As dearly as I would like to be able to take the mass murderers of this world out by saying a magic word and making them disappear in a puff of purple smoke, the hard and inescapable truth is that almost always you are stuck with either leaving them to ruin their nations as they see fit, or prying them out by military force.

And of course you can project deaths.

Maybe not exact numbers, but by what possible rationalization can you postulate that another thirty years of the Hussein dynasty would not have resulted in more deaths than the fewer than 1,000 civilians that even Iraq claims have died in this war so far? In his past thirty years Saddam has killed well over a million of his own citizens--real deaths, not fictional ones--by murder and war, and I can project a curve as easily as anyone else.

To claim under these circumstances that predicting future deaths from his regime is irrelevant is as silly as tying someone to a railroad track when no train is in sight and declaring that obviously there is no apparent danger.

Incidentally, I must have missed all of you deriding the huge predictions of tens of thousands of dead civilians the antiwar people were making. Predictions based on even less real information.

And regardless of the touching faith so many seem to have that there is an "alternative" to either leaving Saddam in power or removing him by force, I have seen nothing of the sort from anyone.

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.

Is there a difference?