Yesterday I took a look at a couple of numbers. I got curious about the similarity between the number who died in the suicide attach on the World Trade Center five years ago and the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The numbers I’m looking at are 2,654 killed in Iraq and 329 in Afghanistan for a total of 2,983. The round number for 9-11 is 3,000. We have doubled our own tragedy and have created a much bigger tragedy in Iraq. If the objective has been to make a safer world, something isn’t working.
posted by Dan McCracken at 7:06 AM
1 Comments:
Yes, I've been struck by these numbers as well. And the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed since the U.S. has gone to war with Iraq is estimated to be between 41,000 and 46,000 now, according to Iraq Body Count. Civilian deaths have increased from 14% of wartime deaths in World War I to over 90% now! Meanwhile, the U.S. debt is greater than 8.5 trillion dollars.
It strikes me that war is an unbelievably inefficient and expensive way to try solve problems. Not only is it clearly morally dubious to go about things in this way, but even in purely practical terms, I cannot see why anyone could possibly think that this approach has any merit whatsoever.
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