IF ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS CASUALTY CALCULUS...:

Don’t be so sure invading Iraq was immoral (Nigel Biggar, March 10 2010, Financial Times)

[M]ost just wars are flawed. Take the war against Nazi Germany. The RAF’s indiscriminate bombing of German cities was largely driven by “Bomber” Harris’s vengeful hatred. While the destruction of Hitler’s hegemony was very good, the entrenchment of Stalin’s was very bad. Any complex human enterprise will involve moral flaws. What needs determining is whether and how these undermine its justice as a whole.

As proof of the Iraq invasion’s wickedness, critics invoke the civilian death toll, soberly reckoned at 100,000-150,000. But Europe’s liberation from Nazi domination cost the lives of 70,000 French civilians and 500,000 German ones through bombing; and, whereas this was the direct responsibility of the British and Americans, most Iraqi civilians were killed by foreign or native insurgents. Yes, the occupying powers were obliged to maintain law and order, and failed initially. But the insurgents were obliged not to send suicide bombers into crowded market places, and they have failed persistently.

Arguments about a war’s disproportion are often intractable. If one assumes the Iraq war was unjust, then no civilian deaths were worth it. Yet in affirming the justice of the war against Hitler we imply it was worth the deaths of 30m civilians. The loss of 150,000 civilians therefore does not, of itself, make the Iraq war unjust. The invasion would be harder to defend were the country’s new regime to fail. But that has not happened yet, and those critics who care more for Iraqis than they hate the former US and UK leaders George W. Bush and Mr Blair will hope it never does.

...it is dispositive that those who opposed the war favored sanctions that they claimed were responsible for the deaths of half a million and maintained Saddam in power.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2010 2:02 PM