Responsibility redux

It’s more than doublethink, it seems to be outright dishonesty. I can’t honestly believe that’s what they think. Surely they realise that a political act has to be judged on its consequences. It’s one thing to say that an act can still be justified if it has some predictable (and let’s not forget predicted) negative consequences. And you can also argue that if nobody had predicted the negative effects then culpability is lessened. But to say that the perpetrator of the act is not responsible for the predicted negative effects as well as the positive is a gross distortion of moral responsibility. And let’s not forget British intelligence warned Blair the invasion would distract from the efforts in Afghanistan and increase the risk of terrorism.

If I save a cat from a tree, but in the process kill a child, am I not responsible for that?

It may be worth noting that John Quiggin made a similar point:

https://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/27/the-case-for-war/

In fact one of the fascinations of the war debate, for me, is the number of ethical systems that people can appeal to in order to get the result thay want.

Doesn’t the Normblog argument also mean that a successful anti-war campaign would have been morally justified?
An anti-war campaign, justified by the desire to avoid tens of thousands of civilian casualties, that explcitly refuses to justify any of Saddam’s actions, can’t be held resposible for those actions.
So its really just a matter of 1) picking a bad thing that you say you are trying to avoid, and 2) saying that you don’t support any of the bad things that happen as a result, and you can make any position on the war morally justified.
This doesn’t just work for the Iraq war, of course. Because you can discount _completely_ any bad side-effects, as long as you make it clear that you agree that they are bad, you don’t have to worry about balancing consequences at all.
For example, a hostage situation. Some terrorist has taken over an office block, and rigged it to explode, killing thousands of people if his demands are not met. Being a fiendish terrorist, he has rigged a dead man’s switch. There are several ways of dealing with this – at one extreme, you can give in to all demands. At the other, you can shoot him, and watch the office explode. The Normblog argument seems to be that shooting the terrorist and seeing the office block explode is okay, and the shooter bears _absolutely no moral responsibility_ for the explosion as long as 1) it’s okay to shoot a terrorist, and 2) shooting the terrorist doesn’t ‘justify’ blowing up the office block.

Quite so. As best I can gather, despite diligent searches no historian has managed to uncover a piece of paper with Adolf Hitler’s signature on it authorising the Final Solution. I suspect Norman knows that . .

The argument seems a little misplaced. The conventions of blame assignment always bring favoured targets into the foreground while others are conveniently ignored. People on both sides of the “Bush and Blair are to blame”/”Islam is to blame” argument (it’s such a reductive debate, but it’s being fought across the opinion pages of every newspaper in the world) buy into this, and both sets of people need to be made accountable from time to time.

It would be more worthwhile to discuss why some people feel that the moral calculus justifies the war on Iraq despite the catastrophic loss of life that has been a result, and some do not. We have to make the argument in terms of the information we have available with an understanding that people have different standards.

On the ‘revolution’ point raised by Eve Gerrard and mentioned in comment 6, I think there is no moral sanction for a third-party to inflict massive trauma in pursuit of revolution ‘from above’. Societies as organic political entities are constrained by a Hobbesian social contract that threatens penalties on those who would disrupt it or maintain it against disruption. There is in principle reciprocity here: the costs of change or resistance to change are borne by the putative beneficiaries. A third party is not similarly licensed to conduct politics by force. It can show solidarity with immanent tendencies within a society, but it cannot force revolutionary civil war upon it. Why? Because if it goes wrong, it is not the third party which (primarily) suffers, but the object of benign experimentation. In revolution, risks are matched to actions. In invasions to produce revolution, they are not.

To be fair, the Normblog quote says causal contribution of a particular sort “doesn’t show” moral responsibility. Perhaps further conditions must be met to show it – say, (a) predictability of relevant bad consequences, (b) their avoidability, (c) their importance compared to good consequences, (d) reasonable precautions taken against them, (e) length of time and scope for action, including by others, before bad consequences arise, etc.

I don’t think you can avoid talking about such details. The abstract debate about consequentialism strikes me as a red herring. Surely you’re quarreling over which consequences matter and which consequences we ought to be held responsible for?

