Has a human life become worth more?

Today it was announced that there have officially been 2000 deaths in Iraq. This has been called a benchmark by a lot of anti-war protesters and they want to have 2000 people meet up in Washington DC and act dead to show people just how many people are dead if 2000 people have died. I, as my readers know, am against the war in Iraq because I believe it was a war of convinience, not a necessary war. However, I am very surprised at the big deal over 2000 deaths. In the Vietnam War there were hundreds of thousands of deaths. In World War I there were millions of deaths in just the first few years. Countless wars have caused many more than 2000 people to die and in a much shorter period of time.

So I’m wondering, in the mind of the average American, has human life become more valuable? Whereas we would tolerate millions of deaths we now only tolerate thousands? Or is it because we feel that this war was unjustified? Maybe, with all of our amazing technology, we just figured that we wouldn’t really have that many deaths anymore. In truth, almost no one was killed during the actual war phase of the current situation in Iraq. It’s only been recently while we’ve been keeping the peace in Iraq that so many have died; due, no doubt, to the fact that we don’t know who the enemy is now that it isn’t Saddam’s army.

If I had to guess, based on my own personal views, I’d say that most people are angry not because they feel that a human life is worth so much but because they feel that their family memebers are dying without reason. If Bush hadn’t wanted to go to war with Iraq so badly, we wouldn’t be killing our 18 and 19 year olds. However, now that we messed things up, it would be quite irresponsible for us to leave. Remember what your mother used to tell you? If you can mess it up, you can clean it up.

Hopefully, we can speed up our process to help rebuild the infrastructure so that the Iraqis can have the country to themselves. What if they go through a Civil War? So what?!? I don’t know why that’s such a big deal. Does no one remember what happened in the United States in the 1860s?????? We already forced them to write a constitution in 1/20th the time we took to write our own constitution. Are we not going to allow them to have a Civil War? If that’s what they need, that’s what they need. Again, why are we trying to impose unnatural demands on them?