I agree with this completely. Where I got confused was when you said:
in response to CyberPundit’s question:
This gave me the impression that you didn’t care how many civilian casualities a war would cause, if the war would stop Saddam’s actions against the Ma’dan.
Of course, we should work to stop all forms of genocide. However, “preventing and punishing genocide” is not equivalent to “going to war with whoever is commiting genocidal acts”. One has to weigh the relative damage of the solution to the crime itself. For example, to catch a murderer, police don’t carpet bomb a city block. Even if it prevents a future murder, it kills fifty innocent people.
Nope, the point is that stopping genocide does not have to cost a single human life, military or civilian. The person who decides whether it will cost any human lives and to a great extent how many lives is the person committing the genocide.
And if we allow a threat from the committer of genocide that the prevention of that genocide will cost significant civilian lives to deter us from stopping genocide, we give that person carte blanche to commit genocide. “I’m going to kill/drive out these people, and if you try to stop me, I’ll drag you into urban warfare which will cost lots of civilian lives.”
And that’s impermissible. We have to be able to stop genocide. We can’t take the position that we will stop genocide, unless, that is, you can threaten enough of your own people’s lives. Because then someone intending to commit genocide will threaten enough of his own people’s lives.
So to take a hypothetical example it would be “moral” to fight a war to prevent a “genocide” which is killing a few hundred people even if it leads to hundreds of thousands of innocents dead? If that’s your belief you are right that there is an unbridgeable chasm between you and me and probably between you and most of the world.
Oh and about pragamtic considerations: what’s happening in Chechnya and Tibet is probably closer to genocide than anything going on in Iraq. But I will take a wild guess that you don’t advocate an invasion of Russia or China. Care to explain why?
Really, really bad guess, CyberPundit - I’ve stated my philosophy in this thread. Russia and China aren’t on the top of my list, but they are definitely on the list.
As for your other point, it is moral to fight a war to prevent genocide. It is not moral to allow a country to continue to commit genocide because it threatens to kill more of its people if you try to stop the genocide.
And I think that a majority of people would be opposed to allowing a criminal against humanity to use blackmail so as to be able to commit more crimes against humanity.
Funny thing, the article you cite says that war is what started this “genocide”. The Shiite’s started a guerilla war against the Sunni’s using the marshland as cover. In self defense the Sunni’s are draining the marshland and otherwise making it inhabitable. As a consequence, the marsh people are being killed and displaced and the EU calls it “genocide”.
Perhaps this is another reason to advocate a limited war. This marshland may already lie within the southern no-fly-zone. We don’t need any urban combat to take this land.
Sua, this isn’t about Saddam blackmailing us by threatening his own people. This is about our choosing a solution to solve a problem which itself does more harm than the original problem. We are responsible for how we choose to solve a given problem.
We choose to declare war on Iraq (well, we may). Saddam chooses to (well, threatens to choose to) make the war an urban war, even though an urban war does not make it more likely that Saddam will win said war. Saddam makes the threat simply to deter the possibility of war.
That’s called blackmail. “If you try to stop my genocide/violations of international law/attempts to acquire WMD, I will place the lives of large numbers of my people in jeopardy.”
This is precisely the downside of deterrence I was talking about before. Saddam is trying to make the world let him act with impunity, by threatening to kill innocents if the world tries to stop him.
You have to decide what is the greater evil - the potential death of innocents endangered by Saddam, or all the future genocides likely to be caused when people realize that you can commit genocide without fear, so long as you threaten to kill more people.
What do you mean “threatens to make the war an urban war”? A war to capture or kill Saddam is by definition an urban war, since Saddam doesn’t currently live by himself in a shack out in the middle of the desert. It’s ridiculous to say that he is choosing to have a lot of civilian casualties because he lives in Baghdad. At some point, we have to take responsibility for our actions. If we decide to oust Saddam, we are choosing to kill thousands of cilivians to do so.
Now, if he is filling military targets with civilians, those casualties would of course be his responsibility. But so far we have been discussing the casualties likely to directly result from an invasion of Bahgdad, not hypothetical civilian hostages.
Sua,
Actually I had briefly looked at that thread but I didn’t realize that you would carry your philosophy so far as to actually advocate invasions of Russia and China. Surely at some point you have to take into account the practical consequences,like possible nuclear war, which would lead to far more innocent people dying.
I second Giraffe’s point. Not all civilian casualties will be the result of “hostage-taking” by Saddam. Even if Saddam didn’t use those tactics thousands would likely die.
You don’t need a cite. Memory is fine with me. I’m not one who thinks we should all back up everything with certifiable proof.
For example, I heard Freidman of the NY times on tv the other day talking about the attitudes of Arabs. He traveled there recently. He says you can’t talk about Iraq, without them bringing up Israel; that there’s a lot of anger. Can I use that in a post? Why not?
I agree with you in general, but in this case I don’t remember the context of the estimate, so it’s not a very useful number by itself. One really needs to know what sort of assumptions went into the estimate to make it useful in a debate.
Sure, but keeping your troops in cities is not the same as using “human shields”. If the United States was invaded, would we blame the Army for civilian casualties because they didn’t put all troops in the middle of Kansas so that no civilians would be hit? No, we would blame the invaders who actually blew things up and killed people.
Just to be clear, I should point out that I understand that civilian casualties are a regrettable but unavoidable part of any war. However, we should be realistic about the fact that those deaths are part of the cost of our actions, and decide if the goals of the war justify the cost. SuaSponte has claimed that a war is justifiable solely due to the treatment of the Ma’dan. To me, this is equivalent to saying that it’s reasonable to stop a fleeing criminal with hand grenades, and that the criminal is responsible for the fifteen people you blow up, not you.
If the Iraqi army flees to the cities & doesn’t engage the US army, I’m sure we have contingency plans for laying on blockades or sieges of the cities. Then it becomes a waiting game- with the US dropping leaflets over every city saying “Hand over Saddam & we’ll give you food.”
Well, thats certainly reassuring! Scooby is sure there is a contingency plan. Whew! What a relief! We’ll starve them out! So much for the “collateral damage” issue!
Boy, just wait to see Al Jazeera try to put some negative spin on that!