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[Diane_Keaton]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I was going back to the conversation we were having last week. I am not going to tell you that civilian casualties in Iraq are higher recently than they were before the war. I don't know whether that's true or not. But since you were lamenting civilian casualties as a general matter, I made the related point that our tactics in Iraq are causing more civilian casualties than other tactics would. I take it you don't disagree, but don't want to talk about it either.



No, I don't think I would have. Not because I didn't see a problem, but because it's not clear to me that in the long run we're going to have done much to make things better. In that respect, it's another Somalia. I suspect that -- for various reasons -- it will take a relatively brutal regime to exercise power in Iraq, with all that entails. The alternative is a failed state, with all that entails. Maybe, if things go well, we'll end up with an authoritarian regime that is less repressive than Hussein was. For the same reason, I don't favor invading Zimbabwe -- I don't see good odds of making a bad situation better.

I appreciate the "first do no harm" approach, and I also recognize the possibility that the new regime in Iraq may not be immune from human rights abuses. Where we differ is that I believe the scale of inhumanity had reached an intolerable level so that these risks outweighed the benefit of continuing for another 15 years as is.