SIAW have posted an interesting and constructive comment on my Daily Moider (two down) on the Lancet report. Read the lot, but amongst the points they make is the following:
... we doubt whether any human being really makes judgements about war, peace and other big issues solely on the basis of cool, rational, objective cost-benefit analysis.
Well, they do and they don't. SIAW themselves, in a rather cost-benefit manner, go on to discuss the blood toll price of leaving the Saddam dynasty in place. This raises the question of whether - if the Lancet estimate of 100,000 dead, mostly civilian - is broadly correct, the invasion was still justified. This is the spirit in which I have been discussing the report.
Let's put the case at the strongest: imagine that a tolerably democratic regime does stabilise in Iraq, and as a consequence there is a domino effect of democratisation spreading across the Middle East. This, after all, is the Neo-Con vision (if you also factor in militant free marketeering). Would this justify 100,000 more or less innocent dead?
I think not. War rightly has a high 'just-cause' and 'just-waging' thresh-hold. In the absence of a serious WMD threat - and it's clear now that the pre-war intelligence only allowed for preventative war by making patently unreasonable 'worst case' assumptions - there was no 'national security' case for war. The war, at best, was pre-emptive, which is illegal for sound reasons.
There was a humanitarian case, to be sure, but this is occluded if the 1000,000 dead estimate is correct. Saddam's genocide is believed to have killed some 300,000, but the Coalition's war was not calculated to stop this in its tracks as it was not on-going. 100,000 victims is disproportionate as collateral damage in a punitive action, as should be self-evident. It is true that Saddam's murderers were a clear danger to their own people, but this could have been met by a country-wide no-fly zone, smart sanctions and a stated intention of striking if mass killings re-started. There's no doubt that such a containment model was not ideal, but it now seems to compare well with the humanitarian cost of invasion.
My view has been that war, in shattering the institutions of tyranny, provided opportunity for democratic structures to consolidate. This was, and remains, true. One's hope is that something tolerable will emerge from the January elections. But this was never a sufficient case for war in itself. It was a kind of revolutionary defeatism, in which it was legitimate to welcome Saddam's fall. But, it will be noted, that in the classic case of revolutionary defeatism - the Liberal-Left's hope for Tsarism's defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 - there was no assumption that Japan's war had to be defended in itself. Wars, both good and ill, often provide opportunities for democratisation, but this has never intrinsically justified them. Progressive politics is not tied to defending state calculations simply because of the opportunities they may provide.
There is a moral question here. At the time of the Iraqi prison torture revelations the point was often made that torture is counter-productive in combating insurgency. I doubt this as fact (it seemed to work pretty well for the French in the Battle for Algiers), but the argument misses the point. Torture, and with it the mass killing of non-combatants, is repugnant because it is anti-human. A war that is not forced upon a belligerent, and which unleashes disproportionate human cost, cannot be justified even if it creates potential for liberation in broad swathes of society. This is not to say that progressives should not work to realise emancipatory impulses, but they should also decry the war which heralds barbarism. Even if the whole of the Middle East goes democratic as a consequence of war, the Coalition will still have committed a horrible mistake in igniting a war that extinguished 100,000 lives. To this extent, I do reject crude utilitarianism.
I acknowledge that the jury is still out on the Lancet Report, but it seems to me to meet a thresh-hold of credibility that forces one to consider the consequences of it being broadly correct (just as Normblog legitimately requires of war opponents troubling doubts over reports of Iranian jubilation at Bush's election success, though based upon reports apparently much more dubious than the Lancet).
I much prefer to believe that the costs of the Iraq war were sufficiently low to justify it both as doing in a wicked tyranny and as a world historic gamble on emancipation. But I think it's incumbent on us all (and from SIAW's obiter dicta I think they will agree) to revise our attitudes in the light of news welcome or otherwise. It is not consistency of conclusion that matters, it is consistency in analysis.
Posted by marcmulholland
at 10:36 AM GMT
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Updated: Tuesday, 9 November 2004 10:48 AM GMT
Updated: Tuesday, 9 November 2004 10:48 AM GMT