A while ago, I estimated that the Iraq war has probably saved in excess of 400,000 lives. More recently, Confederate Yankee tried the same experiment, and arrived at a similar number of deaths -- about 85,000 a year under Saddam -- but a smaller number of lives saved so far (he's responding to a study which alleged a much higher rate of lives lost than the Iraq Body Count) -- but still nearly 200,000.

If so, the tragic loss of 4,000 American lives also means that about 50-100 Iraqi lives have been saved for each American who gave his or her own.

But that doesn't yet portray the true cost, since military personnel die in peacetime as well. How different is that death rate? Sweetness & Light cites Congress's own reports (going back decades) to show that, in fact, the death rate during the Iraq war has been just about the same as during peacetime. If so, that implies troops are now being used to save lives, as opposed to dying in similar rates in other circumstances (training, car accidents, suicides, etc.) with no similar savings in lives resulting.

Finally, I'd like to direct you to these numbers, which I encountered years ago, but had since lost track of. They're an accounting of what nations supplied Saddam with arms.

The argument is always made that "we created Saddam". It's false: we once talked about supporting him (long after he had already come to power -- GHW Bush was a big fan of the idea) but ended up providing him only minimal support. Saddam was a huge Soviet client, however.

But the rule is that if the US has a tiny involvement in something bad, it will be amplified to be the major factor, and if many other nations do 10 or 100 (or in this case, 200) times as much of the same thing, that contribution will be utterly ignored. (And I've also lost the other article at the time, but if I recall, our main "military aid" to Saddam consisted primarily of supplying some trucks.)