John Derbyshire at NRO has a great piece today called Ten Points on the War. His first point is that the name Operation Iraqi Freedom is incredibly lame to which I concur wholeheartedly. He also raises an interesting moral question with his fifth point:
5. Are we being too nice? It is a point of pride for us, military and civilian alike, that we take the utmost care to avoid "collateral damage" — i.e. killing and maiming Iraqi civilians. Well, I am proud of that, too. Not so proud, though, as to forget that there is a calculus of casualties, in which being too punctilious about losses among enemy civilians costs lives among our own military. This is an ugly fact, but a fact just the same.
Where is the point of balance? How many Iraqi civilians are we willing to trade for one dead Marine? A thousand? A hundred? Ten? One? "No answer" is not possible here, though of course everyone pretends it is. You — and more to the point, our military commanders and their civilian bosses — have to have some opinion on this, and they have to act on that opinion. I confess I am an extremist on this particular scale of horrors. My answer: "hundreds, though not thousands." If that shocks you — well, what's your answer?
I must be even more of extremist since my answer would be at least a thousand, possibly more. It's not a real pleasant thing to think about but, as Derbyshire points out, it is a calculation that our military must deal with on a now daily basis.
Before you think me a cold hearted bastage take a moment and, as Derbyshire asks, answer the question yourself. A good friend of mine (ex-military currently working for Uncle Sam in a different capacity) recently sent me an e-mail and, without getting into specifics, let's just say that his answer makes Derbyshire and myself look positively Quakeresque.
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