> > Yes, I'd like to preserve the most Iraqi civilian lives as possible, too, but I'm not going to sacrifice American lives to do it.
>
> I may be opening myself to a barrage of other opinions and/or abuse, but I do think that I would question the morality of your last sentence.

Oh, I knew I was opening myself up to a barrage of other opinions and/or abuse when I posted my last sentence.

The problem is that war cannot be considered in the same capacity as the commonly accepted understanding of right and wrong with respect to people. When we talk of individuals, it's the golden rule and all that goes with that. If you don't want to hurt anybody, nobody should hurt you. If you make a decision to assume a risk, ok, but you shouldn't risk others without their consent. Etc, etc, etc.

War isn't like that. War is war. It's one nation at war with another nation. It's not this one nation's leader at odds with another nation's leader with other individuals who agree to assume the risks of battle making up the militaries, and those militaries can do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt anybody else. Some of the military personnel don't agree with the war, don't want to be involved in it, don't want to fight it, but they do anyway because they HAVE to, because the nations are at war, that's what their job is, and they don't have the RIGHT not to do it. Meanwhile, the civilians aren't all nice pacifists that just want to live their lives without anybody getting hurt. A lot of them support the war effort, would fight if they could, and would gladly take some soldiers down if the opportunity presented itself. Hey, if Iraq invaded the United States, and I saw an Iraqi soldier running around my neighborhood, and I had a clean shot with the antique .22 I own but don't currently have in my house, I'd do it.

I'm not sure if the above has anything to do with anything, so let me rein this back in. If a nation decides to go to war at all, it has decided that there is something at stake that is more important than individual human lives -- not just the lives of the enemy but the lives of its own soldiers and the lives of innocent bystanders. That decision is either right or it's wrong. If it's wrong, then the loss of ONE civilian must be considered firmly unacceptable. But if that decision is right, then, by definition, civilian lives are less important than the fulfillment of the war objective. By definition, the number one goal that overrides all other concerns is to complete the primary objective of the war (overthrow a government, take back land, liberate a people, whatever). Yeah, minimize civilian casualties whenever possible. Wars must still be conducted with minimizing casualties as a consideration. But to value the lives of civilians above the lives of your own soldiers -- well, not only aren't you saving lives, because you're just swapping one for another, but you're undermining your own primary objective. In times of war, the relative value of one life and another is as simple as figuring out which life will better aid the war effort. Sound like a terrible, evil, immoral thing to say? Hey, I started out by saying that if a nation is at war, it has determined that its objective in the war is MORE IMPORTANT than the individual human lives involved. If *nothing* is more important than an individual human life, you shouldn't be at war in the first place.

And maybe that's the way to go. A lot of people believe that very thing.

I don't. I think there are a (very) few things more important than individual human lives. An obvious, down-to-earth example is *more* human life. I think World War II, for example, was worth every single human life spent in it, whether soldier, whether civilian, whether friend or enemy. Why? A few reasons, but only this one is necessary to make the point: Hitler was killing Jews by the *millions*, and he wasn't going to stop. It came down to spending the lives of soldiers who chose to fight, as well as those bystanders caught in the cross fire, to save the lives of many, many more.

Whether war in Iraq is justified is something I'm again going to abstain from commenting on. I don't know enough about what's going on. I don't believe our government has given us all the information that is weighing into its consideration of war. (This is something I would most definitely want before action is taken, or I'd have to disapprove of the war by default.) BUT...if it DOES decide to go to war, then it had better be thinking that the human life that will be lost in it, military and civilian alike, are less important than fulfilling the war's objective.