A couple of weeks ago Vice President Cheney said as much. Here's a quote from his speech:
WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States still faces enemies that could inflict hundreds of thousands of American deaths in a single day, and he defended the Iraq invasion as a critical strike against such terror. The vice president said, "The ultimate nightmare could bring devastation to our country on a scale we have never experienced. "Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands in a single day of war," Cheney said.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/10/11/cheney_defends_us_handling_of_iraq/
Uhm... two thoughts
1. Don't we have about 100,000 men deployed in Iraq?
May be this AQ mouthpiece is talking about our military in Iraq?
2. 100,000+ people died in the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima.
http://www.airpowermuseum.org/trafter.html ____________________
Hiroshima: August 6, 1945, the uranium bomb, Little Boy, exploded at 8:16 a.m. Hiroshima time, 43 seconds after it left the B-29 Enola Gay, almost 2,000 feet above the ground. It had a yield equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Everything within four square miles was destroyed.
Instantly Killed:
70,000
Instantly Injured:
70,000
December 1945 total death toll:
140,000
1950 total death toll:
200,000
Nagasaki: August 9, 1945, the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, exploded 1,650 feet above Nagasaki at 11:01 a.m after it left the B-29 Bockscar. It had a force of 21,000 tons of TNT. Everything within three square miles was destroyed.
Instantly Killed:
40,000
Instantly Injured:
60,000
January 1946 total death toll:
70,000
1950 total death toll:
140,000
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused just a fraction of the casualties of WW II. The March 1945 fire bomb raid on Tokyo killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over 1,000,000, and the May 1945 fire bomb raid killed another 83,000. The total death toll of World War II for both Allied and Axis nations is estimated to exceed 55 million, more than half civilian.
Note: These are the official statistics quoted in a 1994 U.S. Department of Energy document. Other organizations have conducted continuous studies of their own, and continue to debate the statistics.