One of the curious developments in the aftermath of the Iraq war has been the fight over who will get contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. It?s curious because, so far at least, the only money that has been put up to fund this reconstruction is $US2.3 billion included in the Bush?s $US73 billion war appropriation. This is a fair sum of money, but scarcely the stuff of an international incident. It?s important, then, to consider how much Iraqi reconstruction is likely to cost and where the money is going to come from.
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This NYT report gives ground for a pessimistic view about SARS, but has some credibility problems. It begins:

The death rate from SARS may be significantly higher than health officials had thought, up to 55 percent in people 60 and older, and up to 13.2 percent in younger people, the first major epidemiological study of the disease suggests.

Mortality rates are bound to change somewhat as an epidemic continues. But unless the numbers fall drastically, SARS would be among infectious diseases with the highest death rates. Until now, fatality rates reported by the World Health Organization had ranged from 2 percent, when the epidemic was first detected in March, to 7.2 percent.

The new findings come from a statistical analysis of 1,425 patients suspected of having SARS who were admitted to Hong Kong hospitals from Feb. 20 to April 15. Over all, their mortality rate was estimated to be as high as 19.9 percent. By contrast, the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, had an estimated mortality rate, over all, of 1 percent or less.

Let’s look at the last number. If a disease that kills ten million people has a mortality rate of 1 per cent, the number infected is 1 billion. The report is inexact, but clearly implies that several times that many people were killed and that the mortality rate was below 1 per cent. The world population in 1920 was less than 2 billion.

Obviously something is wrong here. This doesn’t mean that the estimates quoted about SARS are wrong, but it would be useful to have a better baseline for comparison.

My piece in todays Fin (subscription required) is about the opportunity cost of the war on Iraq. An excerpt

In the absence of large-scale discoveries of weapons, attention has focused on the undoubted benefits of overthrowing an evil and oppressive dictator. This is a form of foreign aid and can usefully be compared to other aid programs. The total budget of USAID, the main US agency for development and humanitarian assistance is $8.7 billion for the coming year. That is, the money already spent on the Iraq war could have doubled USAID’s budget for the next five years.

It seems certain, however, that the war will herald a sustained increase in military expenditure of at least $US100 billion per year. A more reasonable comparison, therefore, is the ambitious proposal of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, led by Harvard Economist Jeffrey Sachs. The Commission aimed to achieve, for all a poor countries, a two-thirds reduction of 1990 child mortality levels, a three-fourths reduction of 1990 maternal mortality ratios and an end to the rising prevalence of major diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

As the Commission pointed out, in addition to the humanitarian benefits of saving as many as 8 million lives per year, reductions in mortality are directly correlated with a reduced frequency of military coups and state collapse. These provide the breeding ground for terrorism and dictatorship and ultimately lead, in many cases, lead to US military intervention. The estimated cost for the Commission’s seemingly-utopian program over the next decade is estimated at between $US 50 billion and $US 100 billion per year.

War is sometimes necessary in self-defence. But when war is adopted as an instrument of policy, it is often counterproductive and almost never cost-effective.

This long and impressive rant compares the WMD search to a traditional US initiation rite (link via Jim Henley. In tallying up the costs and benefits of the war, the fact that a program of systematic lies was needed to get it started should an important entry in the cost column.

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.

As yet another WMD discovery fails to pan out, I’m puzzled by continued claims that the UN failed in its task by not approving the invasion. Whatever arguments Bush may have had for war, the only one he put up to the UNSC was based on WMDs. The evidence put up in support of his case was obviously dodgy at the time and has since proved to be completely spurious. Contrary to repeated claims, it’s now clear that the US has and had no reliable intelligence about the existence and location of WMDs. Some may perhaps exist, but it’s evident that all the claims made by Powell in his UN speech were false.

This leads to the question – why didn’t Bush put up the case for a war of liberation to the UN? There are some obvious difficulties like the attachment of the Chinese to the doctrine of non-interference, but I think the real problem comes when you think about what would be involved in presenting such a case ex ante. As I observed a couple of months ago on this point

A starting point would be an admission by the US government that it actively assisted or passively encouraged Saddam in the commission of his worst single crime – the war of aggression he launched against Iran, in which he made extensive use of chemical weapons. When Blair correctly says that Saddam’s wars have killed more people than were marching in London, he should be remined of this. I don’t say that the past crimes of the US government mean that it should not do anything about Saddam now, but an open declaration of the US role and an apology for US complicity are necessary if the moral case against Saddam is to have any standing.

The second requirement is for some sort of just basis for asserting that a particular leader is a criminal who deserves to be overthrown. We have such a basis in the International Criminal Court, in which Britain is a participant. Blair should demand that Saddam be tried before this court. Of course, a precondition is that the US should drop its own objections.

