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.

I suggest one more condition: for a “war of choice”,
you must also justify the timing – why it was
necessary to start the war at a particular time,
rather than waiting some months or years and
hoping that the problem will resolve itself, or
at least that the balance of costs and benefits
will improve.

That sets a very high bar for a “war of choice” – as it should be.

The Iraq war fails on the first test as well as on any sensible approach to the second.

My own personal take:
Deontology provides bounds, actions beyond which are moral crimes. Within those bounds, it is often both wise and morally praiseworthy to apply consequentialist reasoning.

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.

Likewise, I’m not even sure that the Civil War can be justified on consequentialist grounds. Did the situation of blacks improve enough? Was upgrading from slave to debt peon-serf, sharecropping or just segregated poverty worth all those deaths?

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.

B is a damn high hurdle. Even leaving aside my generally low opinion of consequentialism relative to deontology, if we should oppose all acts that fail B, are we not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Do we not put ourselves in a position where any sort of political liberalism is impossible, since for any given choice-situation, there is one rule or act which maximizes utility, and all the rest are moral crimes?
In this situation, we have truly arrived at the totalitarian maxim:
“Everything not forbidden is mandatory.”
(Or is it vice versa?)

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 ?

I’m English myself, so I have no hesitation in
saying that the American Revolution wasn’t worth
it. Firstly, they went on to fight another war,
so, as is often the case, one result of war was
more war. Secondly, if you look north of the
border, you’ll see the ghastly results of not
rebelling: peace, prosperity, and an amicable
constitutional settlement giving the same freedom
a little later. Thirdly, the persistence of
slavery in the USA after it had been outlawed in
the British Empire has to count as a black mark,
and some portion of the Civil War, the KKK, and
Jim Crow should go into the equation as well.
For blacks in the South, there wasn’t much
freedom until 1965.
And finally you’re definitely overestimating
the benefits of the Iraq venture, because it’s
already clear that any democratic Iraqi
government is going to be dominated by Islamist
Shias, and 12M Iraqi women are going to be less
free than they were under Saddam.

Nice try, though. At least you’re prepared to
think about numbers and how much “freedom” might
be worth, so I applaud you for that.

‘In the few weeks before its fall, Iraq’s Ba’athist regime made a series of increasingly desperate peace offers to Washington, promising to hold elections and even to allow US troops to search for banned weapons. But the advances were all rejected by the Bush administration, according to intermediaries involved in the talks.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1079769,00.html

Of course the only difference would have been that this offer (if genuine) would have left Iraq’s infrastructure in place, would have NOT led to the death of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis (perhaps more) would not have led to the rise in infant mortality we have soon, would not have led to the electricity ‘situation’ (i.e. it would have led to ‘electricity in our homes, not up our asses’) and so forth. From the point of view of a consequentialist (or anyone) there would have been no contest.

Of course that great strategic genius of our time Richard Perle rather let the cat out of bag about why the invasion was prosecuted the other day.

At the House Armed Services Committee yesterday Perle commented that is is ‘one of the dumber cliches, frankly, to say that force must always be a last resort’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32440-2005Apr6.html

The fact that it might be a cliche because it is true seems never to have occurred to Perle. However, for Perle, obviously, force is NOT a last resort. Perhaps it is a first resort. Perhaps, according to Perle, it should ALWAYS be a first resort who knows?

If there was any further evidence needed as to why Perle should be stripped of office, on the grounds that he is clearly unfit to serve in a democratic government, that statement is it.

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

“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.”

Would the French have been justified in invading the American colonies to liberate the inhabitants from British rule?

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.

I’m afraid I can’t share your optimism. The
push for war in Iraq was clearly timed to put
the Democrats on the hook before the midterm
elections. If the Republicans appear to be in
trouble in the polls in mid-2006 or mid-2008,
I fully expect they’ll whip up another war frenzy.

After all, they never “looked seriously” at Iraq – they just blundered in with no good intelligence,
no reconstruction plan, and no exit strategy.
But they made gains in the midterms and took back
the Senate.

To be fair, I think the neocons do believe they’re
making the world a better place – but they’re
idiots. Cheney and Rove know better, but don’t
care as long as the polls are good.

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.