“We may be arsonists, but we’re not murderers. Have some perspective.”
Yeah, that’s how actually equivalence, as opposed to false equivalence, works.
It’s perfectly fine for you to find all kinds of fault with the US.
But it’s wrong to suggest that civilians murdered by terrorists result in the same degree of blame being assigned to the US, as that assigned to Nazis who took over another country and intentionally murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians themselves.
These are not equivalent.
Clearly.
I think he also means civilians not killed by terrorists, but by the US military. I can’t find it now, but there were/are a lot of deaths falsely reported as “enemy combatants” but were actually just people caught in the line of fire, because “enemy combatants” sounds more patriotic.
Anyway, invading Iraq at all might be considered a war crime… Is the entire US to blame? Maybe not.
[edit]
Here’s the first example I could find.
Even if you included some portion of those killed by drone strikes, you’d still be orders of magnitude below the number of civilians intentionally killed by Nazis in Czechoslovakia.
I mean, on one day, the Nazis rounded up 10,000 randomly selected civilians in Czechoslovakia, and executed them publicly to discourage the resistance fighters there. The US was never randomly executing civilians to make a point in Iraq. That’s the kind of thing that Hussein did.
I agree with you 100% in this case, @Timex, but remember that if you use utilitarian logic, all that matters is the body count, and the body count of Iraq is probably closer to 500k…
But the US didn’t kill all of those people.
It’s an obscenity to absolve the actual perpetrators of those crimes, in this case largely islamic terrorists, and attribute their crimes to the US forces they were fighting against.
In that line of thinking, everyone’s responsible for everything, and responsibility means nothing. Here, I’m just going to say that Spain’s responsible for all those deaths, because you didn’t stop the war.
See, I said I agreed with you.
I realize that, but i don’t think that your suggestion of a ultilitarian view was correct.
You can’t just count the bodies and then apply those deaths to an arbitrary party. That’s not a rational way to calculate the utility of the situation.
I don’t think utilitarianism applies to a party, or to the forces on the ground, but to an action or decision. The action of invading Iraq led to hundreds of thousand more deaths than had the country not being invaded. Of course I just think utilitarianism is limited in cases like these anyways.
As for responsibility, see my previous post regarding the moral role of the citizens, and not the state, which is amoral by definition. In the case of Iraq, for example, Spain behaved in a wildly different manner as a state, supporting the invasion, than as a people (with 8 to 11 million of people, of a country of about 44 million, protesting in the streets at the same time).
So then Spain’s inaction in not stopping the war led to all those people dying.
It’s a nonsensical view, because once you go beyond the actions that actually caused the effect (the terrorists actually murdering people), it becomes entirely arbitrary how many levels of indirection you choose to go through. Everyone in the world ends up being responsible for everything, due to how causality works.
The US bears responsibility for destabilizing the country, but that is not the same as actually murdering civilians.
If you and I are in a fight, and I shoot a civilian, we don’t bear equal reasonability.
I agree, but for the same reason you can’t apply this kind of measurement to hypothetical indirect outcomes of certain actions (like for example the Atomic bombings or American intervention in South America).
Can you cite this incident? I’ve never heard of it. I thought the worst single massacre of civilians, not counting Jews sent east from Terezin, was at Lidice.
It was in response to Operation Anthropoid:
Although looking at that, it looks like Hitler ordered 10,000 executions, but Himmler convinced him it would make it hard to control the population. So instead they arrested 13,000, and only killed a few thousand.
I’m not sure this is true. In the 23 years of Saddam reign, he was responsible for at least 1.2 million violent deaths and possibly as many 2 million. The best estimate I’ve seen put it at 1.6 million ranking him just below Pol Pot at 1.8 million in the recent mass murders hall of shame list. Or 70,000 per year. Even eliminating the million deaths from Iran-Iraq war. That still leaves 20,000-25,000 killed per year, during Saddam’s regime. That includes the periodic gassing of villages, feeding people to dogs and lions, torturing to death, razing of villages for punishment, and the ubiquitous executions. Saddam killing did diminish after the first Gulf War in no small part because the Kurd were protected by the Northern No-fly zone and the Shi’a in the south were somewhat protected by the southern no fly zone. As a general, I believe Petraeus, said Saddam Huessin was a WMD.
