Mounting U.S. casualties dispel modern war myths
usatoday.com
This past weekend, war news suddenly turned from ghostly images of ''shock and awe'' bombs exploding in the distance to bloody ambushes, misfires, stiff enemy resistance and mounting casualties.
A helicopter crash on Friday claimed 12 allied fighters. On Saturday, two Royal Navy helicopters collided over the Persian Gulf, killing seven. A Patriot battery meant to intercept enemy missiles downed a British jet in Kuwait. A grenade apparently set off by a U.S. soldier at a Kuwait camp took another American life. Then, in the type of atrocity that haunts even veterans of combat, Iraqi television put on display Sunday five captured U.S. soldiers and showed the bodies of four others, several shot in the head.
All are tragedies to be mourned. The victims' names, faces and personal stories are grim testimony to the human sacrifice behind even a high-tech war. After Capt. Ryan Beaupre, 30, of St. Anne, Ill., was reported killed in Friday's helicopter crash, his sister Alyse, 31, fought back tears as she told USA TODAY that the family had received an upbeat letter from Ryan only on Wednesday reporting that ''things were good.''
Such losses can't help but test the public's resolve. Yet they need not shake it if they're used for another purpose: to knock down a dangerous conceit of the antiseptic war.
For 12 years, wars have been presented on TV largely as precision-guided bombs hitting exact targets to produce extremely low U.S. casualties. Just 148 U.S. soldiers died in battle during the 1991 Gulf War. None in the bombing attacks on Kosovo. Sixteen U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Technological advances have, in fact, made conventional war less risky to both civilian populations and American soldiers. Those improvements are welcome.
But they've given the public a misleading impression about war. A weekend USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds that even after the first U.S. deaths, 41% believe fewer than 100 U.S. troops will be killed or injured in the conflict. That compares with just 12% in 1991 who thought the first Gulf War would end with so few casualties. A nation that mistakenly views wars as safe could be more prone to start one and less likely to back it if the going gets tough.
Countering this requires the nation's leaders to offer more honest appraisals about the true dangers of war. Even before an enemy is confronted, military campaigns are deadly. More U.S. troops died off the battlefields in the first Gulf War and Afghanistan than in combat. That has been the pattern in the early stages of this war, too, though urban fighting and ambushes are likely to accelerate as U.S. forces close in on Baghdad.
In his national radio address Saturday, President Bush warned that the war ''could be longer and more difficult'' than some predict. On Sunday he told reporters that ''this is just the beginning of a tough fight.''
Such realistic assessments are difficult to hear. But they're needed to brace a public that has been blessedly ignorant of war's high human toll. |
