[QUOTE=marshmallow]
Either the mission is worth it or it’s not. Either the logic of the war makes sense or it doesn’t. It’s either moral or immoral as you understand the world. You support the war, 4,000 dead or no. You’re against the war, whether it’s four, 4,000, or 40,000 dead. You certainly don’t take a “Well, let’s see how this works out, I’m not really sure” approach. Maybe when you’re buying breakfast cereal – certainly not when you back a fucking war.
[/QUOTE]
You make a strong point here. But two things come to mind:
One is that the war may be adjudged worth the cost in blood and treasure. But saying that the deaths and injuries are a “small price” to pay…well, they never are. The cost is always enormous in the lives of the survivors. Ask my mother-in-law, who never knew her father, killed in the final weeks of WWII. Or ask her mother, who knew the husband she lost so briefly that it would now seem like a long-ago dream, but for the daughter she had to raise alone.
That was a more distant war, but this war will have many stories like it. To tell those whose stories they are that the price they pay is “small” is to crap all over them. That’s the reason why Boehner’s comment hit a nerve with me, and I suspect it’s why it has struck a nerve with many others too.
The second is that it illuminates a fundamental problem with the war. Let’s suppose that Boehner had just said that the cost, as high as it might seem, would ultimately prove worth it if we were to see it through.
Obviously if you’re like me, and you think we’re just throwing more lives down the drain to no good purpose, the cost is too high - any cost is too high.
And if, OTOH, you believe that we’re on a clear, if difficult, path towards an unambiguous attainable objective, then you can make a decision about whether the cost is likely to be worth the result: if yes, stay the course; if no, then throw in the towel.
But we’ve had four and a half years of shifting goalposts, rationales, and approaches. Many of the war’s proponents either admit that even the prospect of stabilizing Iraq is a longshot gamble, or will take another decade, or both. Many other war proponents are what Kevin Drum terms “chaos hawks” - that is, they aren’t sure we can accomplish anything positive, but we’ve got to stay because of the chaos and violence that is likely to erupt when we leave. And of course the Administration spins a more positive view, but nobody really believes them anymore.
In short, there’s no basis for making that sort of cost-benefit call to justify the war. All a proponent can say is, “Well, let’s see how this works out, I’m not really sure.” There’s no way to be confident of a payoff that will in the end justify the blood spilled, by anyone’s calculus. Those prosecuting the war are clearly blundering around in the dark, hoping the thing comes to a decent conclusion. But it isn’t clear what tenable conclusion we can reach, or how long it will take (and hence how many lives it is likely to cost).
It’s ‘worth it’ if you believe there’s a sufficiently nice pony behind door number three, but not only can nobody be sure there’s even a pony behind the door, but nobody’s got a clue as to whether spending any number of lives will open the door to begin with, and if so, how to translate the lives into getting the door open.