I was applying the moral calculator to the arithmetic of relative body counts as a hypothetical exercize. I played with the numbers in an arbitrary way, and provoked a little inconclusive argument over the results.

To me, this illustrates the shortcoming of moral arithmetic: The moral calculator doesn't lead to moral clarity. It leads to moral confusion as people focus on the safe abstraction of the numbers and can avoid thinking about the fundamental questions of war and death. It leads people to lose sight of what ought to be a self-evident moral principle: War is a bad thing. Killing people in war, especially (but not limited to) civilians, is a bad thing. War should be used as an utter last resort, when all else has failed, and should be approached with sobriety and gravity....not glee.

"sanctions+inspections+force" was a shorthand for various discussions of alternatives that involve essentially a compromise between the status quo and war. Nothing innovative about it. The basic idea is to back up sanctions and inspections with the threat of force, and the occasional surgical use of force.

For sanctions, it might mean tightening the border around Iraq. We (the US actually working with the international community) could have stopped, boarded, and inspected all ships in the Gulf bound for Um Qasr. Similarly, we could have beefed up inspections at major border crossings, and used our advanced surveillance capabilities to monitor the rest of the border. The US could have gone public with what we knew about cheating, intelligence about secret contracts and dummy companies, instead of hording the knowledge like a grudge to be used later for political advantage.

As for inspections, well, the jury's still out. Despite repeated excited false alarms, nobody's actually found any WMD in Iraq. And that's odd, given how Bush forced Powell to swear on a stack of Bibles that the US has solid unimpeachable evidence of their existence. If I could take those claims at face value, I'd have suggested that the US cooperate with inspections, instead of razzing them from the sidelines, by sharing our intelligence. Imagine a protocol in which a CIA officer would show up at the UN headquarters in Iraq and lead a team of inspectors to some banned weapons. No need to reveal the source, just show them. The inspectors could be guarded by well-armed soldiers with the Iraqis put on notice that interfering with our soldiers would be an automatic cassus belli. If the Iraqis refuse entrance to a facility, we give them an hour to clear out and then we MOAB it.

Of course, it's all hypothetical now. Just a "what-if" alternate universe. We'll never know whether it would've worked. Which takes me back to my basic thesis: Bush decided on war long ago, before all the alternatives had been tried, and forced his decision on the country and the world in a way which precluded any serious consideration of alternatives. He did it with moral arithmetic, imposing an artificially narrow focus on the relative body counts of war compared to doing nothing; and made it difficult for people to even think of a third way that might have produced an even lower body count.

--Robert