Ken Lay is Innocent OK

Just a small quibble. None of the 60 military fatalities classified as ‘other’ are Australian. I believe that the Australian army has had little involvement in Iraq – it’s mostly been navy and air – so we’ve been spared casualties on the ground.

ahem hum hum yes I’d been meaning to check that fact.

I would like to take full responsibility for that mistake, while simultaneously pointing out that Matthew Yglesias did not do a damn thing to prevent me from making it.

Re. the ’60 other military (mainly Australian’ deaths. Australia has not had any deaths.

Our 350 or so troops are patrolling the relatively safe embassy area in Baghdad, training air-traffic controllers and other humanitarian activities. The 60 deaths must be other Coalition member forces.

Daniel-
Were you one of those irritating children that always insisted on pointing out the truth of the matter in the company of adults? (Emperor’s
New Clothes)

Keep QUIET you naughty boy!!! Grow up, learn the wisdom of bending the truth, and become something respectable like a lawyer or real estate agent.

(to date): 896 American military, 61 British military, 60 other military , 112 contractors, upwards of 10,000 civilians.

Now add the Iraqi military dead and you’re about there. (Not that I know any reliable source about that number. Guesstimate around 5k – 10k.)

Note that in the last row of the table Howard hasn’t seen it as necessary to even fake responsibilty. Such is the sorry state of Australian politics, alas.

“it would be a little bit unfair if any of them were to go to jail”

Not at all. There’s no reason to rule out a future in which Bush is brought to trial for war crimes.

but yes: we will get around to Bush.

If ‘we’ is anyone other than the American people, I seriously doubt it. Unless you are advocating assassination. But since Europe couldn’t get around to that with obvious evils like Saddam, it would be rather indicative of your priorities.

Given my actual profession (a securities analyst), my attitude to other people’s lies can perhaps be compared to the ringing condemnation that a brothel-owner might make about the incidence of street prostitution

Sell-side analyst, then, are you?

Why, so there is. Would you care to provide those numbers? And explain their relevance?

For Blair overstating by 80x the numbers found by coalition troops in Iraqi mass graves, more than once, try Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly. The US repeated it.
It does rather put a dent in things, once again.

try using valign=”top” on some of those cells.

Eve:

I suppose that I have two points.

First, that the ‘number of people saved’ is essentially unknowable. The old regime wasn’t torturing and killing people at a uniform rate (most of the massacres happened in 1991) and wasn’t likely to operate at a uniform rate if we left them alone (if nothing else, I expect a lot of Bad Stuff would have come down when Saddam Hussein finally died or was deposed).

Second, that to focus on the number of people saved makes it look like you’re operating on the kind of bizarre utilitarian moral calculus that tries to decide if it it’s worth (say) killing a thousand children in order to prevent the torture of ten thousand adults, or vice-versa. I think that what you really mean is simply that you approve of Bush and Blair’s use of immoral means because you believe they were working towards a moral end, but balancing means against ends is just another example of the same kind of calculus.

Why doesn’t the USA attack China? I am sure there are a lot human rights issues there. I suspect they have WMD as well.

Or am I missing the point?

Sam:
Your first point: the essential unknowability of counter-factuals (or the future) doesn’t stop us making guesses about them all the time, and indeed most of our actions couldn’t make sense if we didn’t do this – it’s not an optional extra. Making predictions about what hellish dictators will do is a fairly important activity, not one we can really give up on, whether or not we decide to go to war. I don’t share your rosy picture of what would have happened after Saddam’s death – the most likely scenario is that Uday or Qusay would have taken over, and their track record was already fairly horrific. The picture of Saddam or either of his terrible sons morphing into a benevolent leader of his docile happy people if we’d only just left them all alone is not a very plausible one.

Secondly, if I were the kind of rabid utilitarian you mention, I wouldn’t even allow the possibility of there being immoral means to a moral end. But as Harry has kindly pointed out, I did say I wasn’t. However even committed deontologists (not that I’m one of these either) allow that consequences make *some* difference to the moral status of actions, and indeed they’d be crazy not to. (And in any case quite a lot of the anti-war case prior to the invasion of Iraq was about the putative bad consequences that would accrue – we’re all inevitably trying to guess the future.)

Harry:
Yes, you’re absolutely right, my point was primarily that the consequences of leaving Saddam in power shouldn’t be ignored in any moral reckoning. And I entirely agree that the difficulty of working out the counter-factuals shouldn’t be ignored either. But surely this isn’t a problem exclusively for the pro-war party? Prior to the war predictions were made of hundreds of thousands of dead, and millions of refugees for the foreseeable future, weren’t they? The point here is not that these predictions were wrong, though many of them certainly were, but rather that the anti-war side was and is just as dependent on difficult predictions about the future as the pro-war side. And similarly with counter-factuals right now, such as the claim that Saddam would have grown old gracefully rather than murderously. I would prefer to see an anti-war case that acknowledged the importance of those saved from the torture chambers, and then set out to show why this wasn’t worth doing, or at least wasn’t the most important thing.