What’s a “non-consequentialist discourse of responsibility”? Can there be talk of responsibility without talk of consequences?

One minor point here–we don’t know which side has caused most of the civilian casualties and don’t even know how many there have been. I’d guess the insurgents are killing civilians at a higher rate now, but that probably wasn’t the case in other phases of the war, particularly in the months during which Fallujah was being bombed (in which the Fallujah neighborhood surveyed by the Lancet team lost 50 people).

I don’t have anything else to contribute to the discussion that someone else hasn’t said better, but that never stops me. As Rich points out in comment 4, the pro-Iraq war side always puts all the blame for the civilian suffering in Iraq on Saddam. So when the US bombed Iraqi civilian infrastructure with the intent of using the sanctions to prevent repairs, it’s Saddam’s fault if the infant mortality rate went up. This is a convenient ethic–so long as the other side is bad (and it is), we’re allowed to hurt innocent people, sometimes deliberately, and blame our enemies for it.

I have, I think, argued against this view in the past. At this point, I’ll just repeat my age-old point that the “pro war left” were (objectively or subjectively) pro the actual war that was fought, not any hypothetical perfect war, and thus supported the myriad of bad planning decisions which led to the carnage in Iraq. I hate to repeat this because it looks like gloating, but there were lots, lots of us who could see that this was in the process of being executed badly.

So, I’ll willfully miss the point of this post entirely, and ask a weird analytic philosophy question.

Now, Chris suggests that mixing consequentialist and non-consequentialist argumentation is not a good idea, but it seems like even if you have a deontological view, your deontic obligations might let you view multiple acts as permissible in a situation. Then, you might want to choose between the permissible options in a consequentialist way. This seems like reasonable moral decision-making to me.

Furthermore, we can formalize many kinds of non-consequentialist moral reasoning using some kind of deontic logic. And you can think of traditional probability theory as a particular semantics for classical propositional logic. But there’s no particular reason why the logic you use for your probability theory has to be classical logic, as Timberite Brian Weatherson has argued.

So, my question is, can we invent a deontic probability theory, and then use that as the basis for an “ethical decision theory”? A person’s utility function would still be their wants, and the modalities in the deontic probability calculus would let us reason about how to best satisfy that person’s preferences, subject to ethical constraint.

Is this nuts? Or sensible? Or both?

dsquared is correct. We on the pro-war side must take into account, in any justification, the war that was actually fought – together with the negligent and/or bad planning. But the other side of that position is that the anti-war side must consider the circumstances for Iraqis under Saddam & Sons continued rule. Consequentialism has its strengths as well as weaknesses.

Ray, I’m not sure the concept of “motivation” does the justificatory work you think it does. Moreover, given the reasonable estimates of comparative death rates under liberated Iraq vs Saddam & Sons Iraq (see Geras), I believe that the assertion in your second sentence is false.

Maybe I’m writing in the wrong thread, but I don’t see the point of assigning blame now.

The important thing is to choose what to do next.

And in the context of what to do next, if you’re a stockholder in a company where the president announced a great new product rollout, but the product didn’t work and the advertising campaign was no good and the company lost a lot of money,

and the president then promoted the people responsible,

and instead of any attempt to fix the production problems and make things right with the customer base the president appeared to be spending all his efforts on persuading the stockholders that everything was OK,

The issue isn’t whether the president of the company had good intentions, or whether he was morally justified. It isn’t whether his employees had good intentions or were morally justified. It isn’t whether the stockholders who supported him at the last general meeting had good intentions or were morally justified.

It’s time for a proxy fight.

And arguing with other stockholders about what they thought at the last meeting is useless. Let bygones be bygones about that. What matters is where they put their proxy now.

As far as I’m concerned, republican legislators who jump on the impeachment bandwagon early enough can get my vote.

“…To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

— Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

The consequences of Saddam remaining in power arguments doesn’t seem as strong to me as it does to those on the pro-war side (no surprise there, but hear me out). For the following reasons.

