I agree with this point of view, and fail to understand how others who claim they're for savings lives can't recognize the point of view.
Casualties will mount even without war in Iraq
Vincent Carroll
March 1, 2003
rockymountainnews.com
Most war protesters, it is safe to say, want to save lives. They may be driven by less savory motives as well -disdain for George W. Bush or, in Europe, an abiding contempt for the United States - but their moral fervor springs at least in part from a profound belief that war is the bloodiest option on the table for dealing with Saddam Hussein.
The more you examine that assumption, however, the less plausible it appears to be. Indeed, the protesters quite likely have it backward: Of all the options available for dealing with Iraq, war might well cost the fewest lives.
No one knows exactly how many people died in the first Gulf War, but most estimates from responsible observers put the number between 15,000 and 100,000. (John Heidenrich, a former analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, offered an interesting argument some years ago in Foreign Policy magazine for why even that range might be significantly too high.) It so happens that a second war with Iraq is likely to result in fewer deaths, for several reasons. Saddam's army is much weaker than it was in 1991; his equipment is much older, while U.S. weapons are more devastating than ever; and finally, his troops can have no illusions about the ultimate outcome of the conflict. But for the sake of argument - and because unexpectedly fierce resistance and bloody urban fighting is at least a possibility - let's concede that as many people could die in a second war as died in the first.
Those are the deaths that war protesters understandably wish to prevent.
Yet despite what those protesters suggest, the choice today is not merely between bloody war and life-affirming peace. If war is rejected, two options remain. They are containment and deterrence, and each will almost certainly result in many deaths, too.
Containment, after all, is the policy of the past 12 years, involving economic, political and military sanctions ranging from the modest to the severe. The idea has been to keep Saddam from rebuilding his military and developing nuclear weapons, and it's worked to a degree. The only trouble is that, given limited resources, Saddam has been perfectly willing to sacrifice the welfare of his people in order to pursue his grandiose goals of state. Estimates of the number of premature deaths caused by the sanctions tend to be exaggerated - they run wildly up to 1 million - but even the most scrupulous of observers, such as former National Security Council official Kenneth Pollack, put them at 200,000.
Containment is now the policy of choice among anti-war activists and officials in governments such as France, although not long ago many were decrying its inhumanity. The barbarity of war is bad, but the barbarity of sanctions that have killed more people than died in the Gulf War is strangely not so bad.
So if war is bloody and sanctions are bloody, why not revert to a policy we used against the Soviet Union? Why not lift all sanctions, grant Saddam free rein within Iraq, and warn him that we will blow him to kingdom come if he attacks a neighbor or funds terrorists who attack us? Why not deterrence?
Two problems: First, Saddam would undoubtedly launch an internal war of genocide against the Kurds and step up the repression of Shiites. He's twice tried to exterminate the Kurds, after all, and Human Rights Watch estimates he killed between 50,000 and 100,000 in the late 1980s alone. And second, he'd develop nuclear weapons within a few years and so be in a position to throw his weight around again.
Wait a second, reply deterrence advocates. Saddam would never risk provoking massive retaliation from the U.S. or Israel. Oh, no? Here is a man who misjudged the prowess of Israel in 1973, the power of Iran in '74, and the resolve of Syria in '75. He again misjudged the strength of Iran when he attacked it in 1980. In 1990, he misread the U.S. when he invaded Kuwait. He then misjudged his forces' ability to resist an invasion. He misjudged the staying power of sanctions after the war. He misjudged the allies' reaction to his assaults on the Kurds and Shiites, which resulted in no-fly zones that protect them. He misjudged Bill Clinton, and was shocked in 1998 at the pounding from Operation Desert Fox. And this list only scratches the surface of his supreme, madcap, comprehensive impulsiveness.
As Pollack observes, "Saddam Hussein is one of the most reckless, aggressive, violence-prone, risk-tolerant, and damage-tolerant leaders in modern history." There are only three ways to handle such a man, and while each one of them is likely to be tragically bloody, only one would end the threat for good. |
