First, the standard correction of your misstatement of the issue:

There has been considerable talk about how the civilian casualties in this war render the entire war effort a moral failure

No. Mary Anne has been beating her head against a wall trying to make a much more sophisticated point about moral relativism. The issue is the notion that there's a moral calculation such that if we kill fewer Iraqis than Saddam might over a given period of time then we are therefore morally pure. More formally, this is the Ferengi-like calculation that [Future Saddam killings] - [present US killings] = [moral profit].

The objection that I have to this is that it's a step down the proverbial slippery slope of incremental rationalization. Maybe this time we're solidly in the black, although it's going to be some time before we add up how many Iraqis died in this war and can compute the moral "bottom line". But having established the precedent that projections of alternative body counts justify war, there's a great risk that in the future we'll delude ourselves, or be deluded by our leaders, into making some serious moral mistakes.

Bush and the Right certainly didn't invent this moral profit-and-less arithmetic. Many others have used it...

--Anti-abortion fanatics justify the killing of doctors based on statistical projections of how many fetuses they're saving.

--An anti-death-penalty fanatic might have calculated that assassinating George Bush while governor of Texas would have saved many more lives.

--When the Russian militia stormed the Moscow theatre held by Chechen guerillas, they justified the deaths of a large percentage of the hostages by arguing that 100% would have died if they hadn't used various supposedly non-lethal nerve gases. They were roundly criticized for not considering other options; did they fail to consider other ways of rescuing the hostages because they were made complacent by their moral arithmetic? Did they settle for more deaths than they should have?

--The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified by assertions that perhaps a half a million soldiers, from both sides, would have died in a conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands. That calculation has been disputed over the years, as any "what-if" scenario can be disputed. Did moral arithmetic take off the pressure to consider other options? Did it reinforce the momentum that the Allied forces had gained; that is, were they fixated on forward progress, and less willing to consider whether a strategic pause with containment might have given the mortally-weakened Japanese government a chance to collapse or surrender, with far less loss of life?

I'll bet people can come up with many more examples, large and small.

It's interesting that those who advocate substituting a moral calculator for a moral compass don't provide numbers for their equations. They rely instead on "common knowledge" and confidence that the calculation, if actually performed, would come out positive.

The White House contains a propaganda brief published April 5 titled Life Under Saddam Hussein. It presents a pile of raw statistics that aren't easily totaled. But they seem to be asserting that over a roughly 25-year period Saddam is responsible for the wrongful deaths of roughly half a million Iraqis. That would put Saddam in the ranks of the Top Ten Murderous Dictators.

Saddam's long term average is, then, about 20,000 Iraqis killed every year. How many Iraqis have died in the last three weeks during the war? The Pentagon claimed several thousand before taking Baghdad. Reports from the Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies of overflowing hospitals suggest many thousands more. At the same time, we're getting reports of some areas running out of food and water, a situation guaranteed to produce many deaths due to malnutrition and disease. It's reasonable to guess that the final tally might be in the range of 20,000 deaths also.

So, here's the bottom line: The break-even point comparing war versus waiting (tightened inspections and sanctions, backed up by the threat of force) is roughly a year.

But wait, any statistical analysis has footnotes. According to the White House, 350,000 of those ~500,000 deaths were accounted for by just two incidents: Gassing the Kurds, and putting down the uprisings in the south. Subtracting those two "extraordinary" incidents (incidents which would not happen again while we have Iraq under careful watch) gives us 150,000 deaths over 25 years, for an average of 6,000 deaths per year. A more reasonable projection of moral break-even is on the order of 3-4 years.

Is this whole analysis [manure]? Well, that's the question, isn't it?

--Robert