1: How long would Saddam/the Ba’athist regime have lasted? We have learnt in the 20th century that totalitarian regimes, all of which seemed so powerful and strong, inevitably, invariably, collapse. To the best of my knowledge not one totalitarian regime has yet lasted 100 years. Hitler’s only lasted 12. It seems reasonable to assume that Saddam’s regime would have eventually collapsed, just as the USSR did, just as Pinochet’s Chile did, just as Franco’s Spain did, etc. And of course we don’t know when that might have happened. Perhaps it would have happend fifty years after the invasion, under Saddam’s sons. On the other hand, perhaps it would have happened 5 years after. But unless you specify how long you think Saddam’s regime would have lasted, and provide reasons for that, then it is impossible to create an adequate cost/benefit scenario. In any case, according to Amnesty, in the last few years of his regime, Saddam was ‘only’ murdering about 5,000 people a year. Assuming that stayed the same, you would have to assume that Saddam would have stayed in power for another 20 years minimum for him to match the estimated 100,000 excess deaths that the Lancet study detailed (any posts that discuss the ‘discredited’ Lancet study will be ignored, unless the poster has statistical training).

2: A few months back, pro-invasion bloggers got pretty excited by the Sudan, mainly because the villains were Muslims attacking Christians. Many went as far as to call for an American invasion of that country (or an ‘intervention’ as it is coyly euphemised nowadays). But it was very obvious that Bush was not going to do this and one of the most important reasons for that is that his army was overstretched. In other words, if you are going to include the hypothetical number of victims that Saddam would have killed if he had not been deposed, you also have to include the amount of victims in OTHER countries who were and are being killed because the US cannot afford to intervene precisely BECAUSE of Iraq. Even by the logic of their own argument the pro-war case runs into trouble.

(of course as soon as this became clear, the topic of the Sudan mysteriously disappeared from the pro-invasion blogosphere).

3: The US is running, to put it mildly, a lot of major risks, risks that would almost certainly not have arisen under Saddam’s rule. For example, there is the strong risk of civil war (with concommitant casualty figures that will be astronomical), not to mention possible consequences of that (a Kurdish state, for example, which will bring Iran, Syria and Turkey into the war). To be fair these haven’t happened yet. But if they happen (and let’s not forget that the Kurds are now more or less allied with the Israelis, and that if Iran attacks the potential state of Kurdistan, the Israelis might retaliate, and the Israelis have nuclear weapons) this could raise the death toll way above anything that Saddam could conceivably have achieved. Consequentially speaking, this would be a disaster for the pro-war argument.

4: Finally, if we all agree to have a moratorium on the Bush equals Hitler meme, could we also have a stop to describing Saddam’s regime as ‘fascist’ (except insofar as describing any authoritarian regime anywhere as fascist). Fascism is a specific word with a specific meaning, and it is not clear to me how describing Saddam’s regime as being ‘fascist’ illuminates or illustrates anything. Is Saudi Arabia fascist? Can we make reference, therefore, to George Bush walkiing hand in hand with a fascist Saudi politician, or the fascist Pakistani dictator Mushareff, or the fascist Egyptian leader Mubarek? Apart from the obvious rule that no ally of the United States must ever be described as fascist, why not? Alternately, can we describe Stalin (or Lenin) as a fascist? Is this illuminating?

I am also unclear as to why the word ‘genocidal’ is so frequently used to describe Saddam’s regime, and not, generally speaking, by those who excelled themselves by protesting the genocides when they were actually taking place.

I might finally point out that the situation in the Congo was and is worse (from a human rights position) than any place on earth, and that this has been the case for about the last 20 years (the Congo war, ‘Africa’s world war 2’ has left roughly 4 million dead and the number is rising all the time), and yet few in the West ever expressed any interest in this ongoing nightmare. Again, part of the reason for this (not all of it) is the West’s obsession with events in the Middle East, which only the naive would think is related to our deep sympathy with Arab culture and civilisation.

Nark, thank you for revealing your position.

If you are capable of maintaining at this point that the war should be continued, then I find it tactically unappealing to discuss that point further with you.

If you believe that now, given current evidence, I can hardly imagine evidence that would change your mind.

I will try to note who the poster is each time, and if it’s you I’ll discuss other topics but try to leave that one alone.

