Good article, Zach. I tend to lean more toward the opinion that as costly as the war might be in lives and other costs, the long-term risks of not fighting outweighs the immediate cost. And even though this might be a little off-topic, just because some people say that we can't win, so why put American and other lives at risk is bad policy in war, business or a lot of other things. If we didn't do things because we couldn't guarantee we would win, we wouldn't do very much.

Anyway, good article. :)

I'm surprised that the toll in Afghanistan is half of that in Iraq. The Iraq conflict seems to me to have been more than twice as violent as Afghanistan (even when taking the relative durations of the conflicts into consideration).

With regard to Iraq, what percentage of those claimed 30,000 deaths are victims of islamist violence, and does anyone actually expect that woud decrease if we left tomorrow? And what percentage of those 30,000 "civilians" were armed? Perhaps I am getting too cynical in my old age, but I can't help believing that the New York Times would list the 19 hijackers of 911 as "civilians" - after all, they weren't in anybody's military.

It is worth noting that until 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, we not only were little concerned with civilian deaths at Saddam's hands, we contributed to them by being indifferent to how he maintained order within Iraq. We raised no great protests about his use of torture and facilitated the import of chemicals and biological agents that Saddam used rather indiscriminately. The Reagan and first Bush administrations continued to back Saddam even after he had attacked civilians with chemical weapons. In fact, after the Reagan administration's rather mild rebuke of Iraq for gassing the Kurds, U.S. assistance to Saddam was increased.

In 1982, the Reagan administration discounted the idea that Saddam had chemical weapons at all. Intelligence, however, had already shown that Saddam began developing them in the 1970's. It is doubtful the Reagan administration was unaware of that fact, but intentionally misrepresented Saddam as a rather benign figure.

Also, a study published by the Bloomberg School of Health of John Hopkins University in 2004 claimed that 100,000 more civilians may have died as a result of the invasion compared to the number who would have died otherwise. So, there is not agreement on civilian deaths before and after.

U.S. official policy discourages the counting of civilian deaths. In the previous gulf war, the first Bush administration even attempted to fire a Census Bureau worker for publishing details of civilian deaths.

In the past, war was an important way of controlling the human popluation in a given area.

Given this is the case, should we not be impressed that modern wars do not have tens of millions of dead?