I spend every day surrounded by U.S. Army officers, many of whom have already been to Iraq and lost men under their command. If I'm going to advocate the use of force on behalf of national strategic goals, it's reasonable for me to have an idea of how many of my students it would be worth killing in the process -- not to mention how much money taken away from other potential uses, whether that be building strategic nuclear systems for a future confrontation with China, or funding social security privatization.

If your answer, Tom, "for every war, every last soldier, every last dollar, every last American if needed", then God help us if you ever run the place. Making the best use of constrained resources and considering the whole range of national interests and future needs is the very essense of being a strategic decision maker. The military planners I deal with would be on Doug's side here, not yours.

Saying that costs should be commensurate with benefits is not the equivalent of judging military success only by casualties. Had the Soviets been invading Western Europe with an eye towards conquering and subjugating it (and making use of its industrial resources), I would have been willing to see one hell of a lot of Americans die stopping them.

If you had known in advance that invading Iraq would kill every soldier and destroy every piece of equipment in the U.S. ARmy, and cost a trillion dollars, but given us a stable Iraq, would that have been worth it? You don't have to be a "liberal" to not like that tradeoff. You might simply think it'd be an excessive use of resources given threats from Iran or China, the time to rebuild an Army from scratch, etc. I realize it is rhetorically convenient for you to equate "thought Iraq was bad strategy" with "Leftist soundrel", but that just isn't so.

So I think the question was fair: if we had known in advance exactly how much blood, treasure, and time Iraq would consume, what would have been your cost ceiling?