Still, I hope you will reconsider and come to reality at some point in the near future. The coming proxy fight could use your help.

In revolution, risks are matched to actions. In invasions to produce revolution, they are not.

Well said, Marc. It’s a point that is forgotten all too often.

j thomas

you are of course correct. Perhaps there would have been a civil war in any case.
However given the obvious threat of such a thing happening, one might argue that that in itself might argue against a war. If you have a large barrel full of petrol perhaps it would be lit by lighning, or static electricity or something of that sort. It’s happened. On the other hand, wading in by throwing matches around would definitely increase the probability of something bad happening.

Moreover since the invasion one has to ask whether such brilliant ideas as disbanding the army were really so terrific (and as you know i could easily list many points at which the American chose to wilfully alienate the Sunnis).

I might also point out the obvious: any civil war will not be a three but a four way battle: the Shias, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Americans (plus the Turkmen and various others), guaranteeing ongoing American involvement in the country for decades. This of course would not have been the case without the invasion. The presence of the Americans will also gurantee the involvement of other powers, most obviously Israel(who have, let’s never forget, nuclear weapons).

Pro-invasion types who talk about the ‘good news’ from Iraq may have a horrible ironic victory. It may well be that people look back on what has been ‘achieved’ in Iraq since the invasion as a kind of golden age.

Compared to the nightmare that followed.

Mark, I’m not trying to convince you and I’m not interested in arguing with you. You’ve made it plain that isn’t worth doing.

I was merely mentioning to you that I don’t intend to do that.

…consequentialist sword: accepting the reasonably anticipated results of an action means anti-war leftists must have accepted (and sought to integrate into their anti-war justification) the consequences of the continued existence of a genocidal fascist dictatorship ruling Iraqis for the foreseeable future.

Your whole “argument” here seems to be hanging on the phrase ‘genocidal fascist dictatorship‘. It has been demonstrated right here in this thread that dictatorship ruling Iraqis was neither genocidal nor fascist.

So, if this is how you want to “argue”, then why don’t we just start exchanging random radical right/left statements, like this for example: …the continued existence of American genocidal fascist plutocracy is an existential threat to the human civilization. Start presenting your counter-arguments now.

Thanks.

abb1, I suppose you and I are using a different notion of “demonstrated”. It was my understanding that the early Ba’athist party was based, in part, on fascist ideology. Re: genocide – see Marsh Arabs; see also Kurds.

In any case, if you like, replace “genocidal fascist” with “dictator who slaughtered an estimated 300,000-400,000 people, and who started pointless wars resulting in approximately 1 million dead”. I admire you for at least acknowledging the other edge of the consequentialist sword. Most anti-war proponents pretend that it can’t cut them.

Mark, frankly I’m puzzled with your preoccupation with a lousy two-bit dictator who didn’t even have a single nuke.

Think bigger: with the American genocidal fascist plutocracy you have a regime guilty of over 100 years of slavery, genocide of the native American people, using atomic weapons on civilian targets, murdering estimated 4 million people in Viet-Nam with chemical weapons and the infamous scorched earth tactic, overthrowing democratic governments all over the world, terrorizing central America for at least a decade, supplying ME dictators with weapons, causing over 100,000 excess death in Iraq just in the first 18 months the occupation. But wait, there’s more: this regime has 10,000 nuclear warheads ready to be launched any second and is developing more as we speak – that’s 10,000 nuclear warheads, Mark. And it’s planning to deploy nuclear weapons in space.

Get on the case now, Mark, while it’s not too late. I don’t think the pathetic Ba’ath party deserves even a second of your attention under the circumstances.

Excellent, abb1. You and I both agree with the principle that genocidal fascist regimes should be sanctioned &/or removed when it is morally and politically feasible to do so. We just differ on which regimes qualify and where to start. Glad to have your endorsement of the pro-war position, and the larger foundational (but now forgotten) mission of the United Nations.

Well, in this case I’m just trying to demonstrate that demonizing what was in 2003 a perfectly ordinary third world government is not a particularly convincing way of reasoning here.

