What history will say about Iraq War?

On Jan. 18, Marilee Swirczek wrote a commentary for the Nevada Appeal, decrying the number of lives lost in Iraq since 2002.

In the article, she cites more than 5,000 U.S. military deaths; more than 30,000 military wounded; at least 2,000 military suicides. I hope we remember the 160,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the countless Iraqi civilians wounded.

This is only one side of the story.

I applaud Ms. Swirczek for reminding The Appeal's readers what the cost of their freedom has been during the last decade. However, she did not mention the fact that the majority of those Iraqi civilian casualties were NOT caused by Americans; most were killed by terrorists, the very people our forces were opposing. Furthermore, suicide is not found solely in the military population. According to NIMH, the "... overall rate (in the U.S.) was 11.3 suicide deaths per 100,000 people." Those deaths were not all the result of wartime service.

That said, the price of liberty has always been heart-breakingly high. During WWII on Iwo Jima, Americans suffered 26,038 casualties in 35 days. On the first day of the Normandy invasion, the Allies' casualties were 6,038. During the American Revolution, the total number of American military casualties has been estimated at 50,000. Thomas Jefferson was right when he said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

There will always be those who seek to destroy us and our way of life, and I submit that we can and must stand against them, with warfare if necessary. George Orwell wrote, "Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Swirczek and the majority of Americans like her have slept peacefully in their beds because a very small minority of American men and women believed in the need to defend their country and volunteered to do so.

Nobody in his or her right mind wants war. Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, loathed it and said, "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

However, sometimes it is necessary to fight. John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, economist and Member of Parliament, understood this and wrote: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

The American warfighter has accepted a duty to all other Americans, realizing that the need to maintain our liberty overshadows the loathing and repugnance of war as well as the personal risk of death or injury. Nothing in this life is free; of all Americans today, nobody understands that better. They know that the currency which secures American liberty is their blood, even to the point of death.

To quote Frederick Douglass, African-American abolitionist and contemporary of Mark Twain: "Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."

Consider continued freedom and security in this land of ours a gift from those who have served and from their families. Consider it a gift of great price given by the 30,000 who have suffered wounds. Especially consider it a gift of ultimate price given by those 7,000 who will never again be hugged by those who loved them. They have not even asked you to acknowledge their gift. A simple "thank you" would be nice.

• Charles and Gale Harris live in Dayton.