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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Friday, October 29, 2004
Costs of War
The war in Iraq was being prepared in 1999 in order to boost Bush's popularity should he become president. Has it been worth it? Did you get your money's worth? There are a lot of American service people and a lot more Iraqis who will never find out.
According to that liberal left-wing radical rag The Lancet, our brilliant little war has cost roughly 100,000 Iraqi civilians their lives. That's civilians. I don't know about you, but that just makes me beam with pride. (Yes, it's an order of magnitude more than are noted on the Iraq Body Count; that's because the IBC only counts deaths actually reported in the media.)
Now let's see. The cost of the Iraq war stands today at roughly 142 billion dollars. So each dead Iraqi only cost us about one and a half million dollars each! It's a real bargain when you realize that the vast majority of them weren't even terrorists! Wait, it gets better! It's all borrowed money! You might not even pay it back -- because your kids will!
Of course, it only takes about ten bucks for an insurgent to blow up a Humvee full of American soldiers. (Do we have a million times more money than they do? Better hope so.)
Seriously: collateral damage is an unfortunate fact of life in warfare, especially in an age of asymmetric warfare and terrorism. It's one of the reasons we should be reluctant to go to war. The professional US military does everything it can to reduce the number of civilian casualties, but it's still an inevitable part of military operations. That's why war should only be undertaken as a last resort, not as a component of domestic political strategy.
0 comments
The war in Iraq was being prepared in 1999 in order to boost Bush's popularity should he become president. Has it been worth it? Did you get your money's worth? There are a lot of American service people and a lot more Iraqis who will never find out.
According to that liberal left-wing radical rag The Lancet, our brilliant little war has cost roughly 100,000 Iraqi civilians their lives. That's civilians. I don't know about you, but that just makes me beam with pride. (Yes, it's an order of magnitude more than are noted on the Iraq Body Count; that's because the IBC only counts deaths actually reported in the media.)
Now let's see. The cost of the Iraq war stands today at roughly 142 billion dollars. So each dead Iraqi only cost us about one and a half million dollars each! It's a real bargain when you realize that the vast majority of them weren't even terrorists! Wait, it gets better! It's all borrowed money! You might not even pay it back -- because your kids will!
Of course, it only takes about ten bucks for an insurgent to blow up a Humvee full of American soldiers. (Do we have a million times more money than they do? Better hope so.)
Seriously: collateral damage is an unfortunate fact of life in warfare, especially in an age of asymmetric warfare and terrorism. It's one of the reasons we should be reluctant to go to war. The professional US military does everything it can to reduce the number of civilian casualties, but it's still an inevitable part of military operations. That's why war should only be undertaken as a last resort, not as a component of domestic political strategy.
