Generations

In Schindler's List, the accountant says to Schindler: "There will be generations because of what you did." That always stuck with me, because it makes you realize that an individual means more than just that single life; it is also a node on the great family tree of history that begets exponentially more nodes over time. When you prune it, it's not a leaf that falls to the ground--it's a gigantic branch.

So when we consider a situation like Iraq, I think it's important to keep some perspective on what's important. And what's important is, quite simply, human lives. When we talk of the costs and benefits of war, we talk in the same breath about many things--the dollar cost, the soldiers killed and wounded, the infrastructure destroyed, the civilian deaths, the prospect of a free and democratic Iraq, the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. But really the most important thing in this list--orders of magnitude more important than anything else--is the sheer level of civilian death that has occurred since the war began in 2003.

Low-end estimates for the number of civilians killed are around 100,000, but there is good reason to believe that the number is quite a bit higher than that, upwards of 600,000. When you think of how many of those people would have gone on to have children had they lived, the sheer loss of humanity, from the generational standpoint, is staggering. To invert the accountant Stern's line: Because of what we did in Iraq, there won't be generations.

Hundreds of years from now, it seems likely to me that no one will think much about the Iraq War, it's objectives, or whether it was a success. It won't really matter whether the Iraqis of this time period lived under a cruel tyrant or a functioning democracy. What will matter, however, is whether the direct descendants of the Iraqis of today exist. That is the great impact the Iraq War will have on history--not some grand geopolitical effect or historical turning of the tides, but the simple demographic fact that millions upon millions of people who would have been alive were, in fact, never born. When our bombs exploded in Iraq, untold millions of descendants disappeared in a counterfactual puff of smoke.