Eve:

(Just a quick clarification – more later.)

I don’t share your rosy picture of what would have happened after Saddam’s death.

This is not my view – I did actually say ‘Bad Stuff’ would probably have happened. My point was that it no more right to use the situation just before the invasion to count hypothetical deaths than it was to use the situation in 1991.

The figures I’ve come across for number of deaths caused by the Saddam regime range from 10,000 per annum to 70,000 per annum. If these are inaccurate I’d be glad to learn better.

If you click on the symbol by my name in the top left corner, you’ll see a series of posts entitled “Saddam’s Black Book”. Your numbers are off by a factor of at least five.

Meanwhile, since we’re dealing in counterfactuals, I’m going to assume that the financial cost of the war would otherwise have been spelt on AIDS prevention and clean water programmes in Africa, thus adding another short million to the casualties of the war. Or something.

Amnesty International lists deaths/murders attributed to Saddam at an estimated 290,000. Since the UN, EU, and US have let more numerous murders pass (Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Soviet Union, Sudan, etc.) it is apparent that the number of people killed is irrelevant.

It also stands to reason that the number of military deaths, while tragic, is secondary to the need/desire of the people for a specific outcome. A war, no matter how justified, is a failure if the need is to low, or the cost to high. This is a good explanation of why the US doesn’t go to war with China. The need is pretty non-existent and the cost is potentially global thermal nuclear war.

It is unlikely that Bush will ever face a trial for War Crimes. From a US point of view, only the US can charge a US citizen for war crimes.

Ken Laye is facing charges in the time honored tradition of corporate thieves. Steal large sums of money. Become popular with wall street. Get caught. Go to jail for a short time. Keep the money.

This talk about “counterfactuals” is silly. Of course we make some judgment about the possible consequences of different courses of action. How can we possibly evaluate the rightness or wrongness of an action (particularly one as large in scope as war) without doing so? It’s only in looking back at a decision already made that those alternatives become “counterfactuals.”

In my opinion, the decision to invade Iraq was the correct one at the time it was made. Even now, I think it was overwhelmingly the right thing to do. We’ve learned some things since 2003 (like the fact that there were apparently no WMD) and some things have not panned out as planned — yet. But we’ve also seen virtually none of the doomsday scenarios that critics cited before the invasion (humanitarian crises, famine, refugee floods, regional war) come to pass — again, yet. The critics were correct that these were risks; supporters were correct to think that these were manageable risks.

But enough of that; the real long-term consequences of the war won’t be known for years (although I think there’s more reason for optimism than pessimism). What’s at issue here is the decision to (1) invade, or (2) not invade. Do nothing. Leave Saddam in power. The sanctions regime had him in a box, after all, and he hadn’t launched a major offensive against his neighbors or his people in years. But the sanctions were fraying; France and Russia were actively working to dismantle them. So-called “smart sanctions” would have led to even weaker controls, and eventually Saddam (or worse, his psychopath sons) would have been out of the box, and back to his ways.

(And what of those sanctions anyway? Weren’t they the foremost lefty cause for most of the interwar years, blamed for killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? Those numbers were almost certainly wildly exaggerated, but the sanctions probably did hurt many Iraqis. By ending the sanctions regime, shouldn’t the war somehow “get” those numbers on its side of the ledger?)

Really, before the invasion I could understand how someone could be against it. (Most were against it for the wrong reasons, but still.) But now, looking back at the decision, and everything that has happened (or not happened) since, I cannot fathom how anyone can say with a straight face that the invasion of Iraq was not a good thing. Even if you don’t buy the whole “seeds of democracy” thing (as I do), the raw numbers are overwhelming: Saddam killed, on average, between 7,500 and 10,000 civilians a year and, again on average, between 75,000 and 100,000 soldiers a year [see NOTE below]. True, these figures weren’t consistent from year to year, but they weren’t an accident either; the Kurds, the Shiites, the Marsh Arabs, the Iranians, the Kuwaitis — Saddam was a serial offender, and it would take a fool to believe that he had somehow seen the error of his ways and decided to play nice for ever after. Against this put the death toll from the war, which at its most inflated comes to around 20,000 total. (By the way, I would second the commentor who implied that iraqbodycount.net’s figures are not reliable.) Iraq is still a violent place, but 90% of those deaths came before May 2003, when Bush told us — remember this? — that “major combat operations” were over. If anyone can plausibly argue that people will be killed on anything close to that scale in future years, as a direct result of the war, I’d like to hear the argument.

