Can we justify killing the children of Iraq?
If we go to war with Saddam, thousands of children will die. So why aren't we agonising over this in the way we would the possible death of a child in Britain? Jonathan Glover argues that we do not have the moral authority to start such a conflict

I have spent the past few years discussing medical ethics with students who are often doctors or nurses. Their work involves them in life-and-death decisions. Our discussions have reminded me of what many of us experience when we are close to someone in acute medical crisis. When a parent is dying slowly in distress or indignity, or when a baby is born with such severe disabilities that life may be a burden, the family and the medical team agonise over whether to continue life support. No one finds such a decision easy or reaches it lightly. What is at stake is too serious for anyone to rush the discussion.

It is hard not to be struck by the contrast between these painful deliberations and the hasty way people think about a war in which thousands will be killed. The people killed in an attack on Iraq will not be so different from those in hospital whose lives we treat so seriously. Some will be old; many will be babies and children. To think of just one five-year-old Iraqi girl, who may die in this war, as we would think of that same girl in a medical crisis is to see the enormous burden of proof on those who would justify killing her. Decisions for war seem less agonising than the decision to let a girl in hospital die. But only because anonymity and distance numb the moral imagination. (...)

There is an extra dimension to the decision about this particular war. The choice made this time may be one of the most important decisions about war ever made. This is partly because of the great risks of even a "successful" war. The defeat even of Saddam Hussein's cruel dictatorship may contribute to long-term enmity and conflict between the west and the Islamic world. In what is widely thought in the Islamic world to be both an unjustified war and an attack on Islam, an American victory may be seen as an Islamic humiliation to be avenged. This war may do for our century what 1914 did for the 20th century. And there is an ominous sense of our leaders, as in 1914, being dwarfed by the scale of events and sleepwalking into decisions with implications far more serious than they understand.
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