Interesting Suggestion
Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting suggestion, which takes advantage of the incredibly low number of civilian casualties to establish goodwill:
As a demonstration of goodwill toward the people of Iraq, our side should pay compensation. Suppose $10,000 went to the family of each civilian killed. Too expensive, you say? If there were 1,300 Iraqi civilian dead, $10,000 for each tragedy would be about the cost of 10 naval cruise missiles. (We launched 800.) Considering the cost-no-object ordnance showered on Iraq, it would be an outrage if we didn’t pay at least a relatively small amount for those wrongly killed. If 1,300 is the number [more like 100, since 1,300 is the Iraqi information minister’s figure – PoliPundit] the United States could even pay $100,000 per death for a total expense of less than one night’s bombing during the campaign. In addition to being the right thing to do, think of the effect such payments might have on Arab public opinion–communicating that we really do care about typical Iraqis, and that, unlike Arab governments, which kill without compunction, we really do grieve over our errors.
$10,000 would be comparable to the amount Saddam paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Compensating 1,300 families with $10,000 each would only cost us $13 million. The payments would have to be handled with a concerted PR offensive, of course. The president could announce the compensation on Iraqi TV as soon as the lights are back on in Baghdad and average Iraqis can watch TV again.
Our enemies will accuse us of placing a low price on Arab lives. We should counter that civilian casualties have been astonishingly low and we’re taking an unprecedented step in compensating their families – a step, for example, that the Iraqis and Iranians certainly didn’t take during the Iran-Iraq war. In fact the biggest downside to this proposal is that it establishes a precedent; but it is a precedent that the US, with it’s highly precise weapons and large GDP, could tolerate much more easily than other countries. It is a precedent that would enable us to easily claim the moral high ground in future conflicts with only a very tiny drain on our muscular economy.
That said, the chances of this coming to pass are miniscule. No one wants to establish the precedent of compensating civilian victims of war.
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