A TWISTED MEASURE OF WAR
NEW YORK POST
Editorial
December 27, 2006
Yesterday was a landmark day in Iraq - or so a gloating mainstream media trumpeted: By the Associated Press' count, the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq has now surpassed the death toll in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The point being . . . what exactly?
That the murder of 2,973 innocent individuals is morally equivalent to sending soldiers in a volunteer military to defend their country and its interests? That President Bush stands on the same moral plane as Osama bin Laden?
Such a comparison, obviously, is obscene. But it fits with the Democratic Party mantra: not just that the war in Iraq is going poorly, but that it should never have been waged in the first place.
Consider: U.S. military casualties in World War II exceeded the number of soldiers and sailors killed at Pearl Harbor by a factor of well above 200.
Does this mean that America should have negotiated a coward's peace with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany? Were the lives lost on the battlefields of Europe and in the Pacific wasted? Hardly.
In fact, what's truly stunning is that today's casualties are noted one at a time - with practically a separate news story mentioning each name.
Of course, each of these soldiers, who have made the supreme sacrifice, deserves the recognition. But the reporting within days of each individual death is unheard of in the history of warfare.
Ironically, the listing of each casualty is a testament to the remarkably low war-time casualty rate America is experiencing in Iraq - even if the drip-drip of grim news makes it seem otherwise.
Another odd twist: The media's "milestone" came the day that an Iraqi appeals court upheld the death sentence handed out to Saddam Hussein and ordered his execution within 30 days.
The sentence was for the specific offense of ordering the deaths of 148 men and boys in the village of Dujail in the wake of a 1982 attempt on his life. But the list of Saddam's bloody crimes is far longer.
Indeed, this was considered among the least of his 35-year misrule. Others include the massacre of 100,000 Kurds - a toll far higher, by the way, than those of 9/11 and the Iraq war combined.
If nothing else, the sentence is a reminder of why it was so necessary to topple Saddam from power in the first place.
We know that the Butcher of Baghdad's lust for WMDs had never truly ended. Had he been successful in rebuilding his program, he would gladly have used those weapons to threaten regional, if not global, security.
Now, his followers, working with foreign forces, are fueling a terrorist insurgency and sectarian violence to drive out U.S. troops and leave a power vacuum - and even greater chaos.
Which is why it's so critical that the terrorists there be defeated - no matter how gloomy a task some in the media try to make it seem.
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