News here of the passing of a milestone in the war in Afghanistan, the death of the 1000th American. This is an occasion for reflection and sadness.
But let us not forget--we have been fighting a war in Afghanistan for 8 and a half years--and while the deaths of 1000 are lamentable, we cannot but be grateful for the technology, training, and leadership our Armed Forces have. These factors have been critical in keeping war dead to under 125 a year there.
Perspective: 58,000 dead in Vietnam. 53000 dead in Korea. 300,000 dead in WWII.
Though I am grateful for the deaths of so few, I wonder whether we have created an expectation in ourselves of the capacity for deathless war (at least on our side), an expectation that at some point could result in the loss of true perspective about cost and benefit in the waging of war. Time will tell.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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3 comments:
Get out. Get out of Korea, Japan, Germany, Italia. Hell I'd say get out of Alaska if we didn't own the place.
Just get out.
Buchanan made a good point this week. We borrow money from Europe, Japan and Korea to defend Europe, Japan and Korea. We borrow money from China to defend Taiwan from China. The military industrial complex has a momentum of their own regardless of the threat. We can't afford it anymore.
Just get out, and do it quickly.
Agreed it is cause for sadness and reflection. Ponder this: what is the normal operational peacetime death rate in the military worldwide? Take out the year the plane crashed on the way home to KY...that year was an outlier...
My math says 1,000 div. by 8 years is an average of 125 per year KIA in Afghanistan. How does that stack up to peacetime accidental and other deaths? Dunno...doesn't lessen the contributions or the sacrifice...just numbers.
Not sure what my point is, but the American public, disconnected as they have become from our military and our war, seem incapable of accepting any losses to advance our national interests abroad. On September 17, 1862, up the road at Antietam, casualties were 26,000 dead, wounded, and missing in one day.
Having said this, I believe for most this disconnect creates a mindset in which our military losses are viewed in the abstract..they become an iconic representation of a political perspective. Ask most progressive bleeding hearts to name one casualty from Iraq or Afghanistan besides Pat Tillman, and you'll come up snake-eyes.
Leonard Cowherd There's mine for today...local kid, nice kid..first from Culpeper to die in Iraq.
Nice comment, John. And thanks for sharing about 2LT Cowherd.
We certainly learned during the first Gulf War that it was, stastically at least, safer for troops in the war zone than for troops on US highways or in local bars.
That said, your comment: "I believe for most this disconnect creates a mindset in which our military losses are viewed in the abstract..they become an iconic representation of a political perspective" is spot on. I so wish these brave men and women's lives were held with greater respect by those of us whose protection they bought.
I was also taken with the Post article CW referenced here: "Obama's War--Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan". I don't recall seeing many headings quite so "understanding" of the task at hand when it was Bush's War. And this was the heading of the announcement that we have now paid 1000 American lives in this war. 300, then 500 and so on were pretty good cause for Code Pink and the Hollywood puppet, Cindy Sheehan to get in front of all the news cameras. Where is the coverage now? Surely Cindy hasn't abandoned her principled opposition to war. Surely she has the same "gravitas" that made her a household celebrity all thosse years Bush was in office. What happened? The tone was so much different before. The Post authors claim it is because the public has been sobered by the reality that war is becoming a part of our daily lives. Please, it is solely because it was part of the media narrative to make the war a condemnation of the Bush Administration, who was hugely unpopular from the moment he had the Supreme Court steal the election from Al Gore to the moment he single-handedly caused the global economy to collapse just so he could hand our first black (partially) President a disasterous inheritance.
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