How much money have you given to relive the suffering of the poor in the world? We’ll count the United Way, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, Catholic Charities, any and all payroll deducted, tax-diminishing contributions, and anything that you can argue you’ve given money to in the name of a good cause and/or contributes to someone else’s quality of life and costs you something or takes up over an hour of your time. We’ll even include time contributed toward habitat for humanity and any other charity where you can say you’ve lessened the pain, suffering and/or hunger of any human on the planet. Have you adopted a child through any of the various adopt-a-foreign child programs? There’s Feed the Hungry, Christian Children’s Fund, and so many others. Have you donated your clothing to Goodwill or done anything for the Salvation Army?

Answer the above questions honestly, and then think about your position on the Iraq war. Are you for it, or against it? Obviously most sane people are against any war for almost all reasons. No one goes into war happy about the prospect of human lives lost. But then the question becomes, can your stance on the war be based on a distaste for human suffering alone? If so, would you be against any war at any time, even those wars that we undertake to defend American soil from direct attack? Would you have opposed American involvement in World War II? How does your stance on the Iraq war impact your voting? How about the November elections? Are you basing your vote on Tuesday on the war in Iraq?

I’ve talked to dozens of people about their stance on the war in Iraq, and most of them are against it. Most people I’ve talked to are against the war for two reasons. 1.) The intelligence that we relied on was inaccurate, and 2.) There are just “too many Americans dying over there”. Since #1 above is hindsight (and many leaders in the democratic party voted for the war), we’ll focus on #2.

Based on the television ads I’ve seen running in my area, the majority of democrats are running on a “get out of Iraq now” platform, with some “track down sexual predators” and “lower taxes” jargon thrown in for good measure (I’ll ignore the urge to review the democrat’s record on taxes, although it is a “gimme” topic).

If your primary reason to vote “Democrat” on Tuesday is to support a candidate who is likely to pull our troops out of Iraq, and your reasoning is to prevent “further American deaths”, pardon my editorial chuckle (ha-ha).

Hopefully you’re smart enough to see that by voting for someone based solely upon the war in Iraq, with an eye towards getting America out of Iraq, is not, in and of itself very sound reasoning. Hopefully you have a better rationale for your vote other than to hearken to the Democratic Party’s rally call on this war. The significance of the almost three thousand deaths of servicemen and women who chose to join the armed forces and go out to the battlefield to support America would only be diminished by leaving Iraq before the mission is accomplished. There’s no way around it. If we leave Iraq before Democracy is established there, and it falls back to its previous state, those who died, did so in vain.

To date, the number of Americans who have lost their lives since the war began is 2,811. (See Wikipedia article: here).

Conversely, the number of people worldwide who have or will die because of starvation by the time we reach the third anniversary of the war’s beginning will be: 27,375,000 (according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, see Wikipedia article entitled Starvation ). Now, you might argue that we can control the war, but controlling world hunger is not within our means. However, a well-read file boy would argue that America causes hunger and famine in many countries throughout the world (America the leading user of resources article: here ), but that’s beside the point. The point is, if you are willing to pull the lever for a candidate based on his stance to limit American military deaths, what are you willing to do based upon the twenty-some million people who have died to starvation since the war began (25,000 people worldwide die each day because of starvation)?

By File Boy