Is Iraq All That Bad?
How bad is Iraq? Everywhere you turn people are saying the war in Iraq is not worth it, that we are losing, that the war is a ‘quagmire.’ Considering how most people receive their information, it is little wonder they feel this way. By-in-large, people get their news from one of the big three networks of ABC, CBS, or NBC. Or if they have cable, they receive their news from either Fox or CNN. Even the best of these, Fox News, has constant news on a new American death in Iraq, or how an IED killed an Iraqi police detail. If bad news is all the American public is hearing, then they will logically begin thinking we are losing.
It seems we have learned nothing from the war in Vietnam. The news networks told inaccurate stories how we were losing the war when we were not. How do you win every battle and lose the war? You can’t. And yet as a result of the inaccurate, unreliable news organizations, the American public began to believe we were losing the Vietnam War. The lesson to learn is we can not trust the network or cable news organizations to tell the whole story. Fox occasionally tells the good news, but not enough.
Powerline has an informative post putting the number of American deaths in Iraq in perspective.
A total of 2,471 servicemembers have died in Iraq from 2003 to the present, a period of a little over three years. That total is almost exactly one third of the number of military personnel who died on active duty from 1980 to 1982, a comparable time period when no wars were being fought. Until very recently, our armed forces lost servicemen at a greater rate than we have experienced in Iraq, due solely to accidental death.
Where was the outrage then? It makes you wonder about the fickleness of the MSM.
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