War In Iraq Saves More Lives Than Lost in Civilian Casualties
By Conor Friedersdorf '02

As the war in Iraq winds down and the process of rebuilding begins, it is useful to consider the objections of the anti-war movement with the benefit of hindsight. Its most powerful objection - one still echoed today - involves the loss of innocent Iraqi life. Anti-war Web site Iraqibodycount.com counts a minimum of 1402 innocent Iraqi civilians killed, and a maximum of 1817 killed.

Those deaths should arouse sadness and regret; the tragedy of civilian deaths is hard to overstate. But the lives lost to rid Iraq of Saddaam Hussein do not tell the whole story. A survey of Amnesty Internation, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and the U.S. State Department shows broad agreement that over the last ten years Hussein's regime bears responsibility for deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Those deaths were not visible on CNN, or reported in the headlines of our newspapers. They wore on the conscience of Americans much less than dead civilians killed by our own bombs. Yet any logical observer should agree that if our aim is saving innocent life, Hussein's removal by force saved many more innocent lives than would any policy that left him in power.

Of course, there are other objections to the war. That the U.S. ought only go to war with the blessing of the U.N. That the war will create more terrorists. That our motives were financial gain through oil. That the cost of souring relationships with our allies was too great.

I do not agree with these objections, and I think that all of them can be logically refuted. But that is beyond the scope of this letter.

Here, I mean only to point out that not going to war because of any of the aforementioned objections, and pursuing even a successful program of weapons inspections, would have left Hussein in power, where he would remain until death, when one of his sons would carry on leading as brutal a regime.

For me, the hundreds of thousands of lives sure to be lost over those future years is an extremely compelling reason that we should have gone to war -even if that was not the Bush administration's motivation.

I challenge those of you who continue to oppose the war to consider whether UN legitimacy, US humility, or an Arab street less angry at the United States would have been worth the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi deaths sure to result had the United States not sacrificed some of its own soldiers and less than 2,000 civilians to end Hussein's regime.