It's always a kind of sketchy proposition to cite casualty figures in the middle of a war,

because if there's one thing combatants' governments lie about, it's how many people have died.

You could almost never get a straight answer. Everybody lies about it. They're lying about it now.

Four and a half years in, we really have no idea how many Russians, Ukrainians, or people from other

countries have died in the Russia-Ukraine war. And we definitely don't know with precision

how many people have died in the war with Iran. But we thought it would be interesting

is to pull up the official numbers to the extent they exist. We don't know, by the way,

with total certainty how many Americans have died. The official numbers may be 16. Is that true? We hope it's no more.

Every death is a tragedy, but we just don't know. But there are official numbers. And so, again,

just as an exercise, as something that might reveal a deeper truth, we pulled up the numbers a minute ago.

So here are the numbers. On the Iranian side, the official number is about 3,600, 3,664, about that.

Iranians dead. Combatants and civilians, majority civilians, as is true in every war, 3600. But that's not

the biggest total of dead in a country in the last three months since this war broke out in the

Middle East launched by the United States and Israel. The biggest number of dead is not in Iran.

It's not in a Gulf state. It's in Lebanon. Lebanon. Yeah, over 4,000 Lebanese,

almost all of them civilians, killed by Israel since Israel and the United States launched the war

against Iran. Think about that for a second. Now, again, we have no confidence in the precision

of these numbers, but in the relative scale of the numbers,

in other words, more killed in Lebanon than killed in Iran, sounds right.

If it's even close to right, it tells you something amazing.

And it tells you, which if you've been paying attention, something you already knew,

which was that Israel cajoled, convinced, threatened, however

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