It's not about me, and what I would've done had I been in charge. It's about the decision that Bush made, and whether his thinking was warped by the use of a moral calculator.

A moral calculator is only useful at evaluating the relative merits (or "relative un-badness") of courses of action you've already thought of. It's of no help at all in finding the best course of action. It takes a moral compass to point us in the right direction in the first place; a moral calculator is best used to double-check that the path we think is the best is truly the best.

It's clear now that Bush made up his mind over a year ago to go to war with Iraq. I think it's also clear that he then applied the moral calculator to come up with justifications for his predetermined plan, which reduces it from the realm of the moral to the realm of salesmanship: Talking about how many fewer Iraqis would die if we invaded was designed to silence critics of the chosen course of action. But it also foreclosed any further thought of alternatives. Using the moral calculator myself, I came up with a "grace period" of 3-4 years before you could legitimately say that sanctions+inspections+force didn't work and that war would be better. A lot of thinking and acting could have been accomplished in that time. But further thought was off the table.

Looking at similar situations in the past may be hindsight, but hindsight can be useful if you learn from it. In the case of the Moscow theater, mistakes were indeed made; the Russian SWAT team didn't think to provide the antidote to the medical personnel on-site. Perhaps they were complacent because their moral calculator reassured them that a few deaths were "acceptable"? One lesson to take from this, I think, is that a little moral angst about commiting the lesser evil might well sharpen the intellect and provide some useful pressure to do better.

A Trekker might well ask "What would Jean-Luc do?". In countless episodes, Picard was faced with choices like this, and consistently refused to accept the lesser evil based on simple moral arithmetic. His personal moral compass compelled him to try harder and find a way to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Jean-Luc Picard may be a fictional character, but those stories contain meaningful parables about real life.

It's worth noting that we traded American lives to save Iraqi lives, and are getting zero credit for this.

Yes we did. The sacrifices and courage of the soldiers fighting the war are not in dispute. This is only about policy set by their Commander-in-Chief.

--Robert