Anything can be easily demonized: ‘Red’ China, back-stabbing France, fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, Taliban, Baath, Putin’s Russia, Bush’s America. Consequently any aggressive war can be justified as ‘liberation’ or ‘fighting evil’. That doesn’t work. Starting war is a crime.

abb1, I’m not sure your injunction against “demonizing” a genocidal fascist government that is indeed a genocidal fascist government is a useful moral guideline. I may be having difficult pegging your argument. Feel free to expand on it.

As far as starting war being a crime; it sounds fine at first blush, but there may be cases where war is a morally and politically acceptable alternative to certain conditions. A few that come to mind: genocide and slavery. One might argue that the foundational UN assurance of state sovereignty should or can be suspended when a state commits genocide against &/or enslaves its own citizens. Query: how bad does Darfur have to get before governments take action to stop the genocide? How bad would South African apartheid have to have been before governments intervene to free people?

Ah, I see Kevin. I disagree with your interpretation of my position. I try to demand the same evidentiary standards of myself that I do of my opponents. Since this thread is about the consequentialist problem and not my personal evidentiary standards (which might be a rather boring diversion), I’ll leave it at that. If you are willing to dredge through the posts JQ thread to prove otherwise, I am willing to continue the discussion there, or by private email. Let me know what you decide.

Mark, you agree, at least, that it was possible for people to sincerely disagree, before the invasion, about whether it would save lives?

According to the UN, lack of clean drinking water and inadequate sanitation kills 1.7 million people a year (most of them children), far more than Saddam Hussein at his worst. $200 billion dollars spent on clean water and sanitation would save millions of lives for years to come, without any doubt.

Opportunity costs should be taken into account.

I want to go back to my original point. Trying to decide who to blame for the mess is not productive.

Want to blame Saddam? Maybe if you enlist you’ll wind up being a prison guard in his prison and you’ll get a chance to kick him.

Want to blame Bush? It’s vaguely possible you can get him impeached and imprisoned. And then if you get a job as a federal prison guard there’s some possibility you’ll get a chance to kick him.

Cheney? Rumsfeld? Maybe they’ll wind up in jail but likely they’ll be too old and maybe dead before they can be brought to justice.

Want to blame Zarqawi? Bin Ladin? I’m not sure whether we have DNA samples on either of them. I’m sure somebody somewhere will get killed and it will be announced it’s them. That will have to do.

But what should we do *now*? Like, say we had some sort of influence on the US government, what advice should we give about iraq? Is it true that no matter how stupid it was to start what we’re doing, now we have to keep repeating it until we win?

Suppose we gave military and economic aid to the current iraqi government, but had no troops there. Would that be worse than what we’re doing now? My guess is that it would match our stated goals a lot better. The iraqi government would have a lot more credibility with iraqis if we weren’t there. The iraqi army would have a lot more motivation. They could handle their internal affairs much more effectively if we weren’t sticking our thumbs in. They might do something sort of genocidal, maybe, but at least it wouldn’t be like random air strikes.

Maybe they couldn’t fight the insurgents. Why would that be? If they were getting money and arms and power plants and such from us, and the insurgents were getting, uh …. Arms from syria? Money from saudi arabia? What?

If 16 million government supporters can’t beat 4 million insurgents, maybe they don’t deserve to win. Do iraqi soldiers need training from us? I doubt it. How much good has our training done? we train them to set up checkpoints and disrupt traffic. At the checkpoints they’re targets, which is one of the reasons we want them to do it instead of us. Would they use this method if it was them in charge? Would we use that method in the USA? Imagine car bombers in Chicago. So we set up random checkpoints and shoot anybody who looks suspicious, and we stop anybody who wants to go through and thoroughly search their persons and their vehicles, and we disrupt traffic so much that the city’s trade drops by 3/4. Would we put up with that? Hell no. At the very least we’d do profiling and let most people through with a quick ID check, and we’d do careful studies on everything we could find out about the cars that exploded and their drivers looking for clues, and we’d zero in on them. And we wouldn’t have the problem that we were more unpopular than the suicide bombers.

We’ve trained enough iraqi soldiers and police that they can incorporate whatever they want of our training into their own training program.

