For some reason, people think I’m a sick bastard when I tell them that losing 3000 soldiers is insignificant. Lets put this into perspective by having a little quiz. How many people were killed in WW2? (Don’t cheat!)

A) One Hundred Thousand
B) One Million
C) Five Million
D) Ten Million

If you’re like most americans, you probably guessed B, or maybe C. Scott Adams asks this question regularly, and people inevitably underestimate by several orders of magnitude. The actual answer? 62 million.

So allow me to be a cold-hearted bastard by saying that if it makes the world a better place, then the 3000 soldiers is absolutely a sacrifice that I would be willing to make as president. The loss of 3000 of our armed forces is almost inconsequential when viewed from a larger perspective.

But this obviously begs another question. Sacrificing 3000 lives without any results is still a tragedy, so is it worth the 3000 lives that we have sacrificed?

To answer this question, I point you to another statistic. Since military intervention in Iraq, there have been between 44,000-49,000 civilian deaths (iraqbodycount.org). While this site says “Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq”, it would be more accurate to say “Civilians reported killed since military intervention in Iraq”. To demonstrate this, look at the database at iraqbodycount.org. Read the a few entries in the database and ask yourself two questions: “Who is dying?” and “Who is killing?”. The answer to the first question is “the Iraqi people”, and the answer to the second question is “the Iraqi people”.

This blog post is full of rhetorical questions, but I will pose one a final question. What would be the effect of pulling out of Iraq?