Chris,

I think that we have indeed left some to die and some suffering. This war (which I supported and still support) like all wars causes real suffering, real death, real grief, real destruction. Some lives will never be whole again, no matter how successful the country becomes. Over a thousand Iraqis, and probably a lot more, died this past month at our hands. That is real.

I don't think we can honestly avoid admitting that. The hard fact is that there was no other way to do what we felt we needed to do. Yes, many good things are happening and will happen. But it's not honest IMO to deny that some very bad things happened at our initiative during the last month as well.

You are absolutely right that some people did die. Some bad things did happen. I don't deny that and I have expressed (in other posts) my feelings about a few of the things that have gone wrong.

But I also firmly believe that the Iraqi people are much, much better off now than they were a month ago. Mr. Higgins has leveled an accustion in which he basically calls us uncompassionate and uncaring.

Did some innocent people die? Yes. Are we uncaring? Absolutely not. To say that we are is dishonest (I'm not taking exception with you rkb, but with Mr. Higgins).

There is no doubt that many innocent Iraqis died or were wounded once we commenced the war - and that no matter how hard we may have tried, many if not all of those deaths and wounds were unavoidable once we made the decision to invade.

However, it seems, both on the prudential case of disarming Iraq of weapons of mass murder (does anyone really think they won't be found?) and the humanitarian case of liberation that our actions were right and just. It is still early yet, but it is difficult to imagine a post-Saddam Iraq that is both a greater threat to us and in which Iraqi human rights are equal or worse than before.

And on that test (which is the only fair test), it is difficult to quibble with the outcome.

Although some surely will.

While I don't want to deny that many Iraqi savilions have suffered as a result of this war, I also fail to see in many arguments about the tragedy of Iraqi cavilians, the recognition that life under Saddam's regime was cruel and involved much as yet untold suffering. So I view this some utilitarion perspective. Our action would be evil if we were disrupting a reasonably benign civilization to impose our will, but it is not evil if our action, on balance, offered the prospect of a much better civilization for the citizens. I have no doubt whatsoever that it does. This argument does not include the arguments, that I also agree with, concerning our national interest of security of which taking down the Saddam regime is a key tactical and strategic piece.

Jeez.
RKB says we can't honestly avoid admitting people died.
RKB is implying anybody is trying to avoid admitting people died.
My question is where did RKB get this impression, or was it a fake, intended to put Chris on the defensive?

Some of these comment-taters are obviously embedded in a bar.

Fact: In wars people die - soldiers and civilians.

A grim balancing of accounts has to be done after or prior to any war to justify war's toll on human life. Those doing the balancing have to take in account the good as well as the bad that occur as a result of war or there will be false realizations that either all wars are bad or all wars are good.

There will be enough evidence, whether the discovery of WMD or long lists of horror stories committed by Saddam and his thugs, to justify this war in my opinion. After reading of 750 people having their ears surgically removed without pain killers in an assembly line in hospitals is enough for me, there isn't an argument that the anti-war types can make to cause me to believe this war was not justified. Pictures of wounded or dead children are terrible, but so is the thought of 750 men without ears.

One thing the "liberals" conveniently forget is how many innocents would have died if the invasion had no taken place. The data we have (some of it released by the liberals when they were advocating for the lifting of sanctions) was that directly through murder of opponents (and their families) or indirectly (through the stealing of the "oil for food" money) the Saddam regime was responsible for the death of one hundred thousand people per year that is eight thousand people a month, so it is easy to calculate that in one month the total death count for civilian Iraquis will be lesser than with Saddam and if we add "normal" military (including Republican Guards as long as they don't have blood in their hands) in less than one year. And we also can calculate that tens of thousands Iraquis have died due to the delays induced by the Axis of Weasels.