Quote from the story:
"The president believes that every life is precious and he grieves for each one that is lost," deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel said Tuesday.So, I'm thinking... western military deaths are probably the smallest fraction of deaths in this situation, compared to enemy combatant deaths and civilian deaths. I don't care so much about enemy combatant deaths, but civilian deaths is a little bit different.
It's hard to get an accurate count of Iraqi civilian deaths, but I bet it's pretty darn high. If we subtract out the number of Iraqis that would have died under the old regime, I bet it still far exceeds the number of people killed on 9/11.
So, we, as a nation, have answered violence with overwhelming violence. We responded in anger to an attack, and look where it's gotten us.
Lesson: next time, take a deep breath and get the facts right. And, if you do go in, plan for an after-victory program. We are the world's policemen. Like any New York City cop, we have to treat everybody with a certain minimal amount of civility.
2 comments:
Certainly "death toll" is a poignant statistic when swaying opinion one way or the other. However, what are one's principles worth anyway?
Let's consider America's least offensive war, the Revolutionary War. I wonder how media's talking heads would be covering it if it were going on today.
Is Iraq moving (albeit too slowly for everyone's tastes) in the right direction? Well, women are in public school now, which wasn't the case in 2001. That's pretty signifigant. We have an elected forum for expressing ideas, as opposed to a merciless tyrant who murdered on his whim.
Is Iraq still broken? Indeed. What then will it cost in human lives to fix? This is their revolution - in which we must participate.
Therefore, now go back to our Revolutionary War. What if we knew going in that it was going to take, not three years, but three generations to have some sort of success. Would we have still engaged?
Hmm. Well... my original post was a tad on the incoherent side, but I was comparing our angry reaction and the number of people killed. If we're angry at the loss of precious American lives, we should be every single bit as distresed at the loss of innocent non-American lives, but I don't see that we are. Our response has been to lash out, and we've wound up doing the very thing we decry so strongly (killing innocents).
"Principles" is a tricky word to sling in this regard. We have frequently betrayed our "principles" (unless you count the principle of worshipping the almighty dollar, which we have never betrayed). We aren't helping in Darfur, we didn't help in Rwanda, we only helped in Kosovo because that conflagration was on Europe's doorstep, we're not helping in Burma and we're certainly not engaging China on the human rights front as aggressively as we could. (Neither are the Europeans, but they sure spend a lot of energy criticizing us for lacking morals.)
So, the question is put: should we be in a hurry to re-engineer a country (i.e., should we be impatient that we haven't yet achieved "success" in Iraq)? That begs the question: should we even be in Iraq trying to re-engineer it?
Conservatives in this country say "no, we should not be in the business of country-building" (there's a catchy phrase for it, but I can't remember it right now), mainly because it's way too expensive. Liberals believe we don't occupy sufficiently-high moral ground to engage in that activity.
I, personally, believe we can and should, but... we should not try to do it on the cheap, and we should not try to get into it backwards.
The neoconservatives in this country thought it would be easy, and they completely ignored the lessons we learned so painfully in Vietnam. Now we get to learn them again. And we get to spend another generation being scared to get involved in another country in a big, constructive way.
I wish I had more time to develop this, but I really should be working.
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