In the 1950's an author named Tom Godwin wrote a short story which involved a hopelessly tough decision regarding the sacrifice of the life of one little girl in order to save the lives of thousands. Godwin titled the story, "The Cold Equations".
Such equations have been at the center of many tough moral decisions during times of war. People have either been forced into making such decisions or have taken it on themselves to do so; people willing and unwilling to play God with the lives of tens of thousands of people in their hands. In military terms, opposing armies are fair game while any innocents who suffer are regarded as collateral damage.
The latest world stage where civilians have been put in harm's way has been the Spring, 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States. The U.S. thought and hoped that once Saddam Hussein was removed from power that the Iraqis would welcome the U.S. with open arms. This has not been the case. A guerilla war ensued that has taken the Americans completely by surprise both in it's intensity and in terms of any solution on how to successfully wage such a war.
It was assumed that the invasion of Iraq would unavoidably involve a certain number of civilian deaths, a necessary byproduct and therefore in a certain sense acceptable; but acceptable to whom? In broad terms the goals of the United States seem to have been to deliver a vengeful lesson on a regime that was virulently anti-American in a post 9/11 environment and to make the world and America a safer place; but safer for who?
Civilians have come to harm during military conflict as long as there have been wars, ranging from having their farm animals and harvests stolen to starvation and plague to genocidal pogroms. In the last century civilians have become ever larger targets in the military arena. The populations of entire cities have come under attack again and again and civilians have paid the cost either because they had the misfortune to live near to military infrastructure and industries vital to a war effort or because they were the target of an effort to terrorize and break the will of a country to continue to fight.
In the case of Iraq once again civilians have been caught in the crossfire of opposing forces as a civil war has broken out with the various Iraqi factions targeting each other, civilians and the American occupation force. Living under the brutal dictator Sadam Hussein must seem an idyllic memory for millions of Iraqis, not including of course, the Kurds who suffered thousands of deaths under Hussein.
Much of the rest of the world considers the deaths of Iraqi civilians a needless and controversial tragedy at best and a brutal war crime at worst. Although the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the United States, the American military would never have come to Iraq had it not been for years of totally unnecessary and merit-less anti-American rhetoric originating in the middle east that eventually culminated in 9/11. Rightly or wrongly, American leaders felt that enough was enough and that a lesson was necessary.
Logic and compassion pirouette in a strange dance when it comes to the subject of wartime civilian deaths. In the cases of Dresden, Germany and Hiroshima, Japan during WWII for example, it was implicit in the very action of the bombings themselves that there was de facto guilt on the part of the civilian populations. There were no tactical reasons and little or no strategic military reasons for either bombing mission. If the civilian populations in these cases incurred guilt then what form does such guilt take? Some Allied military leaders said there was sound military reasons for Dresden, others saw it as a militarily unjustified terror bombing. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unquestionably done to spread terror, to bring Japan to her knees. Needless to say, and no matter what you think of the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan, there was a terrible amount of so-called collateral damage.
The nuclear bombing of Japan was especially criticized after the fact. The reasoning by those high in the military command was that it saved millions of lives on both sides that an Allied invasion would have cost.
A supposition of guilt seems to justify bombings that terrorize and demoralize civilian populations in so far as the will of that country to continue to fight. In the case of Germany and Japan during WWII, the reasoning on the part of the United States and Great Britain seems to have been that civilians do indeed bear a portion of guilt for allowing their respective governments to wage a war of naked aggression, in fact propping up these regimes by supplying sons to the army and working in factories that help supply the war effort. In Europe it was Germany who first bombed cities in England and so set a precedent they would come to regret since they had no strategic bombers while the Allies had several excellent strategic bombing aircraft.
There was little love lost between Japan and the United States during the Pacific War. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March among other incidents saw to that from the American point of view.
According to Wikipedia, the U.S. Dept. of Defense has a definition for Collateral Damage: "Unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack. (Joint Publication 3-60)."
In the case of the invasion of Iraq, the United States military seems to lean toward the idea that Iraqi civilians are innocent and helpless bystanders merely in harms way in much the same way as French civilians in WWII were in the case of Allied bombing campaigns in which thousands of French civilians died by Allied bombs.