Third, there is the problem of equal justice.The moral case against Saddam is compromised by US complicity in the occupation of Palestine. If Bush were to demand acceptance by both sides in this dispute of a peace plan similar to that put up by Clinton and back his demand by a threat of sanctions and a willingness to enforce an agreed peace, the moral case against Saddam would be lot stronger.

Finally, there is the problem of multiple agendas. A moral case for war can be made only by forgoing all attempts at seeking strategic or economic side-benefits. Yet many (most) of the US commentators supporting war are pointing to such benefits as a primary or secondary motivation. A moral case would require a clear commitment not to use Iraqi oil to the benefit of the US, not to use Iraqi territory as a base for further military action, not to make side deals with countries like Turkey etc. So far none of this has been forthcoming.

Given that the UN was never presented with a case for a war of liberation, it’s hard to see how the failure to authorise one can be held against them.

This NYT report on the mess in Afghanistan is worth reading when we are thinking about likely developments in Iraq. The situation in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban was, in important respects, considerably more promising than in Iraq. There was not too much trouble in producing a government with wide support, or at least acquiescence, and there was broad pro-American sentiment. All that was needed for a successful outcome was a reasonably comprehensive effort at peacekeeping and nationbuilding.

Instead, apparently to keep a clear field of fire in the hunt for Taliban/Al Qaeda, the Pentagon confined the international peacekeeping force to Kabul and allied itself with local warlords, inevitably becoming the enemy of its clients’ enemies. The result, two years later, is that Afghanistan is in much the same position as it was before the Taliban took over – warlords ruling the provinces and a government whose writ doesn’t run outside the capital, and not even within it at night. The time when US forces can pull out without inducing collapse looks further off now than it did when Kabul fell.

One consequence is that not even the relatively modest sums promised as aid have been delivered. As I recall, the US even forgot its budget allocation until the need to cover bases for the Iraq war focused the mind of the Administration.

This ought to have been comparatively easy, and it’s been comprehensively botched. Watching the mess that was made in Afghanistan was one of the factors that led me to oppose the war with Iraq. Nothing that has happened since the fall of Baghdad has led me to revise my assessment on this score.

As in most recent wars, military casualties on the US-led side have been minimal in the war on Iraq. But there is another sense in which the cost in American, British and Australian lives has been high.

The money spent on the war could have been allocated instead to improved health care or public safety measures. The cost-effectiveness of such measures varies a lot, but a fair rule of thumb is that at the margin, health interventions cost about $US5 million per life saved (because of lower costs here, a marginal cost of about $A5 million per life saved is also appropriate for Australia).

So if we assume that the war and occupation will end up costing $100 billion, the opportunity cost is around 20 000 American lives. Assuming Australia spends $1 billion, the opportunity cost here is around 200 lives.

To take a more optimistic view of the question, it’s worth noting that the cost of saving lives through health care and other interventions is far smaller in poor countries like Iraq than in rich countries. So, if the US were prepared to spend another $100 billion* rebuilding (as opposed to occupying) Iraq, and allocate a substantial portion of that to health and education [especially education for women, which has big health benefits], many more than 20 000 lives could be saved. A commitment to reconstruction spending on this scale would go a long way towards justifying the war.

*Of course, for any net benefits to be realised, the money has to be new money from America or other donors, not Iraqi money recycled through American contractors.

Shortly before the fall of Basra (4 April), I noted a report in The Times, saying that the British were encouraging looters. The report said

The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussain’s henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.

One senior British officer said: “We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.”

I thought I’d better record this before it went too far down the memory hole. When we come to allocate the responsibility for the destruction of archeological treasures and so on, it will be important to recall that this was the product of deliberate policy, not mere neglect.

Update I’m stunned. A string of commentators in the thread take the line that if the Coalition encourages desperately poor young men to loot government buildings, then stands back while they do a comprehensive job of stripping everything in sight, they’re not to blame because “they only meant Ba’ath party offices and the like”. I was struggling for an analogy for this but res ipsa loquitur .

Further update A further line of exculpation is that the Coalition forces couldn’t have anticipated, when they encouraged looters, that the looting would extend to sites like the Museum. Except that, as the WashPost reports, they were repeatedly warned about the likelihood that the Museum would be looted under the cover of civil disorder (it appears that professional thieves, looking for gold, played a major role in the attack, while generic looting helped them overwhelm any resistance and cover their tracks). The Coalition response was to create as much disorder as possible, then ignore pleas from the Museum for protection.

One last update Bargarz has been particularly sniffy about this post. Interesting, given that he himself approvingly noted the looting of a French cultural centre.