A Conflict About Casualties

The war in Iraq has been painful and divisive in so many ways that it’s hard to imagine what could make it worse for Americans of all opinions. In the past week, I found out. What follows is the culmination of a disagreement about the government’s use of casualties to prove that the Surge is a success. Those who are interested can go back and follow the exchange through links to the original story in the McClatchy Newspapers to my comment to their rebuttal to bloggers who questioned its motives and accuracy:

After the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee turned down all offers to write his memoirs, saying that to do so would “be trading on the blood of my men.” That delicacy of feeling is long gone.

Now Washington bureaucrats are not at all squeamish about using soldiers’ blood for political profit. Case in point is the claim that American combat deaths have gone down since the Surge started and, as the McClatchy Newspapers reported, “Military officials and observers are wondering whether the lower U.S. casualties are a sign of success…”

A recent post questioning this “sign of success” has drawn a rebuttal of what McClatchy calls “vitriolic criticism…from liberal web sites.”

This “vitriolic” retired journalist has long been an admirer of the reporting by McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, particularly in the selling of the Iraq war by the Bush Administration, and the criticism of the numbers story was clearly aimed at the Pentagon source rather than the messenger.

Readers can judge for themselves, but there is a new kind of callous ingenuity in stressing certain kinds of deaths over others, particularly when one source of the numbers–an August helicopter crash that killed 14 U.S. troops–is officially an accident but an Air Force spokesman “could not rule out a strike by a surface to air missile.”

But it’s saddening to be arguing about how our young people are dying rather than why.

Cross-posted from my blog.