It appears that casualties, directly or indirectly attributed to the war, are in excess of 600,000. That doesn’t include all of the people who died in conflicts that arose from, or were abetted by, the regional destabilization resulting from the war. How one aportions blame within the Bush administration is a question that I can’t answer because I don’t know what was or wasn’t said behind closed doors. My point was that the cabal of billionaires who have funded the G.O.P. since the 1970s, with the primary goal of perpetuating the fossil fuels industry regardless of the damage that it causes, are far from blameless.

Incidentally, a good argument can be made that wars are seldom if ever won by great strategists or brilliant generals … they are almost always won by the side that makes the fewest mistakes. At the beginning of the Second World War, for example, radar was a relatively new tool and the brass were openly skeptical about it. When a lone radar operator on O’ahu warned his superiors of incoming aircraft, he was told that a few planes were expected in from Caifornia; his claims that he was seeing a lot more than a few were dismissed. Had they listened to him, the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor might have been evacuated in time and the eleven hundred sailors killed there might have survived. But the Japanese made an even bigger mistake: after inflicting tremendous damage on the American Pacific fleet, they turned and flew back to their ships —passing over numerous fuel depots which they left untouched. Had they bombed the depots, they could have set back the U.S. war effort for roughly a year.