“Not if the NFZ was to be in place indefinately”
Actually even then. I doubt that the NFZ cost more than a few billion dollars a year. The interest you could earn on just 100 billion dollars would be enough to pay for the NFZ pretty much forever.
As for the political cost how is a full-blown invasion better than the much less intrusive NFZ? And there is no guarantee the US will be able to pull out troops from the ME any time soon.
“Remember that the only thing that made S.H. agree to let them back in was our troop deployment.”
This is getting rather far from OP but I would question whether the full deployment was necessary or even helpful to put pressure on SH to accept inspectors. What was needed was the threat of war not the certainty of war. To do that sending perhaps one carrier group and maybe one division as a signal would have been enough. By sending an entire army the US pretty much signalled that it was going to invade anyway reducing any incentive for Saddam to co-operate.
One million is usually the high-end estimate for fatalities (as opposed to casualties, which includes wounded and prisoners) that I’ve seen for the Iran-Iraq war, with Iranian deaths being a good deal larger than Iraqi deaths. Not to sound snarky, but the MSN Encarta cite is in general agreement with this.
(my bolding) Nope. Bush threatened war for quite some time, but we didn’t get any inspectors in until after the deployment was pretty much complete. Did we need to deploy as many troops as we did? Well, we’ll never know that will we? But the build-up was not instantaneous, and S.H. didn’t respond in the early stages. Of course, the French could’ve sent just one or two carriers in order to get the inspectors back in, but they didn’t.
“but we didn’t get any inspectors in until after the deployment was pretty much complete”
Source for this? Iraq let back the inspectors in November 2002. I don’t think the deployment was complete till the early months of 2003.
In any case getting back to the main issue does anyone know of estimates of how many people were killed by the Iraqi regime in the years preceding the war ie. 2002 or 2001? That would probably be the best indication of the number of people who would have been killed in Iraq in 2003 without a war
CyberPundit said:
You can’t count just maintenance of the No-Fly zones. Containing Saddam required maintaining troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other areas in the Gulf.
But the no-fly zones themselves were very expensive. Aicraft operations alone ran just under a billion dollars a year, and that doesn’t count all the ships, support personnel, etc.
In 1999, the U.S. had about 24,000 troops in the Gulf. The Fifth fleet was specifically built for Gulf patrol, and it consisted of one carrier, 36 ships, 15,000 sailors and Marines, and about two hundred aircraft.
The annual cost of Gulf operations in the years before the was has been estimated by the Brookings Institution to be about $50 billion. That’s about one third of the cost of the entire war to get rid of Saddam, EVERY YEAR.
How much of that would be saved if Saddam were gone is unclear, because clearly some presence was required regardless. Plus, Gulf operations provided valuable training, which would have had to be done elsewhere.
But clearly a big chunk of this is directly the cost of containing Saddam. For instance, an aircraft carrier alone costs about $500 million per year to operate. A carrier group runs into the billions per year.
Wow, you’re trying to define this awfully narrowly, aren’t you? The sanctions regime was crumbling, and I don’t think the no-fly zone could be maintained forever. I think you have to look at long-term consequences.
Also, we haven’t considered the humanitarian cost of containing Saddam. Wasn’t it the left that was arguing for dropping sanctions because so many people were dying under them? The infant mortality rate in Iraq has plummeted in the aftermath of the war, in part because millions of kids are getting innoculations now.
I’d also like to add, that we now have an endpoint is sight. We can argue if the occupation will require 5 years or even 10. But the establishment of a stable government in Iraq is much more likely now than when SH was in power. He certainly would have died eventually, but that strategy could very well have requried an indefinate commitment. The situation as it now stands at least has an end in sight.
I’m glad you’re so confident about that. Me, I’m convinced your optimism is ludicrous.
. "Containing Saddam required maintaining troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other areas in the Gulf. "
So what? It is far from clear that the level of US troops in the region will be down any time soon. When do you predict US troops level in the ME will be down to their 2002 level?
“The infant mortality rate in Iraq has plummeted in the aftermath of the war, in part because millions of kids are getting innoculations now.”
Source for this? Here is a news article titled:“Babies struggle to survive in post-war Iraq”
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/7285294.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
“But that stress and worsening violence are causing infant mortality rates to rise, according to maternity ward doctors and nurses. They say they’re seeing more non-hereditary birth defects and premature births.”
“But the establishment of a stable government in Iraq is much more likely now than when SH was in power”
Exactly why is this the case? How do you know that at some point after the US leaves there won’t be be a civil war or another strong man. Certainly it’s far from clear at the moment what a stable Iraqi government would look like and how it would resolve crucial issues like the federal structure wrt. the Kurds.
Thanks.
Anyway, here’s a link to Rummel’s site listing the most murderous regimes of the last century. The statistics only run up to 1987, so where Iraq would fit in I don’t really know.
I really did not want to completely hijack this thread. So I’ll post one more response to minty and Cyber and then they can have the last word.