Any accounting of the Iraqi casualties has to keep Saddam horrors as a base-line (the same thing is true in assessing a war in North Korea)
In addition, prior to the British medical journal Lancet conduct a health survey of Iraq and showed the infant mortality had more than double due to the economic effects of sanctions. In contrast, the Kurdish autonomous region saw infant morality drop substantially. Various sensationalist news article were published claiming sanctions killing 50,000 babies a year. Now, this is the same methodology that found 793 to 8,498 additional people died in Puerto Rico, The wide range is probably very honest of difficulties of assessing this. The Lancet has a history of producing very high death counts, so the number should be taken with a huge dollop of salt. Call it 5-15,000 per year
But the fact remains that sanctions hurt a countries GDP, and in a dictatorship it is the poor that suffer the most. So when we hear the term, the “sanctions are working they are crippling bad country’s X economy.” Let’s remember what the euphemism means. It means poor people are dying to starvation, lack of medical care, poor sanitation, and lack of electricity which means they suffer from the heat and/or cold. I guess for most people it seems better than bombing them, for me a baby killed by an air strike or starving from sanctions is no different.
So say Saddam is killing 20,000-25,000 and sanctions add another 5-15,000 from 2003 to 2018. That adds up to a minimum of 375,000 and possibly 600,000 from the status quo.
Wiki has an exhaustive look at the casualties of the Iraq war. “Credible estimates of Iraq War casualties range from 150,000 to 460,000.” So by most estimates we actually saved lives
Iraq: and to Arab Spring
To me one of the great unknowns. Is what would have happened to Iraq under Saddam during the Arab spring. IMO the Arab spring was inevitable, awful governance, coupled with not only to seeing how the rest of world, lives but the ability to communicate to others. Maybe the Iraq invasion served as catalyst to the arab spring but a revolt was coming. Condi Rice thinks that it would have started in the morning and been put brutally by the evening. I’m not sure. Sanctions had weaked Saddam control of the country. I think is quite possible it would have errupted into a civil war. First against Saddam and then a sectarian war.
The presence of the US army, while undoubtably triggering resentment, also acted as stablizing force in the sectarian war in Iraq. Compared to the Syrian civil war, the Iraqi civil war (the vast majority of people killed in the Iraq war were civilians killed by other Iraqis) was both shorter and less deadly the Syrian war.
You are reading the estimates wrong. Those estimates are of “excess” deaths above the threshold mortality level immediately prior to the invasion (so those 25-40k yearly deaths from previous inhumane conditions are part of the calculation). Studies of mortality differentials find about 400-500k extra deaths in the years after the invasion than in the years previous to the invasion (the Lancet survey number of 650k excess deaths is probably too high).
I think there’s a case to be made for violently deposing a murderous dictatorship, mind you, but the utilitarian calculation does not work short term, and long term is too hypothetical. A different ground from which to judge such an action is needed.
In the case of the Lancet study and the PlOS Medicine study you are probably correct, these are excess death and probably look at pre-war baseline. However, the other 9 studies summarizes by wiki they all looked at violent deaths (in some case this would include run of the mill homicide counting bodies in morgues) but generally it was simply looking at deaths from bombings, airstrikes, gunshots etc. In those case there was no comparison to the high level of violent death that were part of everyday Iraqi violence.
I do agree it is tricky at best to try and make this utilitarian calculation.
But when assess Good or Bad guys and condemn US military actions. It is common just to say that US killed so many babies,so that is bad, and forget that plenty of babies would dead if the US did nothing. Doing nothing has consequence. We have seem to have build up a tolerance for low-intensity warfare (aka Afghanistan) that kills modest number of civilians (and almost no NATO forces) for extreme long periods of time.
We also seem to be able to tolerate governmental violence like North Korea, or South Sudan, and now Rohingya, and previously Iraq over generations as long as doesn’t make the evening news everyday.
Makes sense. It doesn’t touch enough families at home.
I wonder how intense the opposition to Vietnam would have been if young people’s lives hadn’t potentially been on the line.
I’m taking a break from this thread, until Trump is out of office. While I can intellectually make a case that America is good. Emotionally, In this administration that best I can muster is we are better than Nazi, and the communist. Trump is Chaotic Evil and he has moved the whole government to Neutral evil at best.
Yeah, I’ve been mostly not posting on P&R (except here and more as a neutral viewpoint than anything else, I agree with everything in your post except the analysis of the statistics) because of the current situation. A lot of political stuff becomes very relative and not that important in the current climate, with such a big issue looming on top (this is not just restricted to the US, the rise of ethnonationalism everywhere is the most scary circumstance I have experienced, not having lived the cold war).