It's a Tie

It appears as though the number of American servicemen and women killed in Iraq has today exceeded the number of New Yorkers who were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The White House is distancing itself from any correlation between these two statistics, which is kind of ironic considering that they were the ones who drew the false connection between Iraq and 9/11 in the first place. Further evincing their ignorance, the right wing-nut’s response has been to ask how many Americans would have died had the U.S. not invaded Iraq. From the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog:

“Well, the answer is indeed unknowable, but given that Iraq had no substantial connection to Anti-American terrorism and posed no security threat whatsoever to the United States, the overwhelmingly likely answer is "zero." Whatever Iraq was, it wasn't "fighting back" against the Islamic radicals who actually attacked New York.

Of course, if it was only Republican pundits who don't actually know anything about foreign policy who think that replacing a secular dictatorship with an Islamist quasi state was an effective way of "fighting back" against Islamic terrorism, this would be relatively harmless (although pathetic.) The truly appalling thing is that people actually in charge of American policymaking also didn't demand any logical connection between a given military response and the actual threat facing the country, and as a result nearly three thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died for nothing.”