OK, suppose some sections of iraq are so fully controlled by the insurgents that iraqi troops can’t move in without a lot of US air support. What would that imply? I say, declare them de facto independent and invite them to vote for representatives to join the government. If they join, great. If they don’t join they’re a problem but not the problem they’d be if they weren’t on the other side of a border. And if it comes to a war, again it’s 16 million iraqis against 4 million insurgents, and the iraqis have the oil at this point.

Why wouldn’t it work at least as well as what we’re doing? Well, here are some things that wouldn’t work as well. If iraq is heading for some sort of religious-based government, it would look bad. As long as our military is the strongest military in the area and we hold Baghdad, we can tell them not to publicly admit they’re doing that.

And as long as we’re there they can’t publish casualty figures showing how many of their civilians we’ve killed.

And as long as we’re there they have to sell oil to who we say at the price we say. We don’t admit we’re doing that. Maybe that one doesn’t count.

As long as we’re there the iraqi government has to be against arab terrorists. They may not be at all effective against arab terrorists, but they have to say they’re against them. If we leave the iraqi government might start saying nice things about arab terrorists which would enrage americans.

As long as we’re there, iraq won’t have any real cooperation with iran. They recently announced some cooperation. If we left they might follow up on that. It would make us look bad.

If we pull out of iraq we can’t use iraq as a staging area to invade iran. I don’t see how invading iran is in the cards, but if we pulled out then the possibility however slim it is now would be entirely gone.

Similarly we couldn’t use iraq to invade syria.

If we pulled out of iraq, chances are the iraqi government would say some things that sounded ungrateful and it might be hard to get our Congress to approve the aid package we’d depend on to make sure the iraqi government won over the insurgents. That would both make the war effort look bad and it would increase the chance of the insurgents winning. The best response would be for the US press to not report such statements, but they probably would.

Also we’d get reports that government corruption was wasting some of our aid. Not like that isn’t happening now, but with our military there and with the high level of violence inhibiting the media, it needn’t get reported much now. If the violence dies down it will be a hot topic.

Still, in spite of all these potential problems, I think we’d be better off to withdraw our armed forces and provide military and economic aid to whatever government iraq winds up with, until they get back on their feet or we get too disgusted with them — whichever comes first.

Mark
Bernard Lewis is not an unbiased authority on the Middle East, as you should know. In fact his views on Arabic culture etc. are rejected by the vast majority of Middle Eastern scholars. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong about everything, but it does mean that his views shouldn’t be accepted without outside support.

I have no idea what the phrase ‘pseudo-intellectual fascist origins’ means.

As you know (or should) Iraq attacked Iran and Kuwait in both cases because Saddam was enouraged to do so by the United States. Moreover in both cases (as the relevant Wikipedia article makes clear) the wars were started because Iraq believed that it was seizing territory which actually belonged to Iraq (again, an ANTI-imperialist view, not an imperialist view): in the case of the Iran-Iraq war, the region of Khuzestan. Famously (or notoriously) Iraqis of all political persuasions believe that Kuwait is ‘really’ part of Iraq, in the same way that Argentinians believe that the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina.

If you describe any regime which is nationalist and a police state as fascist then almost every non-democracy is fascist. Would you think that describing Castro’s cuba, or China or Saudi Arabia as ‘fascist’ illuminates anything?

brendan,

The amount of other scholars who disagree with BL is irrelevant to the strength of his conclusions. BL outlines the origins of the early Baathist party in his article. Either engage with his argument or concede the point; your empty dismissal is rather unpersuasive, as is your hand-waving invocation of bias.

I don’t see why raising other motivations for Saddam’s wars defeats my claim. Saddam may well have believed that he could get away with gobbling up territory; that didn’t make him any less belligerent or expansionistic. IIRC, Shirer or Speer (?) recounts that Nazi Germany believed it had the green light to invade Poland. So what. Similarly, (again IIRC) some Germans thought that the Sudetenland was part of Germany. This is irrelevant to the fascist nature of the regime.

