So why does the Lancet study matter? To me, it matters because it reiterates something that too many Americans have forgotten: Starting wars is evil.
A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting “aggressive” wars–Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime,” the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.
Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.
He said the atrocities of the Iraq war–from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs–were highly predictable at the start of the war.
According to the most recent study, published in Lancet, somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 Iraqis have died because Americans – both Democrats and Republicans – lost track of the incredibly basic, obvious fact that starting a war is evil. Around half a million people are dead. Is it possible that we’ll learn a lesson from this, and not start a war with Iran?
The important point is not if the “right” number is 655,000 deaths, or 400,000 deaths, or even 250,000 deaths. The important point is that this war – and the whole idea of pre-emptive war – is a tragic, dismal failure, and one that can no longer be in good conscience defended by anyone who values human life. Daniel Davies writes:
The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. […]
That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.
This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer – that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so. […]
There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.
I’d love to see Bush, Cheney and the rest of the gang spend the rest of their lives in prison for war crimes – because starting a war needlessly is a war crime, possibly the worse war crime of all. But there’s no chance that will happen. Power protects power, and no number of people imprisoned and tortured without trial, no number of innocent Iraqis raped and maimed and killed, will suffice to see a single powerful American held responsible for the carnage.
At the least, I hope the people who supported this war might go against virtually all their impulses up to this moment and learn from their errors. Learn enough so that they won’t support the US starting yet another needless war, this time with Iran. Learn enough to condemn the evil, sick policy of “pre-emptive war,” which is just an Orwellian way of saying “let’s start a war because we damn well want to.” The Nuremberg judges knew more about war than Bush and the war boosters ever will, because they were actually willing to learn from reality. The main result of invading Iraq – hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths – should be enough to let us say “never again.”
It won’t. But it should.
Pingback: Official Website of James Landrith: Taking The Gloves Off - Home
Pingback: The Sideshow
That doesn’t tell us why the Lancet study matters. If starting a war was automatically horribly evil with 500,000 dead, it’s got to be just as evil with 300,000. The Lancet is immaterial. (But I’m still going to skewer them one of these days.)
That said, I recognize the sincerity of your emotional response. But I think it moral nonsense to say that starting a war is always evil. War is evil; a necessary evil, in the universe as we find it. Starting a war can be a moral monstrosity of the highest order, or it can be the picking up of a blackjack when a man in a bar sees a thug advancing on him with murder in his eye and a knife in his hand. Would it have been wrong for the United States to launch a surprise assault on the Japanese carrier task forces steaming toward Pearl Harbor?
And THAT said, was starting THIS war morally wrong? Although I must admit that the outcome of the war to date is an ongoing train wreck, I can’t quite see that it was. The quantity of doomsday risk the world faces isn’t infinite; it’s something that can be reduced. The assessment was made that an unencumbered Saddam, and probably someday a nuclear Iraq, represented a big chunk of that risk, and a chunk that could be knocked off. Would you be more or less happy about the North Korean nuclear situation if Kim Jong Il had enormous oil reserves? I know my answer. Even Iran is a more tolerable nuclear power, because it isn’t a one-man state. If Ahmadinejad decided to start playing Lets Make Pretty Glass, there’s good odds the council of clerics would stop him. I’m not so sure Saddam’s generals would have.
You can certainly argue, and I’m sure will, that those risks were all potential and that the Iraqis and others who are dying now matter more. Perhaps. I’m glad not to have to make those decisions, frankly. Collegiate moral dilemnas (“if you could cure cancer by throwing your mom onto the railroad tracks…”) don’t have the added nightmare factor of probability. It’s one thing to say that the Russkies nuked a city and we have to decide how to respond; it’s a more horrible analysis to do if it starts out “there’s a 20% chance the Russians will nuke a city tomorrow…” And even more horrible when instead of 20%, it’s “some chance greater than zero but interestingly less than one”.
I thought you were going on vacation. How can I play practical jokes at your site if you won’t LEAVE?
