Wednesday, April 23, 2003 :::
I haven't heard it remarked much that one of the benefits to the war in Iraq is that we get to test our toys and give practice to our boys. As other threats present themselves in the future, we may be better able to respond to them because of this airing out.
I have heard much made about "Iraqi Freedom", from our government for starters. As my brother linked to earlier, we may have saved more lives during the war than we cost, at least on the civilian front.
I present these together because my heart is reluctant to allow their use as arguments for war, much as my brain is confident they should be part of any comprehensive cost/benefit analysis. That we save and free Iraqis I do count against any humanitarian concerns, but the apparent net humanitarian benefit to the Iraqis I can't count as more than zero.
I don't know why this is. It's probably in part a libertarian, "mind our own business" kind of impulse; that woman getting beaten next door, that's her and her husband's business, not mine. (My impulse to heckle my own views as I express them is something else that mistifies me.) Similarly, while the second sentence of my first paragraph does something to soften my opposition, I can't actually bring myself to support practicing beating up people so we'll be better at beating up people in the future.
I wonder whether this makes sense in terms of risk-aversion. One of the reasons for libertarianism is that people generally have a better idea what they want than anyone else does, even (especially?) experts. This suggests that perceived effects on other people should be somewhat discounted in my own calculations. Practice and testing, that's intangible and hard to measure. This is at least as much rationalization as it is argument, though.
::: posted by dWj at 3:09 PM
