The Media and Its Milestones
David Isenberg over at the Partnership for Secure America has written a great post critiquing the media for making a big deal of the supposed “milestone” 4,000th American casualty in Iraq. He puts it much more thoroughly and eloquently than I can.
Having had a family member serve in both Afghanistan (3x) and Iraq, the artificial ways we use to count the costs of this war are ever more infuriating. Why don’t the wounded, whose lives will be forever marred by the war and who will rely on the unreliable support of taxpayers for care the rest of their lives, count at all? Isenberg has a good point here:
And as Mideast Stars and Stripes reported yesterday the number of wounded coming to the 435th Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility at Ramstein Air Base Germany is nearing 44,000 patients from Operation Iraqi Freedom and is close to reaching 7,000 from Operation Enduring Freedom, according to Air Force statistics compiled this month. Nearly 11,000 of those patients — or 22 percent — are considered battle injuries. While American commanders and soldiers have pointed to signs that the troop “surge” in Iraq is working, the facility has not seen a dramatic drop in the number of overall patients.
I can’t say enough about the article. Read it. The true cost of war is much deeper than the tragic loss of 4,000 lives.
Even if you support the war you should be interested in a more comprehensive look at the costs of the war. How can you propose solutions if many of the problems remain obscured behind weak reporting and skewed facts? We need to be open and honest about the real costs so we know where best to allocate the meager resources we have for the fight.
And, if being open and honest means that no one wants to allocate those resources? Then I guess it is time to come home.
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