Geoff Arnold's Blog

I just stumbled across a very thoughtful piece by Paul Savoy in The Nation entitled The Moral Case Against The Iraq War. Here’s how Savoy frames the issue:
The problem opponents of the war have had in responding to President Bush’s claim of moral legitimacy […] is that they have addressed the moral issue in the terms the President has framed it rather than reframing the issue in their own moral terms. Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being “better off” avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war…. [W]e should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.
There is only one truly serious question about the morality of the war, and that is the question posed more than fifty years ago by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, looking back on two world wars that had slaughtered more than 70 million people: When do we have the right to kill our fellow human beings or let them be killed? What is needed is a national debate in the presidential election campaign that addresses the most important moral issue of our time. It is an issue we are required to face not only as a matter of moral obligation to all those Iraqis killed in the war, but to the 772 American servicemen and -women who, as of May 10, had lost their lives and the more than 4,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq.
Warning: Savoy describes some of the consequences of military action in graphic detail. It will turn your stomach. (If it doesn’t, you are beyond hope.) But as he writes,
Judging from the poll numbers after the fall of the Iraqi regime, the seven or eight out of ten Americans who backed the war were prepared to build the edifice of freedom and democracy on the broken bodies not of one, but of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi children killed or maimed or burned in the conflict.
[Updated: This is a useful source of supporting data, even though it only covers a few months last year.]