The strong argument against attacking ISIS is not the lives, it's the money. [View all]

[Donald Ian Rankin]

In various places I've seen people opposing US air strikes on ISIS on the grounds that they may well result in civilian casualties.

That strikes me as a deeply misguided argument - a lot of innocent civilians are going to die either way, and it looks to me highly likely that more will die if the US does not get involved than if it does (although I'm far from an expert analyst; while the amateur "bombs will kill people argument" is clearly silly, a professional "the likely death toll will be higher if the US gets involved, for these reasons" might conceivably not be. But I'd bet the other way, and in any case, it's the former and not the latter that is common on DU).



Another line of argument boils down to presenting it as a choice between "peace" and "war". This one, I think, is even more clearly wholly specious. The choice is *not* between war and peace, it's between war with the US helping out the less-evil side, and war without the US helping out the less-evil side.



The strong, and probably overwhelming, argument against attacking ISIS, in my view, is not the lives, it's the money.

Yes, the US can probably reduce the number of innocent people who get killed in the short term by bombing ISIS, but because a) it's hard to see it resulting in a decent long-term outcome, and b) air strikes are very expensive, the number of dollars spent per life saved will be quite low compared to the number of lives that could probably be saved by spending that money on e.g. mosquito nets, or even possibly by spending it on fighting other terrorist groups elsewhere in regions where there's a greater chance of establishing a functioning state.

You can buy an awful lot of mosquito nets for the cost of a missile.




But the "You support killing innocent people! You support war!"-type arguments (I caricature, but only slightly) arguments that I see flung by opponents of air strikes at supporters of them has less than no merit, I think - *both* sides support courses of action that will result in horrible war and innocent people dying, and if you only factor in likely outcome in Iraq, rather than the potential benefit from that much effort deployed elsewhere, it's certainly not obvious that the US getting involved will not make the likely outcome better.