Copyright Michael J. O'Donnell <michael_odonnell@acm.org>.
Licensed for free use.
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Executive summary: In response to the killing of 3,025 innocent civilians in the attack of 11 September 2001, the US undertook wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Have these wars achieved anything so good that it was worth killing many tens of thousands of inncocent civilians in each of those countries?
On 11 September, 2001 a team of attackers, sponsored by Al Qaeda, hijacked four commercial US passenger airplanes. With two of these airplanes they attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York. With a third they attacked and damaged the Pentagon in Virginia. The fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.
The attack had no logistical impact on the power of the US. Besides substantial physical damage, it caused the deaths of 3,025 innocent civilians and the 19 attackers.
The USA responded to these attacks by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. No simple moral calculus can determine the rightness of these responses. But people willing to make war should be willing to face any plausible audit of the consequences.
The crucial moral question about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is not whether they have done any good, but whether they have done enough good to merit the harm that they cause. War causes many forms of harm, but civilian casualties are relatively easy to count and understand.
The US government declines to count civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush quoted without attribution the lower bounds provided by Iraq Body Count, so he apparently accepts their validity. Iraq Body Count only tallies casualties in specifically reported incidents that appear in at least three independent reliable sources, so their numbers are almost surely much smaller than the true ones.
Amid a lot of uncertainty about the precise harm of these wars, it is clear that each of the two wars has cause many times the number of innocent deaths that the US suffered in the 2001 attack. Each war has caused civilian casualties in the 10,000s. Have these wars achieved something so good that it is worth killing many 10,000s of innocent civilians?
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