Carnal Reason

Sometimes it becomes necessary to state the obvious: being a soldier is a dangerous thing. This is why we honor our service members’ courage. For a soldier, sailor or Marine, “courage” isn’t an easily-abused abstraction–”it took a lot of courage to vote against the farm bill”–it’s a requirement of the job.

Even in peacetime. The media’s breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq–now, over 1,800 deaths–is generally devoid of context. Here’s some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.

That’s right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don’t recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President’s home town.

John Hinderaker at Powerline

Read the whole thing.

Posted on September 20th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: politics