To me, this kind of "analysis" is disgusting.

In an op-ed piece in today's NY Times, Bob Herbert mentions the latest American casualties in Iraq and then asks the Vietnam-style question. They died "for what?" He then explains his disagreement regarding our choice of targets in the War on Terrorism - and conveniently fails to mention Afghanistan and that we've killed or captured 2/3 of Al-Qaeda's senior leaders.

It is certainly debatable as to whether or not we needed to go to war with Iraq or not. The decision was certainly made based on human error (see the CIA) brought about by the decision not to disclose the truth (see Saddam Hussein). But the question "for what?" requires that the questioner see no benefit for anyone to our invasion and that our young men and women are dying for no good reason at all.

Let's assume that a person was completely ignorant of Saddam Hussein's evils, and you killed thousands of innocent people in a futile hunt for WMD's. Then you found out about the torture, gassings, mass graves, rape rooms, invasions of Iran and Kuwait, billions of stolen dollars, terrible starvation, etc. Let's say by accident we just so happened to allow the Iraqi people to form a democracy where none of the above will ever happen again. Never mind the geo-political improvements to the region. All of a sudden I think you'd feel that on balance some good had been done and that many more people would wind up alive than dead. And an infinitely better quality of alive at that, too.

Just because a lot of people die in a war doesn't mean that the enterprise does not make that place, and mankind in general, better off in the long run. That is the real "what for" to answer "for what?".