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October 17, 2006

Checking the Numbers II

Following up on that Lancet study, I thought Tyler Cowen's remarks hit upon an insight often missing from the discussion: the Iraq War is judged more in absolute terms than relative costs, both in lives and money:

We all know that the political world judges Iraq by the absolute badness of what is going on (which means Bush critics find a higher number to fit their priors), but that is an incorrect standard. We should judge the marginal product of U.S. action, relative to what else could have happened.

As far as I can tell, proponents of the war did use this argument when trying to justify casualties and collateral damage earlier in the war, but this rhetoric has diminished as it has become apparent that the probability of Saddam slipping a WMD to terrorists was < 1 (or even < 0.01?).

Cowen also lays out two scenarios for viewing the death toll, whatever the magnitude:

A very high deaths total, taken alone, suggests (but does not prove) that the Iraqis were ready to start killing each other in great numbers the minute Saddam went away. The stronger that propensity, the less contingent it was upon the U.S. invasion, and the more likely it would have happened anyway, sooner or later. In that scenario the war greatly accelerated deaths. But short of giving Iraq an eternal dictator, that genie was already in the bottle.

If the deaths are low at first but rising over time, it is more likely that a peaceful transition might have been possible, either through better postwar planning or by leaving Saddam in power and letting Iraqi events take some other course. That could make Bush policies look worse, not better.

Posted by Zach Wendling at October 17, 2006 12:45 PM

Comments

Posted by: Eric Seymour at October 17, 2006 01:34 PM | permalink

Posted by: JohnS at October 19, 2006 03:19 PM | permalink

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