So maybe you get it. I wasn't referring to everybody here.

The numbers are a simple projection. Saddam and Sons have killed about a million of their own people in wars and oppression, and I see no rational reason for assuming that somehow they would just quit. Over the next thirty years, assuming a few hundred thousand dead is probably conservative.

A while back (I don't have post references handy) I was given a huge amount of grief for pointing out that the Iraqi casualties caused by this war were balanced by the much larger number of Iraqi people who would now not be brutalized and killed, as they would have been had Saddam and his sons continued to rule for decades to come. Similar difficult calculations have been made for almost every war against tyranny in history. Check your history, and find out which group was the angriest that the Allies did not bomb the death camps during WWII.

I was informed that (paraphrasing) these were "potential deaths" while the war casualties were "real deaths," and as such, the argument was irrelevant. Of course, for such an inane statement to be accurate, one has to assume that for some obscure reason Saddam and his sons would suddenly have converted to Hinduism or something if we had just left them alone.

Davin, for one, has rejected any argument for the war that is based on the fact that the world and Iraq are a better place without Saddam in power, and submits that the several thousand Iraqi casualties render the war immoral on almost any possible level, regardless of how many others would have died had we left the regime in place.

I don't accept that. And the argument pretty much stagnated there.