When it suits them, those who opposed the Iraq war seem capable of saying not only (1, 2) that, on the part of those who prosecuted and supported the war, democratic/humanitarian justifications were merely post hoc, retrospective, but also that they weren't. Saying this today - that they weren't - we have Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg. The two of them write of 'a war conducted in the name of humanitarian intervention'. Now, never mind that Steele has on a previous occasion expressed himself to rather different effect - as if the Iraqi elections were used to justify the invasion only 'after the event'. Some formal compatibility can, doubtless, be accomplished between what he wrote before and what he writes now; and my interest is in something else.
The piece by Steele and Goldenberg is about the various estimates of how many Iraqis have died because of the US-led invasion. No one who supported the war (as I did) can shrug these numbers off. Whichever of the estimates discussed by them is the most accurate, Steele and Goldenberg are right to say that the controversy 'provides no comfort for Bush, Blair and other occupation supporters'. For the numbers of Iraqi dead are, in any case, horrifying, and even once the point has been made that others bear responsibility for this death toll than those to whom it is most often ascribed by Western critics of the war, I do not understand how anyone who supported the war can look at that death toll (whatever its exact size), and at the injuries, and the numbers of refugees, and the extreme social dislocation, and the civil and ethnic conflict, that have followed upon the war, and say sincerely that they weren't wrong in any way, that the hopes and/or expectations they had in supporting the war have not been dashed or had to be radically adjusted.
In fact, so far as I know, few who supported the war have maintained that unbending stance. Steele and Goldenberg go on from the 'no comfort' assertion I quoted above to say that...
They [supporters of the occupation] continue to claim that, whatever errors may have been committed since the invasion, the judgment of history will be that the toppling of a brutal dictatorship was an unmitigated benefit. That alone means the invasion was a blessing for the people of Iraq.Unmitigated benefit? And a blessing? Do they mean unmixed? I think they make life rather too easy for themselves. Despite this, they do, if only in their concluding paragraphs and without perhaps intending to, indicate why many of us who supported the war did support it and are unashamed that we did. Steele and Goldenberg write:
Alas for Bush and Blair, most statisticians do not support their case. Nor can any journalist or other independent witness who has seen the pain of the bereaved still living in post-invasion Iraq or the millions who have escaped to Jordan and Syria. Estimates of the Iraqi deaths caused by Saddam's regime amount to a maximum of one million over a 35-year period (100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign in the 1980s; 400,000 in the war against Iran; 100,000 Shias in the suppressed uprising of 1991; and an unknown number executed in his prisons and torture chambers). Averaged over his time in power, the annual rate does not exceed 29,000.A rate of death by state violence of 29,000 per year over the life of a regime that has been in power for more than three decades might be considered a powerful reason for favouring its overthrow, in the hope of a less murderous sequel. (It also explains why, in changing my mind about the Iraq war, I continued - and still continue - to think that I could not have opposed it.)Only the conservatively calculated Iraq Body Count death toll credits the occupation with an average annual rate that is less than that - some 18,000 deaths in the five years so far. Every other source, from the WHO to the surveys of Iraqi households, puts the average well above the Saddam-era figure. Those who claim Saddam's toppling made life safer for Iraqis have a lot of explaining to do.