Thus we get, in the most grossly simplistic terms possible, the choice between (a) 82,500-110,000 deaths per year, on average, indefinitely, and (b) 20,000 deaths in one year. I think those numbers speak for themselves.

NOTE: These are the numbers I’ve seen, in reliable places like the LA Times. They are consistent with Eve’s figures of 10k-70k per year, and I have not seen these numbers credibly challenged. If these numbers are wrong — if the real numbers of people killed by the Saddam regime were in fact much smaller — that would put a big hole in my argument in favor of the war. I’ll have to look at Daniel’s links. In exchange, I’d suggest you all take a look at http://massgraves.info (all 56 pages of it) and remind yourselves what “never again” was supposed to mean.

Saddam started it out of sheer aggression, in an attempt to take advantage of Iran’s instability after the revolution. Thus I would say that those 1.5-2.0 million deaths can be pretty cleanly laid at Saddam’s door.

Of course, it would muddy things to mention that the US vigorously egged Saddam on during those years, just to ensure that as much steam as possible was taken out of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Wouldn’t it?

Not so clean, really?

Nick:

If you can show that absent American support, Saddam would not have fought Iran for, what, 8 ruinous years, please do so.

And please, no pictures of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand, or I’ll have to follow with a picture of Carter shaking Kim Il Sung’s hand.

Q:

I believe you are incorrect about what is moral behavior. Acting has consequences; so does not acting. If you believe that acting in a certain situation will likely cost X lives, and not acting will likely cost 10 times X lives or more, it is immoral NOT to act. That’s hard math, but it’s the real world.

Which parts of Bush’s statement were wrong (wrong in the sense that Bush knew or should have known at the time that they were incorrect)? Let’s go through the statement given:

“the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.” (Bush)

1) Iraq clearly didn’t destroy all of its WMD – they’ve found at least 35 missiles or shells with sarin or mustard gas, according to the latest estimate, plus botulinum toxin, and they’re still looking. Granted, the stockpiles appear MUCH smaller than expected. But top Iraqi generals have said that each thought one of the other generals had the WMDs, and frontline commanders have said that each firmly believed that other frontline troups had WMDs and were prepared to use them. It’s not clear whether Saddam knew how many WMDs Iraq had, and we still don’t know for sure today what was there before the invasion. The only thing we know for sure today was that they had not all been destroyed.

2) Iraq clearly had not ceased all development of “such weapons” – the quote from David Kay confirms that the programs were there, ready to gear up as soon as they thought they could get away with it.

3) Iraq had not stopped all support for terrorist groups. There’s no evidence that they were actively involved in planning 9/11 (and Bush has never claimed that they were) but there’s plenty of evidence of ties with terrorist groups, including funding suicide bombers through big cash payments to the families.

Thus, the statement “The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations” appears correct, as does the statement: “It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” although, again, the stockpiles now appear to be MUCH smaller than expected.

Last, there’s been confirmation that “It is seeking nuclear weapons.” Regardless of Wilson’s spin, the Niger story seems to have been correct, plus Iraq paid North Korea $10 million in an effort to build nuclear capabilities. Iraq didn’t have substantial nuclear capability, but it was clearly seeking it.

Let’s stop the partisan sniping. If I’m wrong here, I want to know. Other than the fact that the WMD stockpiles were smaller than almost everyone (Republican and Democrat, American or non-American) expected, what “lies” or inaccuracies are in the Bush statement that was used?

As for the Blair “45 minute” quote, didn’t a British newspaper find the source of that intelligence after the war, and didn’t the source continue to insist that the claim was accurate? I’m not saying that the claim was correct, but for Westerners to know exactly what was going on inside Iraq seems a bit different from Ken Lay being expected to know what was going on in his own company.

Q:

I did not say “no one can disagree with me,” I said I can’t understand how they could. Obviously, people do, and they have their reasons. I just find their reasons inadequate, usually.

Secondly, how could I possibly have been more polite regarding morality? You said “such and such is immoral.” I said I disagree. Can you not allow for that possibility? That’s exactly the trait you are projecting onto me.

Regarding imperialism, I could read more — who couldn’t? Then we could have a fascinating conversation on how the invasion and occupation of Iraq is or is not like the colonialism of a century or two ago, and whether that’s good or bad.

But that’s not the subject here, and you haven’t addressed a single thing that I said. Your counterargument amounts to “not!” This is why I don’t usually waste my time arguing on comment boards, and I won’t here any longer.

Seriously, there are good arguments to be made that invading Iraq was not a good idea — both from the perspective of today and that of early 2003. The proprietors of this blog, at least, seem interested in engaging in such arguments. You do not.