This could almost be mistaken for an attempt at a reasoned response as opposed to the reflexive triumphalism that has marked most of your contributions this morning, so I'll make an effort here, observing first that your technique of attempting to frame the argument in terms of self-serving dualities will persuade few who read these posts. [EDIT: in consideration of which might you perhaps reformat the referenced message, which with the careless addition of the embedded images now makes the entire thread impossible to read without extensive horizontal scrolling?]

When I "point to the bodies" I do not "claim there wouldn't have been any if we had left Saddam alone" -- you will search my entries in vain for such a statement. As to "Or are you just uncomfortable with the fact that our bombs killed them, and would rather have let Saddam do it?" it is fair to assert that most of the individual civilians killed, injured or maimed in Baghdad since late March would be alive and going about their business today absent American military strikes; it is highly dubious to maintain that a like number would have been killed/injured/maimed during the same period as a consequence of the normal operations of the regime.

"The only way you can cast a bad light on this, is by focusing microscopically on the worst things you can find." --This, I think, is the heart of our disagreement. The cited deaths are to you "microscopic." They're not part of "the big picture," and it seems inconceivable to you that they could even be introduced into the discourse save by way of fault-finding and self-delusion.

Were you alone in this outlook you might justly be reproved for its callowness and perversity, but of course you are instead a consumer of the reported news, no worse and no better than millions of your fellows--and whereas within your grandfather's lifetime Americans regarded the aerial bombardment of cities with horror and indignation, it's been tactical Holy Writ for a couple of generations now, and no biggie. As Americans we are a simple, generous, impulsive, heavily-armed and rather squeamish people, not notably bloodthirsty, and so we are disposed not to linger over the images of "collateral damage" (itself a deliciously bloodless term of bureaucratic art)--the small, dusty corpses of children, the severed heads, the maimed; all this seems tasteless to bring up at this moment of victory, so beside-the-point, so...microscopic. Your government and your tame domestic press encourage you to avert your eyes. Look, just a block away the happy natives are beating the graven image of the Fallen Foe with their shoes! Now that's the Big Picture!

Well, this just in: the Big Picture, that panorama of civilizations rising and falling, of armies on the march and fleets of mighty bombers--it comes down to its own pointillist microscopic elements, to the individual human beings living, loving, forming families, struggling to get by and occasionally being ground to powder in the clash of forces they are powerless to affect. I'm not suggesting, as you seem to think, that war can be conducted without killing them; I'm not even proposing that war must never be waged without a guarantee of the safety of the innocents. I will further stipulate that, were S. Hussein to be brained next week by falling American ordnance, the quotient of human goodness in the world would rise a tick (the same could be said, to be sure, should the next Killer Pretzel hit its mark). But to dismiss as you do those thousands of newly dead, mutilated, bereaved of whom I've cited a tiny sample as "microscopic," to suggest that they are of negligible concern as against the supposed greater good of "regime change" is to assume a stance in no way superior to that of the planners and pilots of l'affaire du onzi\ufffdme septembre, whose victims, those firemen, financiers, functionaries, cooks and clerks you, I daresay, did not at the time regard as microscopic, were in the eyes of their killers lawful sacrifices to their visions of god and jihad.

Regarding the prospects before us now, I could not improve upon Ashton's recent musings ([link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=95196|http://z.iwethey.org...w?contentid=95196]) on the subject. To the extent this triumph of arms redounds to the political advantage of our own very sinister regime, I freely acknowledge that I begrudge it, but to the extent that an early conclusion brings to an end, or at least dramatically diminishes, the deaths among the combatants and bystanders I warmly endorse it, even should this mean I'm not to be taken seriously as a big picture kinda guy. The emperor does have clothes--but some of us will persist in noticing that the toga's hem is sodden with blood.

cordially,

[edit: kindly formatting suggestions in first paragraph]

When someone dies in an act of violence, how their death is perceived depends on why they died

Maybe by you, buckaroo, but don't project the poverty of your imagination upon the poor bastards there on the ground.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned the World Trade Center, since the lad--predictably, in retrospect--glommed onto it to the exclusion of rational argument. And then,

It was inevitable that some should die during the liberation of their country, and the ones who eventually did die will be remembered as a symbol of their country's struggle. They will be thanked by the millions of Iraqis who live on, now free from the nightmare of the last three decades.

Really, now. It's hard to see what form such thanks might take--what, precisely, are the dead to be thanked for?
[image|http://www.womeninlogistics.org/corpse.jpg||||]
--"Thanks, Sis! If you hadn't taken the top bunk, this coulda been me!" Did this Iraqi death bring the regime one second closer to its end? I mean, if the tyke had sat in Saddam's lap at a photo-op with a satchel charge under her frock that would be one thing, but blasted in half in her sleep by an errant American missile, and then carelessly permitting her remains to be photographed--serving, if anything, to stiffen the foe's resolve--this properly elicits the "thanks" of her survivors? Good god, what a colossally stupid thing to say! Say she'll be mourned, say she'll be remembered, hell, say she'll be forgotten in time, but don't say she'll be thanked. Jesus Christ in a fucking chicken basket...

despairingly,

(umlauts omitted for the sake of deficient browsers)