The question invariably has arisen whether there was not one man in all of Nazi Germany or Saddam's Iraq who had the courage to give his life to save so many people so much suffering by assassinating Hitler or Hussein. Is this an indication of cultural fortitude and does such a culture therefore deserve to have it's civilians slaughtered because of their failure to rein in their leaders who subjugate and murder their own populace and bring aggressive war to other nations?
Generally speaking it is in modern times that civilian populations have become a necessary part of large scale warfare as the scope of wars have increased many times over international conflicts prior to the 20th century and especially prior to the 19th century.
This brings us to the oft mentioned concept of the price of freedom, that price being human lives both combatant and non-combatant with the prize being the elusive concept of freedom itself. The usual state of a populace that is judged to need freedom is a population that is abused, oppressed or terrorized. It is one thing when a populace addresses these issues on their own initiative; but when an outside force imposes their ideas on another country, such as happened in Vietnam where hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians died, then that outside force could be considered guilty of war crimes. The North Vietnamese were in no way a threat to Americans nor were the South Vietnamese in any way in tune with American style ideas of democracy.
However, one can make an argument that a legitimate government in South Vietnam called on the United States for help. The United States tried to enlist European military aid during the American Revolution and during the Civil War both North and South strived simultaneously to enlist and block the intervention of European nations. In retrospect it is easy to see that the U.S. should never have become involved in Vietnam. Even many contemporaries felt at the time that the Vietnam conflict was an immoral one.
I suppose that anytime an outside military is called in to take sides in a civil war which is what happened in Vietnam the entire situation becomes murky. It is the nature of national politics that rarely will one country aid another through sheer altruism. Innocent civilians can easily become pawns to the direct extent to which they are involved in their own nation's political will. One can easily imagine that rice farmers in Vietnam or goat herders in Iraq had little interest in or control of their leader's saber rattling.
On the other end of the spectrum are more sophisticated societies whose populace is much more in tune with their country's international politics and also in a position to influence those politics. If a populace enthusiastically subsidizes their nations military adventures does that populace then have a moral burden if things rebound on them in a catastrophic way? Did German civilians in WWII deserve death more than rice farmers in the Vietnam War? Can the word "deserve" even be used in such a context? Certainly, from an empirical view one can say that certain actions bring the risk of catastrophic failure. If an individual robs a house they could end up getting shot and killed by the owner. This does not mean that the burgler deserves such a fate but one can certainly argue that they brought it on themselves by their actions.
For some people, lack of freedom is tantamount to a kind of death. Patrick Henry's, "Give me freedom or give me death." is a quote that has, through centuries of human history, had more than just rhetoric behind it.
As the decades have passed since the American Revolutionary War the battles for freedom involving the United States have increasingly seemed to have encompassed goals that are more abstract and less empirical. WWI, Vietnam and Korea were all optional conflicts. In the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, simple revenge seems to have been a prime motivating factor, rhetoric aside. In this sense the Iraq invasion was similar to the American response to Pearl Harbor. Many young men were eager to join the military in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and to Saddam Hussein's unrepentant anti-American stance after 9/11. Caught in the middle are always hapless civilians whose lives are snuffed out in incredible numbers.
But what happens when an outside force, as is the case in the American invasion of Iraq, decides for an oppressed populace that their lives are to be put in harm's way in the sense of collateral damage as the price for freedom? It seems to have been assumed by the Bush administration that Iraqi's would willingly lay down their lives for freedom but simply had no idea of how to go about it without squandering those lives with little hope of success against Saddam Hussein. Without hope of success the price of freedom can become too high. In hindsight, attributing the Iraqi people with Western style ideas of freedom was a mistake.
It is common to see television news broadcasts from Iraq where Iraqis say they were much better off under Saddam Hussein than they are under military occupation by the U.S. The civilian death toll in Iraq, so called Collateral Damage, has been very high. That damage could be very much worse when the American occupation force leaves. Civil war between the majority Sunnis and minority Shia seems inevitable in such a case. The likelihood of an eventual Sunni victory in such a scenario is likely but with the spectre of the Shia nation of Iran intervening as the Iraqi Shia attempt to form a separate nation in the south.
Then you have the further prospect of an Iraqi Sunni army turning their attention to the Kurds in the north in an attempt to reestablish Iraqi sovereignty over those Kurds who have already established a de facto independant state. In addition, Turkey, which has stated that they will never allow an independant Kurdish state on their border because of their own internal problems with Kurdish separatists, could intervene on the side of Iraqi Sunnis who attempt to reestablish Iraqi sovereignty.
