2000 dead


The numbers have been massaged
Well, we have finally reached the point that some have been warning us about for some time. Except the numbers aren't exactly what we have been told.

Fortunately, there are experts to explain what is going on. Some of them are even bloggers. This gentleman for example, is not only actively serving but is a Macintosh user.

A look at CNN's special page on OIF Casualties is of course sobering, but also instructive. The default display that comes up, is an alphabetical listing. In a purely coincident support of my point, only 4 of the first 10 casualties are combat deaths, and one wasn't in Iraq at all. Now why you ask, should we not count those non-combat deaths along with the hostile fire deaths? Mainly because hundreds of troops die every year (even when we are not at war) due to accident, in training, during exercises, even driving to work. As I said, being in the military is high risk, and those deaths should not be included in the left's precious "cost of war". I know of an Air Force officer who is on the list who died outside of Iraq, when he was off duty riding an ATV in sand dunes, rolled the vehicle and broke his neck. Play around the ICasualties database, and you will see a lot of non-hostile deaths due to "vehicle accident" or "illness" or "building fire" or "electrocution" or "weapon discharge".

Based on some very general checking that I have done, 2000 dead in three years of full combat operations is remarkably low. Especially considering that the logistics line stretches halfway around the globe. Victor Davis Hanson adds his observations.

Comparative historical arguments, too, are not much welcome in making sense of the tragic military deaths - any more than citing the tens of thousands Americans who perish in traffic accidents each year. And few care to hear that the penultimate battles of a war are often the costliest - like the terrible summer of 1864 that nearly ruined the Army of the Potomac and almost ushered in a Copperhead government eager to stop at any cost the Civil War, without either ending slavery or restoring the Union. The battle for Okinawa was an abject bloodbath that took more than 50,000 American casualties, yet that campaign officially ended less than six weeks before Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender.

Compared with Iraq, America lost almost 17 times more dead in Korea, and 29 times more again in Vietnam - in neither case defeating our enemies nor establishing democracy in a communist north.

Contemporary critics understandably lament our fourth year of war since Sept. 11 in terms of not achieving a victory like World War II in a similar stretch of time. But that is to forget the horrendous nature of such comparison when we remember that America lost 400,000 dead overseas at a time when the country was about half its present size.

I certainly do not mean to cheapen the deaths. To someone who has lost a loved one, a single death was too much.

"2000 dead" without perspective is just a number.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - October 27, 2005 at 04:38 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved