. And thus the people are slaves to their government, and their liberty is given and withheld at the whims of another.

What John Quiggin doesn’t deal with is the spread of democracy or the “march of freedom” or rather just things getting better for the average Joe and Jane in the Middle East, Georgia, Ukraine, etc.

The fact that there’s been any progress at all here is good news, especially given the “war on terror.” Israel is pulling out of Gaza but obviously should do more. Syria is pulling out of Lebanon and it’s a fact that the Lebanese were inspired by Ukraine and encouraged by the American troops nearby.

As far as oil goes, the price is set by the market and the US could get by with the loss of Middle East oil, but it would cause major problems for say, Japan, and the global economy.

Yes the US, bad as it is, is jockeying with Russia and China, but China and Russia are even less likely to do anything about future Darfurs and Rwandas. China in fact blocked action against Sudan, which it has commerical ties with.

The antiwar people can simply not convince me that Saddam Hussein wasn’t that much of problem. They simply don’t realize what the facts were and resort to easy taunts about Cheney and neocons.

In a recent New York Times editorial, they discussed the “looting” in Iraq:

“As James Glanz and William Broad reported in The Times, among the things missing is high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms. The WMD argument was not only wrong, but the invasion might have also created a new threat.”

Technically, yes, there weren’t stockpiles. But because of his insanity Saddam had to act as if he had WMD stockpiles. After the Iran-Iraq war, the genocide of the Kurds, the annexation of Kuwait, etc, etc. Saddam and the Baathists were a very real threat and lost their country’s sovereighty by their behavior.

If the choice was between doing something about Saddam or doing nothing except give tax breaks to the rich, I’d chose to do something about Saddam and hope that regime change would have a positive effect on the rest of the region.

Jet,
it’s fine to attach strings, such as compliance with the human rights standards and so on, but to tell them how to run their elections? What if the Saudi (or Venezuela) government refuses to sell oil to the US until we, say, allow Ralph Nader to participate in presidential debates? Or get rid of the electorial college system? Or allow proportional representation?

it’s a fact that the Lebanese were inspired by Ukraine and encouraged by the American troops nearby

I’d like to see some evidence for the second “fact,” please–i.e., that the presence of US troops in Iraq “encouraged” the Lebanese demonstrations. I’ve heard a number of Lebanese quoted in the media who explicitly dismissed any such linkage.

Saddam and the Baathists were a very real threat

No, they weren’t. You can repeat the statement as many times as you like; it won’t make it true. If you want to argue that the Bush Administration believed that Saddam was a “very real threat” to the US, feel free. (FWIW, I would disagree with you–Colin Powell said in early 2001 that Saddam was fully contained and posed no threat. But then, of course, 9/11 changed everything.) But calling Saddam a “very real threat” to the security of the US is simply counterfactual. The weapons did not exist, and he was completely hobbled by sanctions.

If the choice was between doing something about Saddam or doing nothing except give tax breaks to the rich

Who has to choose? We’ve got a President who gives us both! Truly the best of all possible worlds.

With opportunity costs rhetoric you can justifiably oppose any foreign or domestic expenditure — just mention the lives that could be saved in Africa. What you of course don’t mention is that, even if the money hadn’t been spent on Iraq, it would not have been spent on Africa — and so your opportunity costs argument is essentially moot. The question was “invade or not” not “invade or support The Global Fund.”

>What you of course don’t mention is that, even if
>the money hadn’t been spent on Iraq, it would not
>have been spent on Africa—and so your opportunity
>costs argument is essentially moot.

Well, it wasn’t the anti-war people who started
this line of thought: it was pro-war people who
got stuck when it turned out there were no WMD,
and started claiming it was all a Good Thing really
because of the humanitarian benefits for the
Iraqis. If you want to paint it as a humanitarian
venture, then we’re going to judge it as such.
And it’s bloody awful.

