Tuesday, March 25, 2003 :::
 

Al-Jazeera is reportedly showing footage of dead Iraqi civilians — there are reportedly a handful — which they blame on the Americans. The appropriate counterfootage would be video of the civilians being killed by the Iraqi regime over the next five years that they will be unable to kill because of our actions. This footage, unfortunately, is exceedingly difficult to come by; preempted hypotheticals don't leave compelling video. The next best thing might be torture footage of actual victims of the regime up to this point; supposing they took such footage and left it lying around for U.S. Marines to find, it will be interesting to see what is done with it.

I made that distinction, that what is more relevant are the otherwise future victims and not so much the past victims, and I think it's worth repeating one more time that exactly the same is true of American victims of terrorism (which, since the largest costs are systemic, are all Americans). Comparisons of the costs associated with the Iraqi theatre of this conflict to the costs of 2001's New York theatre are relevant only insofar as the latter are indicative of the costs of a typical event that we might be trying to erase from our future.

::: posted by dWj at 12:20 PM

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Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.