Bin Laden: $1 million, USA: $3 Trillion

There's a sobering article over at The Atlantic: The Cost of Bin Laden: $3 Trillion Over 15 Years. According to the authors, that price tag is the conservative estimate. And what did we get for our money? Predator drones.

How much did Osama bin Laden have to spend to do this? Maybe $1 million.

Osama bin Laden's reign of terror should remind us just how tenuous civilization is. It's hard work to build things, but trivially easy to vandalize and destroy them. An artist can spend a month on a beautiful mural, only to have it destroyed in minutes by a kid with no talent and a can of spray paint. Our society can spend billions building a modern skyscraper, only to have it destroyed in an hour by a few men with small knives in their pockets.

Just how much did Osama bin Laden really cost us? We'll never know the true answer, but

Women Pay Huge Price for Iraqi War

The Iraqis are paying a huge price in lost lives for the war, but there's a hidden cost that has largely been unnoticed. Its the price young Iraqi women are paying: there are no men to marry.

If this happened in America, it would be sad, but women could find fulfilling lives. Women in America aren't judged just by who they can marry or even whether they marry. Women in America can choose to marry or not. Either way, they have opportunities. They can become artists, work in the trades, become corporate executives, work in the service industry and many more. They lead productive, meaningful, happy lives, married or not.

Not Iraqi women. If a woman isn't married by her early twenties, she's considered a poor choice.

Repeat Ft. Hood tragedy every day for 34 years? That's Iraq

What if yesterday's tragic shooting of twelve soldiers at Fort Hood by a deranged Army doctor happened every single day for the next week? We'd have 84 dead. What if twelve innocents were killed every day for a month? 360 dead. A year? That would be 4,380 dead innocent people.

It would be awful.

And what if we killed twelve innocent people every single day for the next 34 years? That would be Iraq.

Americans don't know what war really means. It means death. In Iraq, even the United States government admits at least 150,000 innocent civilians – over 60% of them women and children – have been killed by American bombs. Not terrorists, American bombs.

To equal that death toll in America, you'd have to kill twelve soldiers every single day for 34 years.

Except that it wouldn't be soldiers. To equal Iraq, you'd have to make eight of the twelve be women and children, every single day, for 34 years.

Or put it another way: For every soldier who died at Fort Hood yesterday, there are 12,500 dead Iraqi civilians. For every American brother, sister, mother, father, wife, husband, child, or friend, the death of their loved one is an unmitigated tragedy, a sadness that will be with them forever. And for each one of them, there are 12,500 Iraqi brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends who also mourn the death of a loved one, the tragic loss of a human spirit that was snuffed out by an American bomb.

Humans don't seem capable of understanding large numbers. We gasp in horror when a little girl is kidnapped in Florida, but yawn when ten thousand civilians are killed in an invasion. We're glued to the TV set when OJ is on trial for murdering one woman, but don't care a bit that 400,000 Americans die from tobacco each year.

So when twelve soldiers are killed in one day, I hope it can remind us of the true tragedy we're inflicting in Iraq. To us, 150,000 is beyond our grasp, just a big number, a statistic. But to some little girl in Iraq whose mother was just killed by a brick from a bomb blast, it's her entire whole world.

My heart goes out to the families of those who died yesterday. This tragedy reminds us just how precious life is, and how tragic a death is of someone in the prime of life. And I hope it also reminds us of the magnitude of what we've done in Iraq.

Bush Manipulated by Rumsfeld using Religion?

GQ Magazine published some startling cover sheets for President George W. Bush's top-secret briefings that were prepared by Rumsfeld. Each one features a photo from the Iraq war, with a biblical quote superimposed, suggesting that the war against Iraq was more of a Christian jihad than a war of liberation or to protect American security. With no further insight into who prepared them and why, they're chilling, un-American, unpatriotic, and show a shocking ignorance of the history of colonialism and Islam in the Middle East. If those cover sheets had been leaked during the heat of the Iraq war, there's no telling the damage that would have been done to America's image (that is, if it was even possible for it to get any lower).

But it gets worse. Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a startling accusation three days ago:

As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security.

Anyone with a brain realized seven years ago that George W. Bush was not in charge of this country; he was too empty-headed. Instead, if Frank Rich is correct, the triumvirate of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft found in George W. Bush a man who was electable and who could be manipulated through smooth words and religion. Apparently, Rumsfeld cynically and deliberately used Bush's simplistic religious views and gullibility to further Rumsfeld/Cheney/Ashcroft's unwarranted and immoral war.

Once again, religion proves to be the tool of evil men. Over 150,000 civilians killed by American bombs, over 4,200 American soldiers killed, and for what? Nothing. And all thanks to a President, conditioned by decades of brainwashing to believe the irrational and conflicting "truths" of the Christian Bible.

President Bush, the World isn't just Good and Evil

One of my biggest objections to religion is not the specific beliefs, but rather the way of thinking, the tendency to cast everything into simplistic black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. This was amply illustrated yesterday by President Bush's farewell address:

I have often spoken to you about good and evil. This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere.

But Mr. President, what about the innocents you murdered by invading Iraq?

At least six independent agencies have estimated of the deaths attributable to the Iraq war. The lowest reliable estimate puts the count at over 100,000 civilians, non combatants – more than thirty times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center attack of 9/11. In fact, the real number of deaths may be much higher, over 280,000 Iraqis who died. And the majority of these were killed by American bombs dropped from American airplanes and missiles, not terrorists.

Want even more horrifying numbers? Fifty five percent of the dead are women and children. By the most conservative estimate, that's fifty five thousand women and children whose blood is on our hands.

These were innocent people. Civilian deaths. Why isn't America horrified at this? Why is it that President Bush can be outraged by 3,000 American deaths, but not understand that when you bomb a country back to the stone age, hundreds of thousands of innocent people – children, grandparents, mothers, everyone – will die?

I believe that George W. Bush's religious background was at least partly responsible for these deaths. Accepting religious beliefs requires a suspension of logic, a belief in things that plainly are without a factual foundation. Children are deliberately taught to suspend logic, to trust feelings and emotions rather than intellect and reason. "Faith trumps reason" is an official part of all modern religions:

Divine revelation, not reason, is the source of all truth.
– Tertullian of Carthage (150-225 AD)

A man like George W. Bush sees the 9/11 attacks in black and white, good and evil. He is apparently incapable of understanding that war is also evil, that fighting evil with evil is never a simple choice. If he'd been raised without religion, would he have been wiser? Could he have seen that the choices were complex and grey, not black and white? I don't know.

But I do know that George W. Bush has demonstrated yet again that Christianity does not make a person more moral.

Tags: iraq civilian deaths bush religion Christianity atheism