counting the cost

Lately, I've been talking a lot about the astronomical cost of US foreign policy. It's worth a reminder that it isn't all about dollars and cents:

Consider that documented civilian deaths in Iraq since Bush’s 2003 invasion—noncombatants killed by military or paramilitary acts or because of the breakdown in civil society—have numbered nearly 120,000. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced by the chaos unleashed by Bush’s war. This number includes 2.4 million internal refugees, some half a million of them living as squatters in slums. Another 2.3 million have fled the country altogether and have not returned.

This is a civic catastrophe that gets little attention in America. By way of illustration, a proportional civilian death toll in the United States would be nearly 1.2 million. The proportional refugee total would be 45 million.

Another way to put that would be the entire city of Dallas killed and the entire combined populations of California, Nevada, and Oregon displaced.