Meanwhile I’ll note that Bush’s bold promise of
$15B in new funding to fight AIDS in Africa has
been hugely underfunded so far. So it’s fair to
claim that the fiscal demands of the Iraq war
have taken resources (even “promised” resources)
away from truly effective humanitarian efforts
in other (and poorer) countries.

mw did respond: see #47.

To clarify something: all money of course has opportunity cost — I’m only arguing that the opportunity cost of the Iraq money cannot simply be said to be saving XXX lives in Africa or XXX lives in the US.

For Pete’s sake, uncle k, every possible variation on every possible argument, for and agin, has been beat to death by now.

OK, OK. I often get the same “been there, done that” feeling while I’m reading blogs–but it doesn’t often occur to me to post a comment saying “I see you guys are still wrong, but I’m so bored with the whole thing I’m not going to bother telling you why.” It rubbed me the wrong way, that’s all.

>I’m pretty sure it would not change a single >mind—precious few have changed since March 2003, >regardless of all that has taken place since then.

The war was rather popular in March 2003 (maybe
around 65% approval ?); in the latest polls it
just crossed over into negative territory
(maybe 45% ?) on the “was it worth it” question.
So roughly 15-20% of the country, or maybe 40M
people, have indeed changed their minds. You, on
the other hand, seem oblivious to everything that’s
happened and prefer to stick with your original
view. That is your right, but don’t claim
everyone else is so impervious to evidence.

No, richard c, an invasion of Syria or Iran (or NK, for that matter) would be a far sketchier proposition than the invasion of Iraq was — which is part of the reason why we invaded Iraq and not those other countries. The recent good news from Iraq may make the US incrementally more likely to invade any of those places, but I don’t think enough to pull the trigger (I hope not, anyway).

>if the insurgency is defeated and Iraq becomes a
>stable democracy, the war will have been a
>masterstroke by that canny genius George W
>Bush

I disagree. And so does John Q’s original post.
Iraq was harmless; spending $200B, 100K lives,
and the whole US volunteer army to transform Iraq
from a harmless dictatorship to a poor war-ravaged
democracy is a terrible misuse of scarce resources. And we’re not there yet: when
insurgents can wound 44 soldiers at Abu Ghraib,
the security situation is still dire.

>I was, and am, a supporter of the war, for
>reasons I’d happily outline for you if you’d give
>them a fair hearing—though not today

It would have saved us all time if you’d given
us your goddamn reasons, rather than telling us
5 times that you don’t have time. Too late now.

>All I know of you is what’s in this thread, and
>you seem to me to be the worst sort of time-waster:
>all lathered up and no place to go.

I do get a little “lathered up” when I’m
contemplating a hundred thousand dead people,
killed using my tax dollars. If you don’t like
it, go read powerline. Or produce an actual
argument or some facts to support your bullshit
position.

Someone asked earlier on in this thread in what sense the US ‘runs’ Egypt. In this sense:

‘Aid is central to Washington’s relationship with Cairo. The US has provided Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. All told, Egypt has received over $50 billion in US largesse since 1975.’

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0412/p07s01-wome.html

This despite the fact that Egypt is not, in fact, a particularly poor country (well, it has been made poor by gross economic mismanagement, but in theory it is not poor). Notoriously Egypt receives more in US ‘aid’ than any other country except Israel (another not terribly poor country).

The fact is that the US controls countries via ‘aid’ (bribery might be a better word: how would the US taxpayer feel if s/he was asked to contribute to the US ‘bribe’ budget?).

As this article makes clear….:
‘The United States is offering Turkey an expanded aid package that includes about $6 billion in grants and up to $20 billion in loan guarantees to secure Ankara’s support in a possible invasion of Iraq, sources familiar with the offer said on Saturday.

President Bush met with Turkish Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis and others at the White House on Friday, but U.S. and Turkish negotiators have yet to strike a deal that would allow American forces to use Turkish bases as a springboard for an invasion of Iraq from the north.

