The future benefits are entirely hypothetical. The dead from recent Regime Change are entirely real. Why assume the Rosy Future Scenario?
Afghanistan, today, is an even worse place to live in, than it was under the Taliban. Amazing, that we could create something worse than that. The same could be true for Iraq. 12M dead in 30 years is 33,000/year. I can construct several (equally hypothetical) futures, where more Iraqis die than Saddam (and sons) would have killed:
1. We get tired of Empire, withdraw, and the Kurds,Shiites,Sunnis, do to each other, what the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims did in Bosnia.
2. We withdraw, and the Iranians, Turks, Syrians invade, to partition the country. They fight each other, and the various armed Iraqi groups, endlessly.
3. We stay. 5 years from now, 500,000 U.S. troops are barely keeping a lid on a nationalist guerrilla uprising. One million (more) die before we give up and go home.
4. Saddam really did have WMD. And he really did move them into an adjacent nation. And then into a container on a cargo ship that goes to New York. And goes bang. We do the "3 eyes for an eye" thing. |
