A little bit of relativism

This topic came out of a discussion I was having with my parents over dinner today. The question has to do with Iraq: has the war been worth doing given the costs? This can be examined in many ways, economically, fiscally, politically, etc., but in this case we were just talking specifically about the loss of life inflicted on Iraqi civilians. This conversation followed up a report I was made aware of when I first flew to Canada on vacation last month. It stated that the Iraqi Health Ministry had been asked to stop counting the number of civilians killed since the United States invaded Iraq. This came at the request of a high ranking official in the ministry, but also garnered the blessing of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. This will make the true cost of civilian lives much more difficult to determine, although I'm sure there are few in the Bush administration who are disappointed with this turn of events. You wouldn't want 'unpatriotic' thoughts entering the minds of Americans who, up to this point, have backed the war effort.

According to this article, the Associated Press tallies the deaths of about 3,240 civilians between March and April 2003, referencing an exceptionally detailed report by Human Rights Watch. Since this represents a very limited time period, total number is expected to be significantly higher. The website Iraq Body Count, for instance, documents between 7,960 and 9,792 deaths caused by the occupation as of the time of writing this entry, a situation that has caused Amnesty International to issue a press release reminding the United States of its responsibilities as an occupying power to maintain security for the people of Iraq. Finally, independent of whether the administration declares the 'mission accomplished,' this war is far from over and we can only expect the number of casualties to increase.

The problem with these numbers is that after a while they fail to take on an appropriate meaning -- they become numerical abstractions reported on the news along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. To gain the real meaning of these numbers it is useful to compare them to an event that everyone can relate to -- in this case I've chosen the World Trade Center attacks which began the War on Terror. According to a government website, the total number of dead in the World Trade Center attacks totaled about 2,800 persons. To put the Iraqi case in a better perspective then is to say that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has, to this date, caused the people of Iraq a loss of life equivalent to three World Trade Center disasters. This is not a judgment on the war effort overall, since that would require discussing all of the other ramifications of this policy, but at the very least it's a little bit of a sobering thought.