A Word About Casualties and Proportion

Much has been made about the media’s grisly casualty benchmarks. They feel the need to point out every time we reach another thousand troops killed, even though it takes months for this to happen.

It’s been said before, but the bottom line–still–is that casualties in the Iraq War are nowhere near that of previous wars. In fact, the last time we formally declared war and lost less than 4,000 men and women, it was 1812.

Let’s take a look at actual figures.

Vietnam: 58,195 in 12 years, or an average of 4,850 per year (not accounting for the bell curve of actual casualties over peak time).

Korea: 54,246 in four years, or 13,561 per year.

WWII: 408,306 in four and a half years, or 90,735 per year.

WWI: 116,708 in five years, or 23,340 per year.

Civil War: some estimates are at 625,000, or 156,250 a year.

Now let’s look at Iraq.

4,531. In five years.

That’s less than 1,000 per year. We lost that in an hour on some battlefields, and no one flinched. It is the price of freedom.

When will we stop hearing the tired old argument about casualties?  Liberals need to shut up about casualties.  I’ve lost friends, my friends have lost friends.  We all have.  But they died knowing what apparently people like you antiwar jackasses can’t seem to understand: They died for something.  While tragic, their deaths preserve that much more time that you can freely go where you wish.  Their deaths make it possible for you to road trip to your next rally without having to show papers at a checkpoint somewhere because you crossed state lines.

Just my thoughts.

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