At Least they Died Free!

The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has released a controversial new study claiming more than 655,000 Iraqis have died since the beginning of the Iraq War. Official US Government statistics say it is closer to 50,000. Who to believe?

For starters, the US Government can barely be said to tabulate deaths. According to the Geneva Convention, states are required to keep statistics on deaths in a military conflict. The US has essentially refused to do so, until about a year ago or so when people such as Bush began throwing out extremely low ball numbers, between 30,000 to 50,000. I have not read too much about this story; or about the death count controversy in general. However, it does get the wheels spinning.

In the summer of 2004 the NY Times and The Nation reported that in just the city of Baghdad alone there were about 800 unsolved murders PER MONTH (sorry I couldn't find the link, but trust me, I distinctly remember reading these articles). Think about it, for the last four years we have been involved in a major military offensive that has led to vicious sectarian unrest. There is an attack on US personnel every few minutes, etc. The only way a sane person could rationally argue the death count is around 45,000, as our government does, is by setting up so many precluding categories on your Excel spreadsheet that by the time you funnel in all the raw data and run it through the blender you have successfully eliminated so many categories of death and every unreported murder that you are left with a reductio ad absurdum.

So what does it all mean at the end of the day? For me, I subscribe to a foreign policy worldview known as Structuralism. This theory as advanced by Robert Keohane and others basically argues that in viewing foreign affairs, one must accept that the basic premises of classical realism, but then throw in a modest homage to institutional development and reliance. Classical realism argues the following points:

1. In foreign affairs, states are the primary, if not only actors that matter
2. Morality is irrelevent in foreign affairs. There is no right or wrong in state to state interactions, only balance of power considerations
3. War produces change
4. Alliances are inherrently weak
5. States are expected to operate using a rational actor model
6. There is no learning that takes place
7. Intentions of actors are irrelevent, only capabilities matter
8. Power is purely relative, there are no absolute gains in foreign affairs. If state X wins, that necessarily means state Y has lost something

It irritates the hell out of me when I hear people reference the Republican strategy or Bush's foreign policy strategy to be a 'realist approach to foreign policy.' It isn't. A true realist doesn't care about the death count in an abstract sense, and frankly, a true foreign policy realist doesn't care if Iraqis are free, or if they are our friends. A true foreign policy realist only has one goal, to maximize their state's power relative to the other state's power. Do I personally think 655,000 Iraqis have died? Sadly, it wouldn't surprise me, but I don't really care or think it's important from a Foreign Policy perspective. The consideration is not how well Iraq is doing, it is how well the United States is doing. Does the Iraq War make the United States wealthier and more powerful? Unfortunately, I do not believe there is any evidence to indicate it does; hence, it should be stopped. The idea that discontinuing the Iraq War will make the United States less safe is a bizarre argument to me. Are we honestly to believe that pulling out troops from Iraq will lead terrorists to hop on planes and fly to New York? Give me a break. In a previous post I mentioned the Terrorism Index, published by Foreign Policy Magazine. When the magazine polled 100 foreign policy experts, 50 conservatives and 50 liberals, the majority of BOTH GROUPS agreed that continuing the Iraq War actually decreased the global safety and geo-political leverege of the United States. Check it out; it's the post with a picture of an aircraft carrier as a header.