Thursday, August 11, 2005
Bodycounting schadenfreude
The American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan notes in the LA Times:
the insurgents have designed a war they can sustain for a long time. Obtaining explosives, making bombs and setting them off does not require much skill, money or even courage. ... It is thus unwise to measure progress in Iraq by the number of deaths or bombs in a given period
But American and allied bodycounting is now being been cynically carried out day in and day out by the same people that have caterwauled in opposition to Bush's war from the day it was conceived. As Thomas Sowell puts it:
If you judged by the front page of ... many ... newspapers, our troops in Iraq don't do anything except get killed....
Even a young lady interviewer on Fox News Channel - of all places - recently asked a guest how long the American people will be able to continue supporting the war in Iraq with all the casualties.
A political victory like the one foreshadowed by said Fox interviewer is all the insurgents can hope for, and the anti-Bush maniacs are doing all they can to help them out.
Have been doing so ever since 9/11. You'd think they might have learned from this, or from what Sowell describes as the Vietnam experience:
American victories on the battlefield were turned into defeat on the home front by the filtering and spin of the media.
Even the current Communist rulers of Vietnam have admitted that they lost militarily in Vietnam but hung on because they expected to win politically in the United States
Militarily, the "Iraqi" insurgents are in a whole lot worse shape than they were in Vietnam. Politically, the north Vietnamese stood for something more than fear, and were more than simply a collective of enviers with attitudes where their rudders ought to be.
