"Blood and treasure"--but whose blood?

When people talk in an offhand way about why the Iraq War was a mistake, they usually say something about "blood and treasure"--i.e., the costs to the United States in terms of money and casualties. But what bothers me about this is that it leaves out the toll of civilian deaths in Iraq. Surely the fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have lost their lives should count as one of the reasons the war was a mistake, right?

And yet in the mainstream press, civilian deaths are only mentioned as an afterthought, if they are mentioned at all. I think a lot of the reason for this is because talking about civilian deaths quickly gets you into an argumentative thicket, where you have to start making somewhat complex distinctions--or at least, complex by the standards of discourse in the mainstream media. What I mean is, there are morally distinguishable types of civilian deaths, and so it is not always clear what you are accusing the United States as having done when you bring the subject up.

Here is my personal rough list of the different kinds of civilian deaths, in order from least evil to most evil:

1. Minimized collateral damage. In this case, civilians die as a side effect of a legitimate attack against the enemy. The attacker does as much as can practically be done to minimize the amount of harm done to civilians. Examples: America using precision guided bombs to take out a specific target; America choosing to destroy enemy buildings at night when there are less civilians in the building.
2. Negligent collateral damage. In this case, the attacker pursues its military goals without regard for the harm done to civilians. Examples: not sure exactly.
3. Civilian deaths as a means to a legitimate end. Here, civilians are actually targeted in an attempt to achieve some military ends, like demoralizing the enemy. Examples: America dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to get the Japanese to end the war; American firebombing of Dresden and also Tokyo.
4. Civilian deaths as a means to an end that isn't justified or legitimate. Same as (3), but the goal is different. Examples: Hitler bombing London; a suicide bomber blowing up a bus to get into heaven; a terrorist destroying a building in order to establish a caliphate.
5. Civilian deaths as ends in themselves. This is categorically the worst form of civilian killing--when the actual stated purpose of the exercise to kill as many civilians as possible. Examples: Any genocide.

Now, some of this may be arguable and some cases might not fit neatly into one category. For example, some people might say that there shouldn't be a moral distinction made between (3) and (4), because even making that distinction requires an "ends justifies the means" argument. Or you might look at the case of a Palestinian suicide bomber and think, "Well, he has a hatred for Jews which puts it at level 5, but then again he's also doing it to drive the Jewish people from the area, so there's some level 4 mixed in" (or, level 3, if you think the Jewish people shouldn't be in that area). But the point is, there are definitely moral distinctions between civilian deaths that take into account the circumstances of the deaths and the intentions of the attacker.

There are many liberals and anti-war types who don't take pains to make these distinctions when they argue against the war, and so speak of the many thousands who are "slaughtered" in Iraq at the hands of the American military, and generally portray the United States as no better morally than some third-rate junta somewhere. But this has had the effect of making any such arguments radioactive in mainstream political discourse--it makes it very difficult to put civilian deaths at the forefront of an anti-war argument, because it is so easy to paint the arguer as an unreasonably anti-American hippy.

And yet, even if we assume that every practical measure was taken to minimize civilian deaths in the Iraq War, if the basis for the war is called into question, then it renders all those deaths--all that "collateral damage"--completely unnecessary. Moreover, if it can be shown that the path to war was paved in negligence, then it starts to make all those level 1 deaths look like level 2 deaths. Indeed, when you hear stories about how feeble the evidence for WMD in Iraq turned out to be--intelligence data lifted from a grad school paper, the wildly inaccurate source dubbed "Curveball"--the term "negligence" starts to seem charitable.

And so I think that the huge number of civilian deaths in Iraq is a principle tragedy of the war, and something that should be mentioned far more often in addition to the costs to the United States in "blood and treasure". Saying so needn't entail claiming that the United States is some kind of genocidal killer--but at the same time, there shouldn't be any hesitation to criticize a war that runs contrary to our deepest-held principles.

PS: The story surrounding the estimate of Iraqi deaths is an interesting one in itself. The most controversial studies done were the two Lancet surveys, one done in 2003 estimating the toll to around 100,000 and one in 2006 estimating the number to be 600,000--although that number includes everyone killed as a consequence of the war, whether they were combatants or not and whether the death was violent or not. Nevertheless, both numbers were lots higher than those produced by other studies using different methodologies. If you're interested, I'd recommend an episode of TAL about the 2003 study, which focuses not only on the authors of the study but on one of the people in the CIA who is responsible for minimizing "collateral damage".