Thomas P.M. Barnett

ARTICLE: "Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says," by Sabrina Tavernise and Donald G. MacNeil, New York Times, 11 October 2006, online
ARTICLE: "3rd Iraq Death Has One Town Shaken to Core," by Peter Applebome, New York Times, 11 October 2006, Times Select

ARTICLE: "Baker, Presidential Confidant, Hints at Need for New War Plan," New York Times, 9 October 2006, p. A1.

Here's what I now regret arguing in my last Sunday column:

Unacceptable casualties?

The United Nations estimates that, thanks to our economic sanctions, we sentenced 50,000 Iraqis to death annually throughout the 1990s, mostly kids and old people. That's half a million in a decade, not counting all the citizens Saddam kept killing. Our best estimates say fewer than 50,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003. Continue containing Saddam in the meantime, and over 100,000 additional Iraqis would have died - thanks to our realism.

Here's why I wrote it: I am constantly dismayed at how our nation and the West in general blithely write off widespread preventable death inside the Gap, in effect accepting the long, slow pile-up of bodies rather than risk the inevitable short-term plus-ups associated with interventions (for example, watch Sudan unfold for several years or go in and do the killing required to stop this slo-mo genocide).

WRT Iraq, it's always bugged me how many Iraqis we killed through sanctions or by allowing Saddam to continue in power following the first Gulf War. Stopping that loss of life by taking down Saddam struck me as a very good argument in 2003 and still does to this day.

That war was justifiable on all sorts of moral grounds, but how we've conducted this postwar has not been justifiable.

A complex argument to some, ass-covering to others. But to me, they are legitimately separated, just like the decision for surgery versus the course of care post-surgical. If the operation needed to be done, then you do it, but once you commit to that, you have to commit to the follow-up care. Don't bother to win the war if you're not going to bother to win the peace.

But the direct comparison comes off badly in the column, so I regret it.

Yes, the article on the new death estimates in Iraq pushes me to make that statement. I do think the estimate is wildly inflated for a lot of reasons, and that admitted margin of error that runs from 400k to 700k is sort of stunning, but it did get me thinking about the arguments that need to be made and the arguments I want to make, and it made me realize that I don't want to be associated with arguments like the one I made above.

The sacrifices made by the Iraqi people have been great, as have ours.

There are the mistakes we've made on our own in the reconstruction. Some are forgivable, but many are not. They all tell us we need to get better on the postwar or we'll soon--and legitimately--be out of the business of interventions inside the Gap.

There are the mistakes the military has made, but they are learning. This learning, given the long-term bias we've had inside the Defense Department against postwar reconstruction and stability ops and counter-insurgency, was inevitably going to require a high level of pain to occur. That's just the reality of large bureaucracies and military culture: victory is a poor teacher, as Jim Mattis likes to say.

But in the end, I do believe that our worst mistakes with the postwar have revolved around the Bush Administration's making this fight far harder than it needed to be by not getting enough allies on board and by deciding not to do exactly what Jim Baker is now proposing (and which I have been proposing on Iran for almost two years)--namely, we need to be talking to Iraq's neighbors about how they and we are going to stop the fighting. Compared to our in-country mistakes, our inability to stem the what's flowed into Iraq via Syria and Iran is far more damaging.

You walk into a bar and you decide to set the tone by fighting the biggest, baddest guy in there. What you do not do is try to fight the entire crowd all at once--much less announce it before landing your first blow.

Getting Iraq right was--and remains--crucial to the Long War. That was my main point in the column. But arguing the casualty statistics, as TheJew pointed out so well in a subsequent comment, was not a good idea. It doesn't point in the direction of the solution set, and that's all that matters, no matter what the death tolls really are.