Like Vietnam after the United States left, events in Iraq could steamroll out of control in a spiraling orgy of violence in the absence of the United States military, causing further conflicts involving erstwhile nations with sovereign neighboring countries taking sides according to their own national political agendas. Collateral damage indeed.
Giving one's life for an abstract concept such as personal freedom is a personal decision on the part of many within a culture and sometimes involves the sacrifice of the lives of others. Young men often have their lives put at risk by elders; in a perfect world, it is hoped that these elders in turn did their service for their country when they were young but that is just window dressing. In the case of the Jews at Masada in the year 72, the entire group thought the price of freedom worth all their lives, committing mass suicide rather than succumbing to the Romans during that siege; but not all cultures are capable of a Masada or an Alamo. Not all cultures have a Magna Carta in their background. Highly trained and or highly motivated armies have not been the status quo throughout history.
In the case of the U.S. in Iraq, American soldiers put their lives at risk not only in the name of freedom for ordinary Iraqis from an odious Stalin-like dictatorship led by Saddam Hussein but to help secure protection for the U.S. by striking a blow in the heart of a Middle East hostile to the United States to the point of committing mindless acts of violence within the U.S. Claims of weapons of mass destruction notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was a threat in light of 9/11 if one believes that words kill; that words kill when taken to their logical conclusion or kill because they take on a life of their own, whipping people into a frenzy until the rhetoric is transformed into action. If you believe anti-Western rhetoric is based on untruths then this makes it all the more unpalatable, all the more unpardonable. One need only look at contemporary North Korea to see that rhetorical indoctrination can make a populace see threats where there are none. In the case of Islam, there is little doubt that anti-Western indoctrination is being fomented by television outlets like Al-Jazeera, newspapers, in mosques and by governments themselves. The question is, towards what purpose?
Some say that American citizens themselves are being indoctrinated in a similar fashion. Although there is little doubt that propaganda is being disseminated on both the left and the right in the United States, Americans are much less succeptable to such attempts because of the American mindset and the proliferation of free ideas.
For Americans to ask Iraqis to volunteer their lives for freedom is yet another story and altruism has gone side by side with a certain attitude on the part of the U.S. that Iraqis should have done more to bring down Saddam Hussein and also should not have indulged themselves in bigoted rhetoric that arguably eventually resulted in acts of terror being committed against the West, although Saddam Hussein himself seems to have had little if any involvement with terrorists. The anti-Western rhetoric coming out of Iran may yet cause them to regret a building in Tehran that says "Down With the U.S.A."
In the United States, anti-war protesters seem to be mostly concerned with Iraqi civilian casualties, a tone of anti-Americanism seeming to walk hand in hand with their rhetoric of concern. However, their concern for civilians is legitimate. At the same time they don't seem to appreciate the fact that Iraqis had no rights of protest. Anti-war protesters within the United States have had their own rights bought at the point of a bayonet whether they care to acknowledge it or not though in the case of Iraq it is appropriate to question what it is our bayonets are buying.
Some Americans however, simply do not wish to admit to themselves that they live in a world where death can be the price of political freedoms and that such figures as Stalin and Hitler will continue to exist in our world, notwithstanding the fact that some Americans believe that President Bush is proof of such a manifestation. It might be appropriate to point out here the video tape of hundreds of Kurds lying dead in their villages murdered by poison gas by Sadam Hussein. Poison gas is the very definition of a weapon of mass destruction so the idea of WMD's was a long way from being far fetched.
The credibility of U.S. anti-war protesters becomes stretched to the limit when they begin to compare American leaders to the likes of Hitler and Stalin. I'm not sure what their argument is but it seems to consist more of cynicism than historical fact and destroys their credibility. Personages such as Janine Garafalo, Rosie O'Donnell and Ward Churchill have long ago been dismissed simply as people who have a certain belief system in which the United States will never fare well no matter what; add to that their obvious lack of knowledge regarding history and you have people who are left exposed for what they are.
In the case of Iraqi casualties maybe it is a numbers game; such and such a number will be murdered by Saddam Hussein and such and such a number will die as a result of the American invasion of Iraq. Americans too will die; American soldiers, British soldiers, international journalists, aid workers, civilian truckers. The question that arises in non-combatants as collateral damage is one of choosing to put themselves in harms way as opposed to others making that decision for them.
