If you google “How many people died in the Iraq war?” you’ll get countless sources with answers that vary greatly. This is because the exact human cost as a result of the war in Iraq is not fully known and may never will be. What we do know is that thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands more of Iraqi civilians were killed during this senseless conflict that ended in a worse place than it began. Brown University estimates the civilian cost to be in the range of 300,000. If you include Afghanistan, Business Insider estimates the human cost to be in the half a million range. None of this is to include the millions of lives in Iraq that were impacted in countless ways and the untold number of families who were ripped apart back here at home. Now, I don’t intend this blog to revolve solely around Iraq, but as I alluded to in my first post, it is a core inspiration for why I wanted to start this blog in the first place. I was born in the mid 90s and grew up in the 2000s. I remember, vividly, growing up in this culture of perpetual war. And even though I was only six at the time, I have the vaguest memories of 9/11. As I reflect on these events today I’m left with an overwhelming sense of sorrow. As I learn more and more about the real history I gain a deeper and deeper sense of commitment to a set of elementary moral principles. Principles that, if practiced by Americans at the time, would have spared us and the world a pointless war. We don’t deserve the luxury of admitting a mistake in hindsight and brushing the whole war off so flippantly. Rather, we need to come to terms with the crimes we as a nation committed in the Middle East and learn to be more critical of our government and military so this cycle ceases to continue. So I ask now, two decades later, what was it all for?