Overall, Kaplan's article does a good job of analyzing the situation in Iraq, but I found his closing comment irritating: "If we're going to stay in Iraq for months and years to come - at a cost of hundreds of billions of additional dollars and hundreds, if not thousands, of additional lives - we at least ought to know why."

Like much American commentary about Iraq, this estimate of the number of lives being lost obviously only considers the lives of U.S. soldiers. By far the majority of lives being lost in Iraq are Iraqi lives, and they are dying at the rate of "hundreds, if not thousands," every month.

What this sort of commentary conveys is the unconscious assumption that only American lives are worth counting - something that the rest of the world would certainly dispute.

Not only are you correct, but for some reason people never want to acknowledge that dropping bombs on populated areas kills innocent people. The old saw that they are being used as "human shields", doesn't hold water when you consider that bombs are usually dropped on cities.

When people call for the bombing of Iran they seem to irrationally believe that the bombs will only land on people who are specifically threatening us or on abandoned areas. In actuallity they usually fall on innocent people--women, children, pregnant women. Doesn't this bother people who happen to be pro-life?

And this doesn't take into account that sometimes cluster bombs with depleted uranium are dropped, which kills people long after hostilities may have ended

Probably a hundred Iraqi lives (possibly more) have been lost for every American one; no doubt injuries are along the same line. The 'costs' there are far, far higher than most people are even willing to talk about.

Casualties, civilian as well as military, should lead the evening news every night on every channel. This war is an atrocity.

But what is being overlooked from a strategy standpoint is that by fighting terror via an invasion, we kill and injure THOUSANDS of innocent people, which from their point of view is no less terrorism than 911. Many (MOST in fact) were not part of Al Queida and therefore were killed or injured because they lived in the wrong country-a country which never threatened us nor supported Al Queida. Now it has become a recruiting tool for the very same terrorists we fight.

So why dont we question a strategy which accomplishes such goals for our enemies?