The incredible double standard here is that there were more murders in Chicago during the first 6 months of 2008 than their were U.S. military casualties Apr.-June, 2008. Add together all murders in the United States and what are we really talking about here? Do we have a war happening in the United States that we have become so inured to that we see those deaths in an entirely different light? Since Iraqis deserve to be considered you can add thousands more deaths to the Iraq War equation though the estimates of 100,000 Iraqi deaths as of late 2008 seem far fetched to anyone who has studied military history.
3000 plus dead on 9/11 has galvanized America to spend an unknown number of American, Iraqi and Afghanistani lives in what has turned into an orgy of vengeance in the name of ferreting out Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and by the way introducing the wonders of democracy to the Iraqi people.
Perhaps the message that America is giving to Islam is that it would be far better for muslims to use their what industriousness, cleverness and passion they possess against their own oppressive governments rather than in terrorist acts against the United States whose track record of oppression in the middle east is largely a fantasy that exists only in Muslim minds. Of course if you believe the attitudes of such people as Ward Churchill and Rev. Jeremiah Wright then the collateral damage on 9/11 was entirely justified, an act of cosmic karma in response to the entire history of American foreign policy. Knowing the obsession that Islam has with Islam, it is hard to credit the idea that the terrorists flying the planes on 9/11 were thinking of Vietnam or Salvador Allende.
If one considers the amount of collateral damage that never happened to thousands of muslims in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's because of the direct intervention of the United States, then it is clear to see that Islamic terrorists have an entirely different agenda than they claim. Where is the positive reaction from Islam to the War Crimes trials in the Hague of former Serbian military officers who slaughtered innocent muslim civilians? Let us see Rosie O'Donnell or Ward Churchill writing an emotional essay about the those Croatian or Bosnian muslim lives that were never snuffed out because of the American government; but there is no place for that in their colored belief system.
One of the events that is fueling anti-Western sentiment in Islam is the Israeli/Palestinian impasse. Give me liberty or give me death is certainly the view of at least some of the Palestinian peoples. For some Palestinians being a 2nd class citizen is something they simply are not going to abide.
It seems to me that their are certain parallels between the sons of the American Revolution and the Palestinian attitude toward Israel. But Palestinians commit acts of terrorism in view of the hopelessness of their forging any kind of an army, not that that has ever done them any good in the past. The Palestinians should have followed the lead of the American Confederate States after the Civil War who had the military option taken from them after 4 years of war but who elected to not commit acts of terrorism against occupying Northern armies, perhaps because of a graceful leader like their beloved Robert E. Lee, perhaps because the emotional gap between North and South never obtained the proportions of the Jewish Palestinian gap in Palestine. In the case of the Civil War, the combatants in the end were 2 sides of the same coin, fellow Americans who'd had a family feud.
Certainly the price paid in 4 years of bitter fighting, 260,000 in the South, 360,000 in the North, had been an exacting one with untold numbers of civilian dead and injured in the way of collateral damage.
When it comes to political freedom and security from violence what is the price worth in terms of human life? Is there such a thing as acceptable collateral damage when it comes to human lives? Certainly military and political leaders in the past have made exactly that type of cold calculation. What about a scenario which could be the case in Iraq where the oppressed have nothing to compare their oppression to and are relatively happy in their own minds? What if the cause of freedom seems hopeless? Who has the right to put their lives at risk?
It seems self evident that figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King would have simply disappeared without a trace in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Republic or Hussein's Iraq. With such a hopeless outlook, would Gandhi or King have ever even tried to accomplish anything in a country like Iraq since in the end their success in their own cases was a direct reflection of the ultimate strength and fairness of those institutions they fought against rather than it's inherent weakness?
The price of freedom from oppression and what in fact exactly constitutes oppression is a subjective one, living in fear of physical harm is not. Many Iraqis who have died at the hands of suicide bombers were certainly better off under Hussein simply because they were alive.
Without complex notions of political freedom and a cultural history of fighting governmental oppression the death of an Iraqi woman's brother or uncle by Saddam's hangman or an American missile must bring much of the same grim sadness that is far away from a view of such a death being collateral damage. American bombs and Saddam's hangman's noose have much the same effect, delivering people to a place they have no wish to go. For some, love of life and love of freedom bring far different responses.
