March 15, 2002
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Counting The Dead
As you can see to the right, I have been participating in the very popular googlebomb to raise awareness about the Herold Study on Afghan Civilian Casualties. Nonetheless, I have always had some misgivings about dignifying the count at all. If the civilian casualties in Afghanistan were indeed higher than the September 11 attackes, I'm not sure it would make the least bit of difference, given that the September 11 attacks deliberately targeted civilians. The civilian casualties in the war are an entirely separate issue.
One of the repugnant things about the study is just that "eye-for-an-eye" calculus it suggests. Surely Herold didn't mean to imply that if the casualty count were lower, that in itself justified the war? The justification remains elsewhere - primarily in the prevention of future terrorism and, at least in consequence, the liberation of the Afghan people.
Citing the Herold count as an antiwar argument also completely ignores the distinction in how the civilians were killed in the WTC and in Afghanistan. Andrew Sullivan recently linked this article by Michael Walzer addressing problems of the left in the U.S., and referencing the body count:
A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else.
Go read the rest of it, it's excellent.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at March 15, 2002 06:21 AM | Technorati inbound links