Bad Faith
By Winner of the Bildungsroman Award for Best Coming of Age Matt Yglesias makes a simple but nonetheless not often enough made point here:
The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option. Iraq Year One was a fiasco, but it was a genuine mistake. Since then, and certainly these days, we’re passed all that. Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success.
Sending young men and women to die based on a policy error is at least forgivable. Sending them to die to preserve people’s egos is quite another matter. (Or, if you’re enough of a psychopath, you can make a horrible, visibly specious attempt to minimize these pointless deaths by comparing them to homicide deaths for the population as a whole.)
…UPDATE: I agree with eRobin and others in comments that it’s more complicated because of the amount of bad faith inherent in selling the war. Still, I can at least imagine someone (although very misguidedly) in 2003 thinking the war might accomplish something.