700 dead and counting

Last Sunday, it was announced that our ill-fated invasion of Iraq has now cost the lives of 700 American soldiers. I have no idea how many Iraqi lives have been lost so far; such figures haven't been tabulated with any real accuracy. But we do know that 700 volunteers in the American armed services have been killed as a result of our decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, mostly in the chaos which resulted once the liberation of Iraq turned into a prolonged occupation.

Seven hundred doesn't sound like much, especially compared to the 3,000 who died on 9/11, let alone compared to the nearly 60,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. But each one of those 700 was a real young man or woman — one probably no older than a Princeton undergraduate, albeit without the privileges that keep Princetonians safely in New Jersey, while those with no other opportunities are sent to Iraq. The loss of any single one of these young lives would be a tragedy, but, to paraphrase that insightful moral philosopher Josef Stalin, the loss of 700 is a statistic.

I keep trying to figure out ways to make that statistic meaningful. This column, for example, has exactly 700 words. So we're talking an American casualty — a human life — for each word that I type, for each word that you read.

Last year, I had the privilege to precept in Princeton's largest class, Maurizio Viroli's famous introduction to political theory, POL 210. That had about 400 students in it, and they would fill all the seats in McCosh 50, leaving latecomers to stand in the aisles. I try to imagine what it would be like to lose all those young people, and I find that I cannot. Yet the casualties in Iraq surpassed by a full 300 the number of students enrolled in Politics 210.

When he was a young, antiwar activist, newly returned from Vietnam, John Kerry memorably asked, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Later, as a senator, Kerry voted to authorize the current invasion and occupation of Iraq. Like his fellow senators who voted for the war — misled by faulty intelligence and by the spin of an administration that saw the war on terror as an excuse to settle scores with old enemies rather than an opportunity to make America safer — John Kerry made a mistake, a mistake that he is still unwilling to acknowledge fully.

President Bush, however, refuses to acknowledge that he has ever made any mistakes at all, suggesting in a news conference last week that those ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction might still be found on a hypothetical Iraqi turkey farm. Such arrogance makes it clear that, as long as this administration remains in power, more and more Americans will die for Bush's mistakes — most importantly his decision to invade a nation which posed no real threat to the U.S. and had no real ties to al-Qaeda. This decision not only led to deadly chaos in Iraq, after all, but also diverted critical resources from Afghanistan, allowing top terrorist leaders to escape and the Taliban to regain control over much of the country.

Indeed, it is likely that the last American to die from these mistakes may not even be a soldier in Iraq, but a civilian at home who falls victim to an undeterred al-Qaeda plotting from an anarchic Afghanistan.

John Kerry may not be the ideal candidate of a Deaniac's dreams, but he does realize that President Bush's foreign policy has been "stunningly ineffective." Kerry represents a real change from the deadly status quo. In the battlefields of Vietnam, Kerry learned the value of a single human life, and in the antiwar movement he led upon his return, Kerry demanded an end to the conflict which was one of our country's greatest mistakes.

Our greatest mistake in the war on terror has already cost us 700 American lives — one for each word in this column. Only by becoming engaged with politics, and by embracing the candidacy of a viable leader committed to ending Bush's deadly policies, can we insure that this mistake does not cost us thousands more.

Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. You can email him at mfrazer@princeton.edu.