Well, I did not say that it definately would be the case. I only suggested that with SH and his two sons out of power, there is a better chance than when they were in power. Also, I’d like to thank you for playing so fast and loos with the time scales in this debate. The war can only be justified by looking at the projected deaths for 2003. And that only by assuming that the NFZ would be in place. But if “at some point” Iraq has trouble again, then they did not form a stable government. I agree that what the Iraq government will look like is not clear. It should not be too clear from our perspective. I’m sure you are aware that it took our founding fathers some years to come up with our governemt, and that had to change (some) several times in our history. If Iraq does not have a working governemtn for the next 5 years I wouldn’t even start calling it a failure yet. As far as the federal structure goes, they have the advantage of a lot of experience with the American system of federal government. I’m sure that some federation of Iraqi zones (not sure what they would want to be called) could be established which would ensure both individual rights and local traditions.
Well, its not really optimism. Just a realization that stability in Iraq is much more likely without SH than it was with him. They certainly have lots of other problems to deal with. The current allied occupation is certainly not the least of them.
OK, I’m done hijacking. One last question for you two. If my sentence was so objectionable, do you really think that SH was better than anything which might result from the occupation? Not the worst case, mind you, but the best case scenario? Or are you only suggesting that he was about to declare freedom for his people? Or perhaps you are of the opinion that SH’s regime was stable despite his brutality?
“The war can only be justified by looking at the projected deaths for 2003.”
I never said that. Sure the later years matter as well but we don’t know how they will turn out. They could be worse than 2002 if , for instance, there is a civil war. To evaluate the humanitarian outcome of the war we can start by comparing estimates of the deaths caused by the Baathist regime in 2002 with the deaths caused by the war in 2003.
“And that only by assuming that the NFZ would be in place”
Since there were no plans to stop the NFZ that seems a reasonable assumption.
“I’m sure that some federation of Iraqi zones (not sure what they would want to be called) could be established which would ensure both individual rights and local traditions.”
Why exactly are you so sure? Iraq is a tinderbox of ethnic hatreds and regional tensions comparable to the former Yugoslavia. The majority Shia have never held power and were surpressed by the Sunnis. So were the Kurds who have their long-term ambitions for their own state which is totally unacceptable to Turkey and Iran. The Kurds want their own super-province within Iraq which would include the oil-rich Kirkuk but you can bet that other Iraqis as well as Iran and Turkey will oppose this because they think it will become a launching-pad for a Kurdish state.
No cite, I’m going from memory. You could be right about the timeline. But The US has been the only country taking an active role in that area for the last decade and a half. Without the US there would’ve been no expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait, no NFZ, and no inspections. I was not in favor of the latest war, but I get tired of the US as being painted as the bad guys in this. We took action that we thought appropriate against a dictator. And the Iraqi people will more than likely be better off in the long run. They think so, and most people around the world think so.
Do you believe they would’ve been better off if S.H. had been left in place? That is the real issue here, behind the question in the OP. Blair says we’ve found 400k people so far in mass graves. If that figure is true, it surely represents less than the total number of Iraqis slaughter by S.H. Reports from some sites indicate that some of the people were actually burried alive (no signs of lethal trauma, but the corpses had their hands tied and were blindfolded).
“Do you believe they would’ve been better off if S.H. had been left in place?”
I think it could go either way. For instance if there is a Bosnia-style civil war it would be worse that the Saddam regime. My guess is that so far the war has made things worse for the average Iraqi particularly if you factor in the enormous economic disruption which threw millions of people out of work. I hope things get better but it’s far from certain they will.
As for the mass graves like I mentioned they mostly represent Saddam’s victims of the 80’s and early 90’s before the NFZ. If you want to evaluate the humanitarian benefits of the war in 2003 ,estimates of victims from more recent years would be far more relevant.
See, that’s the ludicrous part I was referring to. The Shiites hate the Sunnis, the Sunnis hate the Shiites, the Kurds–who everybody else hates, including the Turks–want an independent state of their own, a substantial portion of the population wants an Islamic theocracy, there’s not even a semblance of a national government, and the whole shebang is held together by nothing more than continued occupation and administration by the American military.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is ludicrous.
Cynderpundit and minty green obviously feel that Saddam should have been left in place, and that the sanctions should have been lifted. That’s what I’m getting from the posts at any rate.
You know if I were an Iraqi citizen and I had to choose between going through this period with the hope of living in a society where I wouldn’t have to fear being picked up off the street for no reason and tortured and executed, or continue to live under a madman who routinely murdered multitudes on the grounds of nothing more than a remote suspicion, I think I would prefer things how they are now. But maybe you all would love to live in a country where the ones who were crazier than your leader, Saddam, were his sons who would undoubtedly take over his reign
“Cynderpundit and minty green obviously feel that Saddam should have been left in place, and that the sanctions should have been lifted”
I never said anything about lifting sanctions. I think the administration had the right idea in early 2001 with Powell’s proposals for “smart sanctions” for Iraq.
As for the horror stories of before the war, it’s just as easy to produce horror stories after the war; those who were killed during the actual fighting, the ensuing insurgency and counter-insurgency, those who died because hospitals were looted, those who died in the crime-wave that followed “liberation”, the millions who lost their livelihood after the war. There are plenty of horror stories to go around in Iraq but those who invoke humanitarian reasons for the war tend to be a tad selective about the ones they talk about.
With the removal of Saddam there is a possible end in sight with the lawlessness that followed his removal. With Saddam in power, there was no nor would there ever be any foreseeable relief from his terror. Equating state sponsored terrorism against the country’s own citizenry, and the confusion and lawlessness following a military action is dubious at best in my opinion. Your position still seems to be that the Iraqi people would have been better off under Saddam’s sadistic thumb. I disagree.