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If the U.S. kills 10,000 Iraqi civilians, will this be a just war? 1,000? 100,000? On the eve of destruction, a deadly moral calculus awaits.
Mar 20, 2003 | As the war with Iraq begins, the question of Iraqi casualties -- particularly but not exclusively civilian casualties -- may loom larger than in any other war fought by America.
Advocates for the imminent war with Iraq say it will be a battle of liberation in which even significant numbers of civilian casualties will be acceptable, while opponents see it as industrial slaughter, in which all moral justification will be buried beneath piles of Iraqi corpses. Both have numbers of dead Iraqis to back their cases. Hawks cite those Saddam has murdered (a million, by many counts) and extrapolate how many more will die if his reign continues. Doves tabulate the thousands killed during the fighting of the last Gulf War and in its immediate aftermath and offer grim, sometimes apocalyptic predictions of future casualties. How many deaths there are will help determine whether the United States is welcomed to Iraq as liberators or fought as occupiers, and it will shape the perception of America abroad for decades. And there's almost no way for us to know how many there will be.
The issue of casualties, both civilian and military, is so crucial because of the way the Bush administration has defined this war. During World War II, a war regarded by all of its combatants as one of national survival, an entire enemy nation, soldiers and civilians alike, was regarded as a legitimate target. Large numbers of civilian casualties, or individual horrors like Dresden or the firebombing of Tokyo, were seen as regrettable, but they did not cause participants or historians to alter their assessment of the moral status of the parties involved. In the first Gulf War, that blank-check acceptance of "total war" was qualified by the fact that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty despot, and many of his soldiers peasant conscripts. But because Iraq had invaded Kuwait, there was a tacit sense that Saddam and his army deserved whatever they got.
In the current war, however, Iraq has done nothing to provoke an attack (aside from Saddam's long-standing pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, which he alone has to answer for). The moral rules governing wars of choice are far stricter than those governing wars of self-defense. Moreover, President Bush's explicit statement that this is a war of "liberation" for the Iraqi people, and his argument that America's only real enemies are Saddam Hussein and his inner circle, make it critical, in both the court of world opinion and in the hearts and minds of Iraqis after the war, that civilian casualties be kept as low as possible. Moral purists might argue that Iraqi military casualties, too, should be kept as low as possible; but once hostilities commence, the uniformed personnel of an enemy army, no matter how unwilling they are to fight or tyrannical their leader, are generally considered legitimate targets. The moral uneasiness surrounding this judgment is inherent in war. (The U.S. military has stated it will attempt to determine the hostile intentions, or lack thereof, of Iraqi troops. But with the U.S. military's ability to kill thousands of enemy combatants at a distance, virtually instantaneously, and in the heat of battle and the fog of war, it is questionable to what degree this noble goal will be realized.)
One of the central concepts used by scholars grappling with what makes a war just is "proportionality," or the ratio of those killed to those saved. "You have to have some reasonable assurance that you're not going to do greater damage than the benefits that you hope to bring by fighting," says Michael Walzer, a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and the author of "Just and Unjust Wars," the standard work on the subject. "It is morality by predication, and it's undoubtedly very uncertain, but you are morally bound to try to do a serious estimate."
Here, though, the variables are so multifarious that they make a serious estimate nearly impossible. What happens if there's urban combat in Baghdad? If Turkey moves into Kurdistan? If Saddam unleashes chemical weapons? If there's civil war?
Or, on the other hand, what if Saddam's troops surrender en masse? What if one of his inner circle assassinates him before the war even gets started in earnest?
Can the military save Iraq without destroying it?
In a few days or weeks, the answers to these questions will become clearer -- and as they do, the argument over the war's justice, or lack thereof, will heat up. (This argument does not touch other arguments in favor of or against the war, such as America's real motivations, its legal right to act, the consequences of a unilateral war, the threat posed by Saddam, and so on. It concerns only the issue of whether the war is justified as a war of liberation. One could agree that it is justified as a war of liberation and still oppose it for other reasons.) Unless no Iraqis are killed, or every single one is, neither side in the debate is likely to be able to claim victory. The death of a single child can and will be seized on by antiwar advocates; those who are pro-war will argue that even 100,000 deaths is an acceptable price to pay.
In any case, the whole moral conundrum hangs upon a roll of the dice.
"If you take an unknown and multiply it by another unknown, you get an unknown," says Beth Osborne Daponte, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1992, Daponte was fired from her job as a demographer in the Census Bureau after she told a reporter that 158,000 Iraqis died in the first Gulf War and in the months immediately following it, a figure that contradicted the official government line that casualties were impossible to determine. Now, she says, "I don't speculate on the numbers."
Yet plenty of others do, and their predictions vary widely. A confidential United Nations study, leaked in December and widely quoted by antiwar activists, estimates a staggering half million deaths. A study released in November by Medact, the English affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War provides a similar number. A press release from the group says, "A US-led attack on Iraq could kill between 48,000 and 260,000 civilians and combatants in just the first three months of conflict, according to a study by medical and public health experts. Post-war health effects could take an additional 200,000 lives."
