Paul Krugman cuts to the shameful heart of the matter:
There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met …But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.
We think of morality and mathematics as being separate domains, but sometimes morality can be measured in numbers just as poverty can, or the height of a building. For instance we know, at least roughly, how many people were killed annually by Saddam's police. We have rough figures on the effects of the UN sanctions on hunger, infant mortality, and health care in Iraq and so on.
We have figures on American (reasonably accurate) and Iraqi casualties (fairly good estimates) caused by Bush's invasion and occupation. And lots of other figures, too, certainly enough to estimate the true cost (not in dollars but in the human suffering vs. human well-being considerations that are at the base of morality) of bringing Bush's idea of democracy to a dictatorship.
Add them up. This isn't a job for an ethicist or a theologian, at least not yet. Before they make their judgments, lets hear from the statisticians. X killed on this side, Y killed on that side. Add them up, weigh them. Is X a great deal larger than Y, or vice versa. Do the math and there's the answer to the moral question.
Posted by: PSymbol on April 23, 2007 2:54 PM