Pointing out that there are other places that deserve intervention as much as or more than Saddam’s Iraq at best establishes a real-world inconsistency of the pro-war interventionist principle; it doesn’t defeat the argument that it was morally and politically appropriate to rid Iraq of Saddam’s regime. If the police catch a murderer, it is unreasonable to claim their successful campaign was wrong due the existence of another bad or worse uncaught killer. Also, it seems to depend, for its operation, on accepting the force of the pro-war principle: we accept the appropriate of ending genocidal regimes, but we want you to also get rid of these other genocidal regimes – to which the pro-war side might respond “Great! Let’s start with Sudan!” (Enter contrarian France, China, Arab states, “anti-Imperialists”, etc.)

Mark, it takes a very strange reading of my post to interpret it as suggesting that $200 billion should have been distributed in Iraq. I’m saying that if your goal is to save lives, then invading Iraq is a bad way of achieving that goal. It’s extremely doubtful whether _any_ lives will be saved that way. But spending that money on basic health projects around the world would, without doubt, save _millions_ of lives.

The fact that the Bush administration chose the extremely risky project, rather than the guaranteed project, which would be more effective than even the best case Iraqi invasion, suggests that ‘saving lives’ was not their motivation.

Just to point out that the Lancet and UNDP projects both referred to excess deaths figures counted over the eighteen month period after the war; since the death rate is unlikely to have dropped all that much, the figure is now more like 150,000 excess deaths.

brendan,

Actually, BL wrote the op-ed for the National Post; it was reprinted in various places, including Frontpage Magazine. This should be apparent from the text underneath the Frontpage reprint that says “National Post, April 4, 2003”. (I’m not sure why you think that’s relevant, but your irrelevant error is still an error.) Still, I think we’ve come as far as we’re going to; we both agree that the Ba’ath party had fascist influences (“of that I didn’t have the slightest doubt whatsoever”!) and you don’t subsequently dispute its militarist, expansionist, dictatorial nature.

ray, it was not entirely clear from your post whether you meant saving lives in Iraq or saving lives across the world. Thanks for the subsequent clarification.

daniel, iirc the UNDP report estimated deaths at 18-29k (more in-line with IBC estimates); not sure how you get from that to 150k.

iirc the UNDP report estimated deaths at 18-29k (more in-line with IBC estimates)

Tim Lambert has dealt with this issue:

This makes a misleading comparison between the Lancet number for all excess deaths (which includes the increase in murder, accidents and disease) and the ILCS number for deaths directly related to the war (which just includes deaths caused by the coalition and the insurgents).

As Daniel commented:

Since the IBC and Lancet estimates are not comparable with each other, obviously they can’t both be comparable with the UNDP (in fact, neither are).

http://timlambert.org/2005/05/lancet34/

Mark

J Thomas’ point is correct. Whereas my statament about Front Page Magazine was an honest mistake you blatantly misread my statement about fascism to produce the opposite of what I meant. Thomas is also correct in that unless we have a basic commitment to honesty in terms of quotation and evidence, there really is no point in continuing this discussion.

When we send in Peace Corps guys there every now and then one of them gets airlifted out in a decontamination bubble. They take him to the CDC in atlanta, by which time he’s likely dead already, and they try to culture the virus to find out what it is and get some idea whether they can work out some sort of defense, and it isn’t unheard of they lose all the workers in a CDC wing.

With respect, j thomas, absent a few supporting links that looks like some pretty serious exaggeration to me. “Lose all the workers in a wing” — has that ever happened, even once?

I know a little about emerging viral diseases (used to do research on HIV-1), and the argument that “we shouldn’t send people into foreign countries because they might have communicable diseases we don’t know about” seems entirely bogus to me, as does your prediction of an epidemic with a 90-99% kill rate (even Ebola struggles to get that in most instances). There’s little in my experience to suggest that Central Africa, for instance, is likely to throw up more or worse emerging diseases than any other part of the world. I also don’t think that current medical technology needs any kind of improvement before we can send troops anywhere with reasonable confidence in the face of emerging disease risks. (I’m not advocating sending anyone anywhere, just saying that medical tech makes emerging disease just one of many risks rather than an overwhelming hazard to be avoided at all costs.)