Defeatists and the “Cost” of the War in Iraq
The Bear on Dec 15 2005 at 7:00 am | Filed under: Need to Know
We are constantly being told that the “cost” of the war in Iraq has risen to over two thousand deaths and many hundreds of billions of dollars. The hidden, unexamined assumption behind this statement is that if we had not invaded Iraq, our inaction would cost nothing.
For all we know, the cost of not invading Iraq would have been tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars. We might be engaged in a much larger war right now. We will never know.
We had a choice. We could either invade Iraq or not. If we invaded, there would be partially-knowable consequences; if we did not invade, there would be other partially-knowable consequences. We now know a lot more about the consequences of invading Iraq; we know only a little more about the consequences of not invading Iraq.
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