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Comment by Fargren | Hacker News Reader

>>over 3x as many Americans who were killed in Iraq in total - so 3 Iraq wars per year.

I know what you mean, but it really bothers me that you are only counting American deaths. The total number of Iraqi deaths arising from the Iraq war is highly disputed, but it seems to be somewhere between 150,000 and a bit over 1,000,000, depending on the survey and whether it only counts direct deaths of combatants vs. surveys that count civilian deaths and indirect effects. In any case, deaths arising from opioids are nowhere near any amount of "Iraq wars per year".

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I remember listening to a rare press conference with President Bush in 2006. Someone asked him how many people had died as a result of the war in Iraq. To my genuine astonishment, he answered that approximately 60000 had died thus far. I couldn't decide whether to be more astonished at the figure, or that he had just given a straightforward answer to a direct question.

I think he's just comparing deaths of Americans by action A to deaths of Americans by action B.

There's no ulterior motive there; just a desire to compare apples to apples.

Even if you only count American deaths, the majority of them were probably caused by spending money on the war that could have been spent elsewhere.

Because this is a matter of U.S. government policy, the responsibility is to the people of the United States.

Seems pretty simple to me.

All humans have the responsibility to not kill each other.

Who said that? Some times humans think other humans have a responsibility to kill eachother; I'm guessing you sometimes agree.

Even if you believe humans should sometimes kill each other (which is not a universally held opinion, but also not insane) you should see all loss of human life as, at best, a necessary cost. To not consider enemy casualties as a cost goes against this. To not consider civilian casualties on the other side as a cost is even worse. If killing foreign people is not considered something costly, then war becomes too easy a choice for the countries with the most powerful armies.

Every heard of "human rights" ? They're not called "American rights" or "European rights", are they?

Only Americans are real people. Others are just foreign statistics. Nobody died at Stalingrad, for instance.

sad but true, i guess rest of the world should all adapt to this approach and just ignore US overdose epidemics, because it doesn't matter, right?

> and just ignore US overdose epidemics

Actually, that would be fine. The US doesn't need the world to pay attention to its opioid overdose problems. The world has enough problems to focus on, like millions of people still dying from malaria, or a billion people without access to clean running water or electricity. The US has plenty of tax revenue - ~$6.6 trillion annually, larger than Japan's entire economy - to deal with the problem completely on its own.

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