Okay, if you want to do a cost-benefit analysis, I’ll play that game.
It’s been estimated that the WTC attack cost the American economy around 1 Trillion dollars, including secondary effects like damage to the airline industry and investor confidence.
How much would a nuclear attack cost? Let’s be incredibly conservative, and say it would be about 10 times the cost of the WTC attack.
Let’s also be conservative, and say that the cost of the Iraq invasion is at the high limit of 200 billion.
And to be really, really generous, let’s leave out any economic benefit the U.S would gain from having Iraq as a full trading partner and not having to house a few divisions in the Gulf to contain him, which they do now.
In that case, we’re betting 200 billion against ten trillion. In that case, it would make economic sense to attack Iraq if there was a 1 in 50 chance that it would avert a nuclear detonation in America.
I’d take that bet.
But the real world is even more skewed towards attacking Iraq. First of all, the cost will likely be far lower than 200 billion. I’d guess it would be closer to the cost of the Gulf war, or about 70 billion. Second, saying a nuke would only cost 10 times what the WTC attack did is incredibly optimistic. If it detonated in an expensive place like Manhattan, the cost would be incalculable, but we’d be talking about essentially the entire Island of Manhattan being obliterated, and if the winds are blowing right the contamination of the rest of New York. The blow to the United States would be massive. It would certainly throw us into a heavy recession or perhaps even a depression. The cleanup would divert huge national resources for years.
And then there’s the benefits that come from the war. The U.S. currently spends billions each year stationing a defensive force in the Gulf specifically to deter Saddam. Getting rid of Saddam will boost investor confidence, increase trade, lower the world cost of oil, and probably benefit the U.S. by more than what the war costs.
But of course, in this situation the true costs are not financial. They are diplomatic and human costs. What is the value of losing diplomatic capital? What is the value of the lives lost in the war?
But here again, the equation falls on the side of invading Iraq. Diplomatically, you’re going to find that once the world sees the U.S. steaming towards the Gulf there will suddenly be support from all sorts of unlikely areas, just like there was during Gulf I. There have already been some surprising reversals: Saudi Arabia and Egypt have already moved off their original hard-line positions and moved towards the U.S. position. Even Iran has said it will support an invasion of Iraq if the U.N. votes for it.
The reason you’re going to see big reversals toward’s the U.S. position is because once the war is inevitable, the other nations will be thinking like this: “Okay, it’s inevitable that we will soon be living in a world in which the United States has overthrown Iraq and is now calling the shots there. Given that reality, would I rather live in that world as an ally or an enemy?”
As for human lives, how many would be lost in a nuclear blast in Washington or Tel Aviv? How many people die in Iraq each year because they can’t get enough food? How many Kurds are going to die at the hands of Saddam?
There will certainly be casualties on both sides. I expect the margin of victory will be even greater than in Gulf I, which means American servicemen will have incredibly low casualties. U.S. military power is almost working like an ‘industrial enterprise’ now - a bunch of technicians carry out a large, expensive operation virtually unopposed, and suffer about as many casualties as equivalent large, dangerous industrial activities do. How many casualties were there in the Gulf War? A couple of hundred? Less? Out of 500,000 soldiers?
Probably a few thousand Iraqis, most of them soldiers.
The big risk in this war is that Saddam manages to keep an effective, loyal army around him in Baghdad and the U.S. has to dig him out in urban warfare or lay siege. In that case, the casualties on both sides will be much, much higher. Perhaps a few thousand Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis - many of them civilian.
That’s the absolute worst-case. The absolute worst-case result of inaction is a mushroom cloud over a major city, and hundreds of thousands or millions dead. More Americans lost in one day than were lost in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
War is horrible. Sometimes the alternative to war is worse.