LinkedIn on Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Let’s start by forgetting about the military and civilian people who have been wounded as a result of United States foreign policy. It’s not that the wounded are somehow irrelevant. Hurting people, at whatever level, is an awful thing to do. It’s just that I have something I want to say and it helps me make my point if I focus on the dead.
“…focus on the dead.” These are not words I like to write. They remind me of how unbearable it would be if they were about one of my own children, wife or other loved ones.
So, this piece is only about the dead.
Consider the following… According to our government, to date the war against Iran that we initiated has resulted in the death of seventeen Americans, all in the military.
The thing about numbers of people killed is that they defy the basic conventions of ordinary math. The death of just one person, military or civilian, is an infinite loss to that person and his or her family – and possibly to our society. We’ll never know. Taking all aspects of our individual humanity into account, people are unique and irreplaceable. So, losing seventeen of us isn’t just seventeen times worse, is it? If that were the simple math of casualties, it would suggest that the loss of a single life has some finite, calculable standard value, which it doesn’t.
At the same time that we’ve lost our seventeen military men and women, Iran has lost more than 3,500 civilians according to health authorities in their country. Let’s assume that’s a good number. Plus, somewhere between 4,700 and 6,000 military and government personnel. Let’s say 5,000 for the sake of discussion. Round numbers, we’re talking about 8,000 Iranian people who have died as a result of the war we started.
Are they innocents, these 8,000, or are they bad people? In a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a spy whose wife, Jaimie Lee Curtis, has just discovered what her husband really does for a living, she asks him, hoping for a negative response, “Have you killed anyone?” To which he answers apologetically, “Yes, but they were all bad.” as if that makes any difference. Does it? Make any difference, that is? Do we somehow have permission to kill people that aren’t nice or who otherwise offend us?
The politics and societal norms of Iran aren’t relevant. People are people. That our government, the media and too many of us in general tend to value our losses, but not those of our opponents is unfortunate, to say the least. They’ve killed seventeen of us while we’ve killed roughly 8,000 of them. It’s a ratio of 470:1 and there’s nothing fair or okay about it. Each one of us is not worth 470 of them. To think about the spread that way is ridiculous. To even ask the question is proof of how truly uncivilized we still are – despite our standing among the world’s economies and hierarchy of power. If we valued their lives, Iranian lives, as equivalent to our own, what passes for the humanity in us would have put a hard stop to this war the moment Trump started it.
Some of us make the excuse that the Iranian government doesn’t value its constituents the way we do, but considers them dispensable. Could be, but what difference does that make? They’re still people and we’ve killed them. Even if we argue that we’ve done so in self-defense, how immediate was that threat and did we do everything possible to find a non-violent solution?
Does the no more nuclear weapons argument really make any sense? We have nuclear weapons. Israel has nuclear weapons. Isn’t it understandable that Iran would want its own nuclear weapons as a deterrent and means of self-defense?
The shutting down of USAID by the team of Trump and Musk has already resulted in the death of an estimated 700,000 people – with long-term consequences affecting thousands more. And somehow that’s okay? Because they were poor and didn’t look like many of us – and those of us who made the decision in particular? I mean, what the heck, no Americans were sentenced to death when the Agency for International Development cut off its distribution of vital foods and medicines. So, why should we care? I’m being sarcastic of course.
Here’s the thing. We urgently need to consider not only the cost of our foreign policies in terms of lost American lives, but also, with equal value, the carnage we’re imposing on our opponents and generally in other parts of the world.
To say that all people are created equal isn’t an exclusively American premise. It’s a global concept, that should apply to our entire species, without our recognition of which there will never be world peace.
-Les Cohen
