Stardate 20020926.1938

(On Screen): My entire experience with MetaFilter wasn't an unrelieved negative, by any stretch. I did encounter people there with whom I did not agree but whose arguments didn't give the impression of coming from a wild-eyed fanatic. Oliver Willis was one of those, and in the course of recent events, after having neglected it for far too long, I was again drawn to his site (I visit it once in a while, but it's not a daily read) and caught up on the posts he's made recently. Unlike some, whose worldview is so foreign as to make meaningful discussion essentially impossible, Oliver actually lives on the same planet as I do.

So I find that he is asking some questions that deserve answers. For instance, he cites an article on Slate which tries to evaluate the potential for deaths, of innocents and enemy combatants and friendly soldiers, which might be expected in a war in Iraq, and then says:

Someone has to fight these wars (they're not just infographics on Fox News Channel) and it would be nice if they had to sacrifice their lives, it would be for a just cause.

Oliver is right; it isn't "divisions" and "battalions" and "tanks" doing the fighting. It's Ernie from Chicago, and Manuel from LA, and Joe from Brooklyn. And it's Abdul from Baghdad, too. Whenever our guys go into combat, I always worry myself sick. Though some might think it otherwise about people like me, I don't think of war as the ultimate spectator sport, football writ large. It's a dirty, ugly, dangerous and horrible business full of fear and pain and horrors beyond the imagination of civilians in peacetime, where the fruits of human ingenuity (especially ours) are applied to the task of killing as many people in certain areas as possible. (I wrote about that last year just as the bombing began in Afghanistan.)

It's times like that when I most regret being an atheist. It would be nice in that kind of case to be able to pray, and to feel as if I was somehow making a difference by doing so, but of course I don't believe any such thing, so as an atheist all I can do is sit and wait and sweat it out. It is, of course, far worse for those who are actually involved, and for their families. But though I don't know them and they don't know me, they're my brothers and I fear for them.

But I'm not so sure that I agree with his final point: if our men must sacrifice themselves, I think it better that it be in a good cause than in a just cause. But that's because I do believe that we are, well, justified in acting in our own interests (things like "keeping our nation from being attacked again") rather than being required to act according to some sort of abstract concept of how things should be, some sort of universal concept of justice divorced from any self interest.

To respond to the article he linked to, it isn't possible for any of us to make even the beginning of a prediction about how many casualties there will be, let alone how many deaths and who will have done the dying. The author acknowledges that it's based on various kinds of assumptions, but even with that he tries to make an estimate, and I don't find his analysis convincing because I don't grant the assumptions he does make, nor agree with the analogies and previous lessons he cites. For instance, he makes the following statements about the Republican Guard:

What do past cases tell us about how a future war conducted largely in the streets of Baghdad might play out? As this sidebar explains, two useful parallels are the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and the U.S. experience in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Iraqi forces are almost surely better armed and better trained than the military or paramilitary organizations we fought in those cases. Thankfully, they are probably also far less motivated.

That said, it is important to remember that the Iraqi Republican Guard forces, numbering about 100,000 troops, fought reasonably hard in Desert Storm. These troops enjoy a number of benefits from Saddam's regime—and are heavily implicated in his rule. Republican Guard forces would probably fear retribution from an alternative regime or from Western occupying forces more than they would fear Iraqi opposition forces and American airpower on the battlefield. How much they would fear American invasion forces, and thus when they would choose to surrender, is difficult to answer—as are such questions as whether they might be convinced to desert Saddam by some sort of amnesty offer. Yet another issue in estimating casualties is whether a threat to hold Iraqi commanders personally responsible for war crimes may deter the use of weapons of mass destruction.

In 1991, the Republican Guard were in far better shape than they are now. As he mentions, morale was far better. But more important is the fact that it had only been 2 years since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and the majority of the soldiers, non-coms and officers in the Republican Guard were combat veterans. Those divisions themselves were still organized and controlled based on their experience in combat.