I will give the benefit of the doubt to our nation on the actual numbers here, but is anyone else bothered by this? About a year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins university estimated the Iraqi death toll at an astounding 655,000! The argument our government had was that this was not credible and that the number is more like 30,000.
Is that all? Well then, fight away! There's no reason to let a small number like 30,000 stop us. Now I realize that we can't just leave now and peace would magically appear. And I respect and appreciate the efforts of our military. I just have to wonder how the public would have felt about going to war had we known the cost would be this high. I suspect our leaders knew how much damage this would cause and essentially decided that it was worth it. In our nation we (and the press) tend to focus on our own deaths. Currently we are coming up on 4000 deaths of our servicemen and women. We see this as "The ultimate price" and I don't dispute it. But we have to add in the 30,000+ civilians who didn't ask for this war when really considering the value of this conflict. I'm no longer convinced we made the right decision.
For what I suspect is the most accurate civilian death toll, you may wish to visit a web site called Iraq Body Count
Rob,
ReplyDeleteThese are great points, and I don't have the right answer as to how we deal with this. There's no doubt that Saddam was evil and I am glad he is no longer in control.
That being said, for the sake of argument let's look at the numbers as based on the Iraqi Death Toll Website: For the sake of doing this without a calculator, let's just say that our involvement since 2003 has directly or indirectly resulted in the death of 70,000 people (The inference of them being directly involved was not intended). If we extrapolated this in a linear fashion, then in 8 short years, we're at the lower end of the range of deaths that happened under Hussein's leadership. (Note: there is a good argument as to why a linear extrapolation isn't accurate, but I sold my college calculator on eBay, and besides, it lessens the strength of the argument :-)). The real point is that innocents are being killed directly or indirectly in the current situation, and it's bothersome.
"Let's also hope and pray that we can bring our heroic soldiers home before the U.S. death toll reaches 8,000."
I agree 100% with this. I have to ask though - what is the maximum number of civilians we are willing to lose too? Our servicemen (and women) bravely signed up knowing they may have to pay this price, but these civilians have not.