It all adds up to something

ARE THE ANTIWAR protests getting you down, with all those pictures of empty boots lined up to symbolize the 1,911 (as of Friday) American soldiers killed in Iraq?

Don’t be discouraged. A lot of bad guys are dead too.

According to Gen. Jack Keane, who recently retired as deputy chief of staff of the Army, the U.S. coalition killed or detained at least 50,000 insurgents in the first seven months of 2005. So I guess we’re doing something right.

Granted, U.S. officials continue to tell us that the Iraqi insurgency really involves only a small number of people, maybe 16,000 insurgents, or at any rate “not more than 20,000.” But this discrepancy is not important. Maybe we captured or killed some of them twice.

What’s important is that we outnumber them -- 150,000 U.S. troops to 20,000 insurgents. Plus, we’ve got more firepower. The Government Accountability Office reports that we’ve used 1.8 billion rounds of small-caliber ammo in Iraq. Sure, skeptics say that if you work out the ratio of bullets fired to insurgents killed, it looks like our aim is not so great. But it’s the thought that counts.

Besides, the “bad guy body count” is probably too low. All those suicide bombers should really be counted in our “dead insurgents” column too.

True, those dead bad guys have taken out lots of civilians with them. What with suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, assassinations and so on, the Iraqi Interior Ministry estimates that from January 2004 to June 2005, insurgents managed to kill 12,000 Iraqi civilians. But that’s not so special. We’ve taken out lots of civilians too, and we weren’t even trying: According to the Oxford Research Group, U.S. forces have caused the deaths of more than 9,000 Iraqi civilians since the war began.

But hey, who’s counting? Everyone knows you can play games with statistics. Public health researchers, writing in the medical journal Lancet, said in 2004 that the Iraq war had likely caused about “100,000 excess deaths” among Iraqi civilians. So which is it -- 12,000, 9,000 or 100,000? How can you trust numbers that are so all over the place?

Regardless, it’s important to remember that we’re not the only ones who know this is a war worth fighting. We have lots of friends in Iraq, and plenty of them are dead too, including at least 197 coalition troops and 3,173 Iraqi soldiers and police.

I’m not denying that there are still some security problems in Iraq. But every cloud has a silver lining. The insecurity in Iraq is saving us money. Congress has allocated about $24 billion for reconstruction projects such as restoring electricity and rebuilding schools in Iraq, but because ongoing security problems have forced us to cancel many of our reconstruction plans, we don’t actually have to spend all that money!

Admittedly, despite these savings, the total cost of the Iraq war is nearing $200 billion. But keep it in perspective. We’re about to spend $200 billion on post-hurricane reconstruction here in the U.S., and we can do that without even raising taxes: We’ll just slash funding for public broadcasting, foreign aid and public health. So what’s the big deal about the cost of the Iraq war?

Viewed properly, in fact, the war in Iraq is actually part of the post-hurricane reconstruction effort. Consider that thousands of soldiers from Louisiana and Mississippi are serving in Iraq, and some of them have been rendered homeless by storm damage. Fortunately, the war enables us to offer them housing and a good job over in Iraq.

You see, it’s all connected, if you just think about it long enough. President Bush put it best: “You know, something we -- I’ve been thinking a lot ... and it’s clear to me that Americans value human life.... And that stands in stark contrast, by the way, to the terrorists we have to deal with. You see, we look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break. They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people. It’s a war on terror.... These are evil men who target the suffering. See, sometimes we forget about the evil deeds of these people. They killed 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001. They’ve killed in Madrid, and Istanbul, and Baghdad, and Bali, and London, and Sharm el Sheik, and Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Around the world they continue to kill. They have a strategy.”

Well, anyhoo ... what was I saying?

Oh, yes. Only connect. I mean, think of the waste, with all those empty boots lined up by antiwar protesters just to make some kind of political point. Wouldn’t it be so much more uplifting to donate those boots to hurricane victims?