Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all.
   --Arundhati Roy

Reliable estimates by independent organizations indicate that more civilians died in the first month of the war than were killed in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. A five-week investigation by the Associated Press reported at least 3,240 civilian deaths between March 20 and April 20, 2003, including 1,896 in Baghdad alone. The AP survey notes that "hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims" are not reflected in the totals because the count excluded victims not taken to hospitals as well as records of hospitals in areas too remote or dangerous to visit. Between April 20, 2003, and the beginning of the wider insurgency almost a year later, at least 500 Iraqi civilians were reported by Iraq's Interior Ministry to have been killed by American-led forces in checkpoint shootings, misdirected arms fire and delayed explosions of cluster bombs. Hundreds more have been killed in the siege of Falluja, according to the director of the city's general hospital.

But even if as many as 5,000 civilians have been killed by US forces, isn't freedom for 25 million people in Iraq worth the cost of 5,000 lives? Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, argued this cost-benefit analysis in making the moral case for war in the New York Times Magazine before the invasion: "The choice [was] one between two evils, between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant's grip." Ignatieff concluded that killing people was the better choice if the United States was willing "to build freedom, not just for the Iraqis but also for the Palestinians, along with a greater sense of security for Israel."

This is the moral reasoning of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Invoking the lesser-of-two-evils defense to justify his killing an old pawnbroker and stealing her money, Raskolnikov argues: "Kill her, take her money, dedicate it to serving mankind, to the general welfare. Well--what do you think--isn't this petty little crime effaced by thousands of good deeds? For one life, thousands of lives saved from ruin and collapse. One death and a hundred lives--there's arithmetic for you." A few thousand dead Iraqis and freedom for 25 million.

What is overlooked by those who believe the benefits of the war outweigh the costs is that killing even one innocent person to benefit others violates the most basic human right--the right to life. The right to life is one of those unalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. "Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual," William Blackstone wrote in his eighteenth-century Commentaries on the Laws of England, one of the leading sources of American civil liberties. What Blackstone meant when he characterized the right to life as a God-given right is that it is beyond the power of any mere government to abrogate or repeal. Innocent people may not be killed or injured by the state, even when a majority believes it serves the greater good.

In a prelude to the "Grand Inquisitor" scene in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan asks his faith-based brother Alyosha a question we all need to ask ourselves about the children who were killed or injured in the Iraq war: "Let's assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquillity. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let's say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?"

Even more horrifying than the torture of Iraqi prisoners by their American captors has been the unnecessary suffering and death inflicted on the Iraqi people by the war itself. One of those children on whose unavenged tears the edifice of freedom has been built in Iraq was 12-year-old Ali Ismael Abbas, who was so badly burned in a US missile attack on Baghdad that his entire torso was black, his arms so mutilated that, as New Yorker correspondent Jon Lee Anderson described the hospital scene, they "looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit." His family, which included his pregnant mother, his father and his six brothers and sisters, were all killed by the blast. Some of their bodies were so unrecognizable that all Anderson could see in morgue photographs was a collection of charred body parts and some red flesh. The remains of other family members were mutilated grotesqueries. "[His mother's] face had been cut in half, as if by a giant cleaver, and her mouth was yawning open.... The body of his brother was all there, it seemed, but from the nose up his head was gone, simply sheared off, like the head of a rubber doll. His mouth, like that of his mother, was open, as if he were screaming." Judging from the poll numbers after the fall of the Iraqi regime, the seven or eight out of ten Americans who backed the war were prepared to build the edifice of freedom and democracy on the broken bodies not of one, but of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi children killed or maimed or burned in the conflict.

Viewed in the light of our own moral ideals, as embodied in our constitutional tradition, the right to life is so fundamental that killing the innocent to advance the cause of freedom of electoral choice or any other purpose, however worthy, must be regarded as wrong. We denounce terrorists because when the freedom of self-determination they seek is weighed in the balance against the right to life of innocent people, it is the right to life that our collective conscience has decided should prevail. Terrorism is simply a criminal technique for coercing a political agenda by killing innocent people. And it should make no difference whether the people who do the killing are freedom fighters like Palestinian suicide bombers, who purposefully kill civilians, or freedom fighters like the American liberators of the Iraqi people, who aim at military targets but who know with substantial certainty that they will incidentally kill civilians. In the eyes of the criminal law, a person is regarded as intending the death of another when he either has the purpose to cause the death of the victim or when he knows that death is substantially certain to result from his acts.

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