WHAT IS A FREE IRAQI TO ME?:

Farewell to Bush, the president and the man (Lanny Davis, January 12, 2009 , Washington Times)

I strongly disagreed with his decision to go into Iraq pre-emptively. And I still think, despite progress and some signs of stability and democracy in Iraq for which he deserves credit, that the war was not worth the lives lost or the hundreds of billions spent, with little sign that it had any effect on the war against terror and seems to have had a greater effect of empowering Iran in the region.

We've suffered a tad under 4300 dead in Iraq--or less than just the Confederate losses at Gettysburg--while liberating 28 million+ people from what even the most rabidly anti-war folks usually concede was one of the most repressive and murderous regimes in the world. My math isn't terribly good, but isn't that something like 6500 Iraqis freed per US death? It is, of course, possible to make a Darwinian/nationalist argument that one American life is more than that. But what then are we to make of WWII, where the 400,000 dead Americans would have to have apparently liberated more than 2.6 billion people in order for the war to have been worthwhile? Particularly given that the war was so expensive that US debt hit over 120% of GDP and that the war had the "greater effect of empowering" the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2009 8:09 AM