I really hate this.

First: Projected dead are not the same as real dead.

Be sorry for the ones killed and stop trying to justify it by all the "future dead". This is not Passover and you cannot tell who will die by the lamb's blood on the lintel.

Yes, I believe that Saddam is a murderous bastard. Yes, I believe his boys are worse. Yes, I believe he would have killed more people than he has, though we won't ever know how many. No, I don't believe we can statistically justify corpses with projections. Future projected "Saddam" dead have not bled and suffered.

I know that military operations are frequently predicated on such arguments. It was certainly done to justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's part of their job. It is unseemly coming out of the mouths of civilians who are not witnessing the human suffering that results from these assessments with their own eyes and ears.

The military can make those estimates precisely because they will be both members of and witnesses to the groups who suffer. The cold steel of statistical projection is balanced by the warmth of last breaths. They have an understanding that we who watch simply do not have.

It's everybody else's job to do their best not to rejoice over the "low" death count, but to express gratitude that it was not higher. It's everybody else's job to remember that every single person killed is somebody's child, so we may retain our humanity and not become as ravening wolves.

It seems I will never get this through people's noggins.

Second: Who is Saddam? Are we "better" than him? Who cares? His behavior is hardly a moral compass.

The important question is, who are we? Why do we fight? Why do we make peace? Why do we negotiate sometimes and resist others? What do we believe?

Until we answer these questions in the context of this war, consistently and honestly, in terms of our own identity as a nation, we will measure ourselves by the yardstick of not-Saddam, because that is as much as we think of ourselves.

Regards--
Mary Anne