2500

Armchair Generalist, responding to Tony Snow’s claim that 2500 “is a number”:

No, Tony. It’s not a number. “No. 2500” had a face, family, and friends. Not that he was one of your friends – asshole.

Yes… but.

There’s no doubt that the death of the 2500th American serviceman in Iraq is a tragedy. However, that particularly death is no more or less tragic than death 1831, death 722, or death 118. I concur that Snow was displaying the flip attitude towards casualties that this administration has become famous for, an attitude that is both infuriating and inexcusable. On the other hand, though, he’s kind of right.

A war supporter made the point to me that numbers like 2500 are for all intents and purposes politically meaningless, and I think that he was right. The debate on either side of the war would not be affected a whit if the number was 1250 or if the number was 5000. Indeed, I’m not convinced that doubling or halving the casualty number would even give a reliable indication as to whether the war was going well. Casualty rates are far more useful for evaluating such claims than absolute casualty numbers.

Nor does the number 2500, or even 5000, represent some kind of upper limit on what the United States ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war. The willingness to accept a cost in blood has to be proportionate to the goals pursued and the benefits expected of a military action. If I had believed that Hussein was two weeks away from a nuke, and that he would immediately have handed that nuke over to Osama Bin Laden, and that he had planned and helped bankroll 9/11, and that he was about to invade Kuwait again, and that his removal would cause democracy to spring all over the Middle East etc., then I daresay 10000 American dead would not have been too high a price to pay for his ouster. Since I’m not an idiot, I didn’t believe any of those things. It’s impossible to come up with a specific number of American servicemen that I would have been willing to sacrifice to eliminate Hussein, but it’s fair to say that 2500 is way too many.

Nevertheless, Tony Snow has a point. The issues that render the Iraq War just or sensible have almost nothing to do with the tragic death of the 2500th American serviceman in Iraq. Invoking that number (and I don’t mean to pick on Jason; lots of bloggers have mentioned it, but his comment had a characteristic blunt elegance) doesn’t really tell us anything new about what’s happening in Iraq. The next number to receive serious attention will be 2987 (one more than died on September 11), but its occurence will be no more relevant to the war, or even to the evaluation of our current progress in the war, than was 2500.