There’s been lots of news from the Middle East recently, some good and some bad. The good news includes the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia and the presentation of the long-promised ‘roadmap’ for peace between the Palestinians and Israelis.

The bad news includes yet another incident of US troops firing on civilians. This is a reflection of a lack of capacity for peacekeeping rather than deliberate malice but incompetence in an occupying power that has waged a war of aggression is a crime in itself. Even in the postwar period, direct killings of civilians by the US are occurring at a rate that exceeds most estimates of the killings by Saddam’s dictatorship in the years leading up to the war (1-2000 per year under Saddam, or 20-40 per week as opposed to around 50 per week postwar). And the death rate due to the indirect effects of war (leftover munitions, banditry and looting, the destruction of hospitals, damage to water supply etc) are far worse.

How do we balance these things? If the long-term effect of the war is to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to the Middle East as a whole, then the present suffering will prove justified. But if the end result is an authoritarian government marginally better than Saddam’s and a continuation of the current stalemate in Israel-Palestine, the war will ultimately be judged as a crime in the same general category as other wars of aggression, notably those launched by Saddam himself.

The saying that ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan’ is nowhere more true than when rules are broken in the hope that the ends will justify the means.