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August 30, 2005
Some Badly Needed Perspective On Iraq Casualties
I was thinking just today about the 1700 or so military deaths in Iraq, and wondering what proportion were actual combat deaths--because I knew that a significant fraction of the death toll was due to accidents, perhaps 200 or so. In the military this is a constant danger, no matter where you are stationed.
This evening I found over at The Ten O'Clock Scholar this astounding post. Referencing Powerline, RDS notes that
...normal training exercises in the military killed TWICE as many American soldiers per year from 1983-1996 than the vaunted, undefeatable, deadly "insurgency" in Iraq has been able to do.
It's only because of media reporting that we think, say, 40 deaths a month from combat is something to get all hyper about, when every month 120 were dying just accidentally in the military for the previous 20 years. The media could have made that front-page news every day -- another 4 soldiers killed! -- but they didn't mention it, so nobody got demoralized. But now they make sure you hear about EVERY SINGLE DEATH, without context.
Absolutely right. John Hinderaker amplifies this point at Powerline:
One wonders how past wars could have been fought if news reporting had consisted almost entirely of a recitation of casualties. The D-Day invasion was one of the greatest organizational feats ever achieved by human beings, and one of the most successful. But what if the only news Americans had gotten about the invasion was that 2,500 allied soldiers died that day, with no discussion of whether the invasion was a success or a failure, and no acknowledgement of the huge strategic stakes that were involved? Or what if such news coverage had continued, day by day, through the entire Battle of Normandy, with Americans having no idea whether the battle was being won or lost, but knowing only that 54,000 Allied troops had been killed by the Germans?
News reporting on the war consists almost entirely of itemizing casualties. Headlines say: "Two Marines killed by roadside bomb." Rarely do the accompanying stories--let alone the headlines that are all that most people read--explain where the Marines were going, or why; what strategic objective they and their comrades were pursuing, and how successful they were in achieving it; or how many terrorists were also killed. For Americans who do not seek out alternative news sources like this one, the war in Iraq is little but a succession of American casualties. The wonder is that so many Americans do, nevertheless, support it.
I have often asked the question about the Iraq war and its naysayers: "Why is the measure of success been determined to be the number of soldiers killed per week; or the number of IEDs exploded?" As Hinderaker points out, the undisputable goals of WWII would have been completely undermined if we had focused solely on casualties.
In my recent "inside-my-head" arguments with Cindy Sheehan, I've made the following point: Let's say today an IED goes off and kills three Marines. This is without a doubt a tragic event--for us as Americans, for the Marine Corps, and most of all the families of those killed. Yet on this same day, roughly 100 people were killed on our highways, and they were equally tragic events.
Tomorrow (my argument went), it's quite possible that no American will be killed in Iraq; yet it's dead certain that another 100 people will be killed on the roads of the US. And another 100 the day after that...700 a week, roughly 35,000 a year--men, women, and children.
So, indeed, RDS's point it a good one: where is our perspective?
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