“never again” is usually a phrase used for the Holocaust. Which begs the question, really, of whether (for example) a “war of aggression” might have been appropriate against Germany if they had “just” been slaughterin Jews rather than attacking other countries. I think it would have been justified; do you…?
Anyway.
There is a difference between premptive action and aggression.
Aggression is motivated in essence by a desire to take something. Saddam’s attack on Kuwait could properly be termed an aggressive war. Hitler’s attempted conquest was an act of aggression. Aggressive wars usually have conquest and/or acquisition of resources as their goal
Premptive action is a realization that not all weaknesses are ongoing; that not all people are trustworthy; that not all allies are steadfast. Israel’s attack against the massed troops on its border was a preemptive war. War against Iran or NK could be a preemptive war.
Preemptive wars are always a gamble. But in theory, they have the goal of protecting the citizens of the initiating country from longer-term damage.
The problem with preemption is that it’s a guess. Sometimes people get it wrong. But one of the roles of a government is to protect its own citizens–and usually to value its own citizens most highly–so I’m unwilling to believe that preemption is never acceptable.
A nuclear north korea would be an excellent example. I can only imagine what havoc would be wreaked if north korea were to sell a nuke to someone willing to use it. Most people believe they’d sell one if they had one. And we can all probably agree there are people who would use a nuclear weapon if they had one in their possession.
So, Amp: picture yourself as a government official. You’ve sworn to protect the country and its inhabitants. You have an obligation to your consituents and country which exceeds your obligation to others.
Your advisors know NK has a nuclear weapon. They figure, as best they can, there’s a 50% chance they’ll sell it without us finding out. They figure there’s an overall 20% chance it’ll be sold, and used, somewhere in the world. maybe here.
Now, it’s your call: is there NO justification for going to war with NK? Would there be no justification of the projected casualties were low?
Arguing that all wars are evil is a bit like arguing that all prisons are bad. it ignores the reality that not all people, nations, or governments are equal in their desires and the manner by which they would enforce them. Some people should be imprisoned; some governments should probably not exist.
The problem isn’t that “military action is bad”. The problem is that this particular administration appears to lack the ability to properly weigh the criteria for entiering a preemptive war.
I can only imagine what havoc would be wreaked if north korea were to sell a nuke to someone willing to use it
You may not have to imagine it for long. As you, of course, know, the NK probably do have nukes and have apparently discussed selling them to, among others, Iran. Perhaps if the US hadn’t been so busy pursuing non-existent WMD in Iraq, it might have been able to prevent this. Or not. Beloved Leader’s craziness aside, NK had strong incentive to seek nuclear weapons. What else could they do to protect themselves? Truthfully, if I were the leader, democratic or dictatorial, of a small third world country, I’d do everything I could to get my hands on a nuke or two, preferably with an ICBM. Why? Because its the only thing that will keep the Americans from screwing with you. Whatever conclusion one can draw from that.
What Robert said in his first paragraph. Has anyone who did not already believe the Iraq war is evil changed their mind because of the study? Would anyone who does believe that change their mind if the study’s numbers were proved high by an order of magnitude?
The problem with preemption is that if Iraq had had WMD, it would have been perfectly entitled to use them against the United States – under the preemption theory. Similarly, NK could legitimately attempt a first strike at US assets.
Premption is legitimate when someone is preparing to attack you, and you know who it is, where they are, and what they are doing. Anything else is a bunch of cowboys shooting up the town.
It would be nice if some of the chickenhawks, crusaders and promoters of wars on “Islamofascists” would come to the sudden realization that they played a part in the murder of hundreds of thousands.
Unfortunately, those driven by fear, hatred and power don’t care about truth or logic. They are driven by their emotions and view those opposed as traitors.
They wouldn’t listen when veterans (like me) stood up and opposed the war. They wouldn’t listen when flag officers stood up and called for a withdrawal.
They aren’t going to listen now. They don’t care.
Of course, I’m a little jaded and cynical these days…