On top of an estimated $6 billion in grants that would be provided to Turkey in the event of a war, the Bush administration is offering backing for up to $20 billion in loans that Ankara could secure through private banks.’

http://truthout.org/docs_02/021703B.htm

Ankara did not in fact kowtow to Washington and so did not get the aid. This renders comparisons between Turkey and Egypt grotesque: at the end of the day, Turkey, being a democracy and not an economic basket case, can afford to turn down these bribes and has a fair degree of autonomy. Egypt, being a fascist dictatorship, cannot afford to do anything to upset the country that owns it.

The US runs Egypt.

OK if you are going to be pedantic then it doesn’t run it in the same sense that Stalin ran the Ukraine: Mubarek doesn’t wake up each morning and phone George W. Bush and ask for his orders for the day. Neverthless, because Egypt is completely dependent on US support for its ‘economy’ the US creates the framework within which the Egyptians must function both in domestic policy and (much more importantly) in foreign policy. This is the notion of a ‘client state’ and here, I think, the ancient Romans would have understood what was going on vis a vis the US and Egypt much more clearly than we do.

If you look at histories of Rome, kings or other leaders who led with the consent of Rome are termed (correctly) Roman ‘client kings’: although I’m sure that’s not how they described themselves to their subjects.

‘Client Kingdoms. The Romans followed the formula in Britain that had been so successful elsewhere; rather than try to conquer with force, they established “client kingdoms” on the borders of territory they directly controlled. Basically this meant that certain Celtic tribes, in return for not being overrun, agreed to ally themselves to Rome. Treaties with tribes in the north and in East Anglia created buffers on the frontiers while the process of mopping up resistance continued.’

http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Roman_invasion.htm#clientkingdoms

Mubarek (and Musharreff) are client kings of the US, rewarded with bribes for doing what the US wants done in the area.

More to the point:

‘The Romans were big on the benefits of the civilization they were bringing to the people they conquered. They saw themselves as on a mission to expand the Empire and bring the Roman way of life to all the poor souls bereft of its benefits. Curiously, this is the same attitude later employed by those who built the British Empire.’

Remind you of anyone?

http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Roman_invasion.htm#clientkingdoms

Richard Cownie, in comment #22:

“It seems you can evaluate the Iraq war in at least three different ways [realpolitik, just war, humanitarian], and whichever way you prefer, it’s a disaster.”

Those are pretty much my sentiments, but if you want to understand the pro-war faction (or some of them) there is a fourth approach: the Victorian notion of the white man’s burden in a new guise. The idea is that America is powerful enough to re-shape the world for the better, just as Niall Ferguson describes Britain doing in the 19th century. (Being Irish, I have some problems with that portrayal.) With that power goes an obligation to use it against the likes of Saddam. Even if the Iraqis lose out, maybe the Middle East as a whole will gain.

Or something like that. Really, they should explain it themselves. Instead they mostly say: Why bother arguing? You wouldn’t understand.

there is a fourth approach: the Victorian notion of the white man’s burden in a new guise. The idea is that America is powerful enough to re-shape the world for the better, just as Niall Ferguson describes Britain doing in the 19th century.

I agree completely, Kevin, and I wonder why it is that we don’t hear the “I” word–imperialism–more often. Not even from the administration’s critics, I mean. On the other side you find both unabashed imperialists (Ferguson, Max Boot) and more ambivalent ones (Thomas Friedman), but the left seems to have a hard time looking to the past for guidance on this issue, or coming up with a compelling anti-imperialist argument. Is talk of “empire” just passé for anyone except its champions?

>Had I known in March 2003 that the enterprise
>would result in ~100,000 innocent deaths, cost
>hundreds of billions and implicate the US in
>torture, I would have swallowed hard, but would
>probably still have come to the same conclusion

OK, now let’s haggle over the price. Would you
still say yes if it cost 200K innocent lives ?
500K ? A million ?

