I got some decent pushback on my GOP Team Leader comment from the other day. Rather than just answer in the comments, I'll take the opportunity to go through the process here on the front page.

Not only do I think the Iraqi Body Count (IBC) is too high, it does not support your use of it. For example, when Iraqis or foreign terrorists blow up the ICRC building, the UN building, and other “soft” targets, those deaths go into the IBC database.

Valid, and I thought of that while I was writing it. However, it would seem unlikely to me that more than 2/3 of the Iraqi civilian casualties have been caused by insurgents. Likewise, there are few other force on which one can attribute collateral damage in Afghanistan for.

I personally don’t find it unbelievable that “The war on terror has taken more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Great, we agree! Moving on.

It is completely dishonest to say that “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up”. Unless, of course, you are making the argument that despite spending “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up” that fewer fatalities (lower fatality rate) have resulted in both countries.

You're making what is called a counter-factual argument, saying that the consequences of not taking an action would have been worse than taking said action after the action has been taken. This is not a way to engage in rational discourse. It is also the same illogic that Bush uses, for instance, to justify his massive tax cuts: "things may be bad, but they would have been much worse if I hadn't done this."

You presuppose of binary view of possibilities, in this case, "war or nothing." This was a big part of how the pro-war faction succeeded. They were able to frame the debate as war vs doing nothing at all, which of course is a completely ridiculous way to look at things.

The real rub with counter-factual arguments is, of course, that there's no way to know what would have happened if alternative courses of action had been taken because the matter is already settled. They're useful in science because you can go back and re-do an experiment, a luxury we don't have in the world of statecraft.

Beyond this, your argument is further flawed in that you equate any innocent lives lost through US non-intervention to innocent lives we directly bring to an end. This is not rational either, unless you want to say that we're responsible for every unjust life lost world-wide in the same way that we're responsible for blowing up a wedding party by mistake.

WWII killed more “innocent civilians” than the attack on Pearl Harbor. Especially in Europe, whose people had nothing to do with the attack on Hawaii (not even a state at the time).

And so the inevitable comparison to "the good war" comes out. This is pure jingoistic masturbation. Comparing the non-threat of Iraq with the very real threat of the Axis powers is bullshit. Don't take my word for it. Ask a vet about it sometime.

I guess, by that logic, we should have just rounded up 3,000 or less Afghani and Iraqi civilians, murdered them, and called it even? Is that the point?

No, but it would seem that's somewhere near the point the GOP is making. The point I'm making, Tim with no email address or home page, is that the notion that the GOP really thinks it's "Unbelievable" that George Soros would get up and say things like this in public is a pretty unbelievable in and of itself.

Further, it would seem to me that the GOP refuses to admit (finds "unbelievable") that there are strong moral arguments against what we are doing right now in Iraq and around the world. It would seem that when such an argument is made the GOP, rather than making any attempt to actually engage in the work of undertanding and justifying what is going on, seeks to marginalize that moral position in any way it can. My point is that I think the GOP is acting in an immoral and untruthful fashion. My point (which was there all along) is this:

This GOP apparatus is an enemy of truth, an enemy of logic, an enemy of compassion and rational thought. They’ve got to fucking go, and decent Republicans are going to realize this sooner or later. You cannot run a good political party on lies, greed racism and religious fervor. (I just added greed, forgot it before)

If, on the other hand, what you're trying to draw out of me is what I would consider to be a better response to September 11th, you might want to read Why War is Not the Answer or Thoughts on an Anti-War Movement, both of which I wrote in the fall/winter of 2002. I haven't given a lot of thought to the matter lately because, well, a course of action has already been taken and I'm more concerned with what is going on than what might have been.