Casualties of war.

• Position: Persian Gulf War - Editorial

Think about it: Saddam's threat to the region ended, the price of oil stabilized, Arabs kissing Americans in the streets of Kuwait City. Three hundred twenty-three American troops dead-a tragedy, certainly, but in relative terms a miracle. Do we at the Monthly regret counseling patience, diplomacy, and sanctions rather than war in the Persian Gulf?

Don't bet on it. We continue to believe that this war was wrong both in principle and in practice: in principle, because war should be the last and not the first resort; in practice, because when the United States does go to war, all Americans should be in some way involved, but in this conflict most of us had to bear no burden and pay no price.

For anyone who remembers the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, or the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the notion that the U.S. has some moral obligation to defend by force of arms any "legitimate government" against foreign aggression is too silly to merit consideration. But there are two arguments against our opposition in principle that we find compelling: 1) "While the coalition patiently waited for sanctions to work, wouldn't Iraqi troops have continued to torture Kuwaitis?" 2) "Wasn't war necessary to wipe out Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, and nuclear threat?"

The litany of horror coming out of Kuwait certainly does make the blood boil. Tragically, the litany hasn't ended with the Americans' arrival, since the Iraqi crimes have set in motion the familiar cycle of atrocity, with Kuwaitis carrying out reprisals against collaborators-and against agitators for democracy.) But consider the other side of the ledger. Estimates of the number of dead Iraqi soldiers-not counting civilians-range from between 25,000 and 50,000 (The New, York Times) to 150,000 (NBC, drawing on Pentagon sources); Time and Newsweek put the number at around I 00,000.

Whatever the precise figure, "there were," as General Schwarzkopf put it, "a very, very large number of dead in these units, a very, very large number of dead." Many of these soldiers were draftees, often ignorant and illiterate and-judging from the mass surrenders to any Americans they could find, including journalists-generally unwilling to fight. If, as Bush repeatedly said, "Our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people," we sure had a strange way of showing it. The Kuwaitis were horribly mistreated. But dropping fuel-air explosives and cluster bombs on starving...