So says a Jordanian woman interviewed on CNN when asked whether Jordanians understand what the War in Iraq is all about. “I wish I knew what it is about,” she says. “I do know that people are dying.” Her comment is followed by the obligatory furrowed brow and sympathetic nod from her interviewer.
I’ve seen and heard plenty of arguments against the war. The argument I make is the standard libertarian principle that the American government has no business interfering in the affairs of Iraq. Some say that the motivations of the US are suspect, that Americans are after oil or territory. Some say that war will increase instability in the Middle East. Others say the the US aggression has circumvented UN protocol. And so on.
But of all the arguments I have heard, far and away the weakest in my opinion is the one offered by the Jordanian woman and shared by many others: the war is wrong because innocent Iraqis are dying.
Don’t misunderstand me. It is certainly a moral and ethical aberration to kill innocent people. That activity is wrong per se and in vacuo. It is wrong with or without war. But invoking that principle to condemn the War in Iraq is frankly bizarre.
Suppose we take for granted the number given by Iraq’s (former) Information Minister, Muhammad Sa’id al-Sahhaf — the same man who told us that Hollywood was wagging the dog with studio footage of American marines taking the Baghdad airport — of a couple of thousand civilians killed expressly by coalition bombs. Even with that number killed in three weeks, and given numbers provided by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, it would take coalition forces many, many years at the same rate to kill as many innocent civilians as Saddam himself has already killed.
Torture, rape, murder, disfigurement, dismemberment, ghoulish Mengelean experiments on animals and people, imprisoned children, families held hostage, and in general a ubiquitous and complete disregard for human rights and dignity have permeated Iraqi society for decades. Saddam’s Gestapo, the Fedayeen, even used women and children as shields as it fired on coalition troops. It stored its munitions and weapons in schools, hospitals, and mosques. It has been a regime whose disregard for human life is legendary.
To argue that the war is bad because innocent people are dying is utterly Neanderthal. Innocent people have undergone a kind of oppression in Iraq that the Jordanian woman either cannot conceive, is ignorant of, or else condones. Perhaps if she had her tongue cut out for what she said, or if her daughter was raped in front of her, or if her toddler son were put in prison for failing to call Saddam “Uncle Saddam”, or if her husband were sexually mutilated and hoisted on a pole for everyone to see — perhaps then she would see what is obvious: people have been dying anyway. By the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. All at the hands of a man who would have killed her and fed her to dogs just to entertain his sons.
People are dying? Yes. And they have been dying for more than twenty years. But if the war is successful, the deaths will cease. At least, they will decrease significantly. There won’t be ten thousand Kurdish villagers dying slowly in the streets from nerve gas. There won’t be Gestapo police pushing people through shredders feet-first while goons laugh at their screams. There won’t be one-in-five children dying from starvation while a dictator builds a hundred palaces.
There are plenty of reasons why this war is morally wrong. But if all you know is that people are dying, then you don’t know much of anything at all.