EDITORIAL
Moving to war: Weigh collateral damage

Yesterday's intense if arcane debate in the U.N. Security Council adds almost nothing to the chances that war with Iraq might be averted or postponed. The point of the final vote, when it comes next week, will simply be to force the 15 member states, as President Bush put it Thursday night, to declare which side they're on.

We have never been convinced that the need to conquer Iraq outweighs the sum of the negative collateral effects at home and around the world. Here's a survey:

• Growing skepticism among Americans about the morality and efficacy of the coming war is exacerbated by disingenuousness on the part of the Bush administration on how much this effort has and will cost.
• After the war, the Western alliance will remain fractured, NATO paralyzed, the Chinese and the Russians offended. The French agree that Iraq would not be cooperating with inspectors if it weren't for 250,000 or so U.S. troops surrounding it, but they insist that a few more weeks of this will accomplish disarmament without the need for war. Is disarmament Bush's point, or is invasion still necessary because his post-Saddam agenda for Iraq doesn't stop at disarmament?
• Resentment against Americans is mushrooming. Bush is undoubtedly correct that most people, whether they admit it or not, will be glad to see Saddam removed. But an Indonesian graduate student at the East-West Center told us the other day that the first effect of the American invasion in his country will be to turn the moderate Muslim majority into radicals. It seems evident that Bush has failed to consider the cost of turning Indonesia, the world's fourth-largest nation and the largest Muslim country, against us — not to mention the many like it.
• Bush is right that the current debate in the Security Council threatens that institution's credibility. But not because it can't agree to back up its resolutions — it has failed to do that many times — but because the United States and its coalition will have defied its will in invading another country.
• North Korea, a country clearly far more immediately dangerous now than Iraq, has exploited Bush's obsession with Iraq to the point that some of his aides are conceding its accession to nuclear power is a fait accompli. That development makes a disastrous war on the Korean peninsula more, not less, likely.
• Thousands of Iraqi civilians doubtless face death, injury and great hardship. One wonders how many of them can die without damage to the claim to have liberated them.

Finally, there's the chance that either the war will go badly or, once it's won, the combination of Kurds fighting Turks, Shiites fighting Sunnis and armed exiles returning from Iran will pitch Iraq into a state no better or worse than it is now, creating even greater regional instability.

In other words, the risks of this war plus the collateral damage — the outlines of which already are clear — call into question its prudence.

We can hope the Security Council finds a way to agree next week, and proceed to a fruitful joint enterprise that makes the world a better place. But we don't count on it.