Saddam in 2002/2003 was thoroughly contained, in
no position to start more wars. His internal
repression had cost roughly 300K lives over
25 years – but most of that was in suppressing
Kurds and Shiites long ago. More recently I
expect he was killing less than 5K people/year.
And the containment was costing roughly $1B/year.
He was also 65 years old and presumably wasn’t
going to live forever.

I don’t see how anyone can work the math to make
this look like a good deal.

You have to love Consequentialism:

Approximately 25k American soldiers (and unknown numbers of civilians) died to free a population of 1.8 million whites (we won’t count blacks, as their situation was not improved) from relatively benign British rule. So here we have a tradeoff ratio of about 1 soldier for 80 people living in greater freedom.

Counting just soldiers (surely civilian death rates were higher during the Civil War as well), 1 soldier was killed for every 6 slaves freed in the American Civil War.

Assuming 100k excess deaths (some combatant, some civilian) out of a pop of 20 million, we have 1 dead Iraqi for every 200 freed from totalitarianism.

I would submit that if the American Revolution was ‘worth it’, the unseating of Saddam was as well. After all, Saddam was more tyrannical than George III by far. And you’re getting more civilians freed per death.
I’ve no idea on how to compare enduring Saddam’s rule vs. black slavery. If we think Saddam’s rule was only 1/50th as bad as slavery, then the Civil War was a better bargain than unseating Saddam. But if we think Saddam’s rule was only 1/20th as bad as slavery, then the unseating looks like a comparatively good deal.

For a consequentialist, such considerations do not matter.
Action is the same as inaction. There are no decisions that are for one person to make and not for others.
States of affairs, the benefits and costs that flow from them and the costs of acheiving them are all that matter.

Please note that the post was (mostly) Swiftian, as I am (mostly) not a consequentialist.

The current pro-war position seems to be: yes, a
lot of people got killed and the economy and
infrastructure of Iraq got worse, but “freedom”
and “democracy” outweigh that.

So if you believe “freedom” is more important
than prosperity, why doesn’t anyone propose doing
something about Singapore, which has plenty of
prosperity but no effective democracy ?

>But by the consequentialist standard being put
>forth, it would seem that not only do we have to
>pass A) ‘Some net positive consequences’ hurdle to
>avoid an act being a moral wrong, we also have to
>pass B) ‘Optimizes utility relative to other
>opportunities’ hurdle.

The fact that this is not the policy with the
best consequences doesn’t make it immoral – it
just makes it a poor decision.

However, violating the “Just War” conditions
(as the Iraq War pretty clearly does – as the
Pope and many other religious leaders agreed)
does make it immoral.

Morality and optimality are not the same.

Richard C: I doubt you or anyone else is reading anymore, but suffice it to say that I don’t share your complacently rosy forecast for the unliberated Iraq. For one thing, Saddam’s body count was in the millions, when you include the casualties of his wars (which you must). Second, Saddam wasn’t ‘thoroughly contained’; the sanctions regime was falling apart, and though we now know that it seems to have worked in curbing Saddam’s WMD production, for how long? Five years? Ten? A serial predator doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and his sons did not appear to be much better bets. In fact I think the odds were long that Iraq could have *avoided* some kind of violent cataclysm upon the death of Saddam. Civil war, or even regional war, were said to be risks of the invasion, and they were, and still are; I think they would were, over the longer term, even greater risks had we not invaded.

I’ve had this conversation several times with my brother, a passionate critic of the war. He contends that historical research on the end of totalitarian regimes (he often cited Hannah Arendt) made the aftermath of the Iraq invasion completely predictable: chaos, looting, sabotage, score-settling, organized crime. But if that’s true, then such a period of instability and bloodshed was inevitable for Iraq. Were we to stand and wait and simply pray that Saddam (or Uday/Qusay, or any of the other Baathist elite) eventually would prove to be Ataturk or Gorbachev, and renounce the past (his country’s and his own) and turn toward peace and justice? That was always the unlikeliest scenario of all.