Considering the possible demise of civilians as acceptable collateral damage during time of war or indeed targeting civilians is a tacit suggestion that they are in some measure responsible for a war. Is the West passing a chauvinist judgement because the middle east never had the cultural intelligence or fortitude to create their own Magna Carta?
Trading the lives of innocent civilians to avoid the supposition of the loss of even more lives in an ongoing and violent Hussein regime is arithmetic. Author Tom Godwin called it "The Cold Equations" in another time and for different reasons. The United States government was probably thinking of preventing future American casualties more than anything else, perhaps thinking that the best defense is a good offense. The Bush administration may have put forth the idea of Weapons of Mass Destruction as the reason for invading Iraq simply because they felt that the real and more nuanced reason simply wouldn't play well in the mass media as subtle arguments often do not.
My own personal belief is that the WMD argument was a smoke screen PR move the Bush administration felt would sell better and for which they could provide at least a modicum of international law in the mix. The real reason may have been a comingling of a simple desire for revenge with a desire to show the middle east that not only would the United States not sit back and take what the Bush admininstration saw as a physical manisfestation of anti-Western rhetoric without a violent reaction but that for every attack on American soil there would be a far worse outcome on middle eastern soil. The U.S. simply needed a chump to take this punishment out on and Sadam Hussein stepped right up to the plate, perfectly and unwittingly fitting the bill in the same way the Taliban did in Afghanistan.
Furthermore the U.S. may have felt that in bringing violence to the middle east that there would be collateral benefits in the form of the people of the middle east turning against terrorism or at least ceasing to give a type of grass roots anti-Western rhetorical support that might create a new generation of terrorists and embolden the present generation of youth to similar acts of terrorism. Of course there was always a chance that this course would only serve to create new terrorists but I don't think the Bush administration dismissed this idea but simply didn't care. After all, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor the United States was hardly sitting around fearful of further angering the Japanese. Instead the U.S. decided to take it to Imperial Japan come hell or high water.
The bottom line was that the Bush administration came to the conclusion that words do indeed kill and that anti-American sentiment had been whipped to a frenzy among the general population of the middle east amounting to an indoctrination that had little to do with the actual history of American foreign policy in the region; one cannot correct behaviour that one is not guilty of in the first place. Since reason and perception were out the door there was only one language it was felt that Islam understood and that was violence; tit for tat, an eye for an eye. A violent lesson in reality had worked in the recent past as the incredibly violent regimes of WWII Japan and Germany no longer troubled the world.
In retrospect it would have been better had Bush tried to advance these reasons no matter how subtly the argument was perceived in the American press. In fact, the very simplicity of the WMD argument was it's greatest weakness and a more nuanced argument for the invasion of Iraq would have been far more difficult for the Left to attack as well as having the virtue of honesty. Attacking an idea because it is a lie is far different that attacking it because you disagree with it. Anti war protesters attacking the WMD theory which never should have been put forward in the first place hampered the war effort significantly. Perhaps the greatest argument in the Bush administration not using the subtler arguments was that they could not hang at least the illusion of a legal war on those ideas as they could with WMDs even if it was only lip service.
If a hard lesson delivered to anti-Western elements of Islam was to be the intention on the part of the U.S. it seems to have had little effect in the middle east and one fears that there may be many more muslim lives served up on the platter of collateral damage in a direct correlation to the future success of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in targeting the United States.
The sad fact for Islam is that terrorists have absolutely no chance of taking down a country that Japan and Germany together could not touch but these terrorists have every chance in the world in eventually transforming large cities in the middle east into scenes of destruction like Dresden and Hiroshima. Those in the middle east who despise the United States would do well to take this idea to heart and to bear in mind the terrible revenge visited on a Japan and Germany that never really even touched the United States mainland. Anti-American Islam is really, really pushing it's luck. If the United States has visited such destruction in the middle east as a result of 9/11 with a divided American public what in the world do you think will happen if an act of terror worse than 9/11 succeeds within the 48 states. A truly united America would mean dark days indeed for Islam.
The fact that Iraqi civilian casualties have been minimal compared to only a couple of hours in Dresden, Tokyo or Hiroshima must seem the scantiest of consolation to an Iraqi child laying in a hospital bed somewhere in the middle east who has lost his family and his arms.
I for one cannot stop thinking of that child.