They couldn’t even wait for the next thousand on the odometer. Remember the big deal the press made about the 2000th death in Iraq? Now the magic (and utterly meaningless) number is 2500:
While there were no details on who it was or where the 2,500th death occurred, it underscored the continuing violence in Iraq just after an upbeat Bush returned from a surprise visit to Baghdad determined that the tide was beginning to turn.
In other words, we’ve now lost, over a period of over three years, almost as many as died in a couple hours on the beaches of Normandy (perhaps even the same number as were lost just in training for that event). Would the media have been so hung up on these kinds of numbers during that war? It seems unlikely, but if they had (or to be more precise, had today’s media been reporting then), the story would have been something like this.
Melanie Phillips makes a point that applies to Britain, Canada and beyond: “With few exceptions, politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people’s heads that drives them to such acts.” These are not Pushtun yak herders straight off the boat blowing up trains and buses. They’re young men, most of whom were born and all of whom were bred in London, Toronto and other Western cities. And offered the nullity of a contemporary multicultural identity they looked elsewhere — and found the jihad. If we try to fight it as isolated outbreaks — a suicide attack here, a beheading there — we will never win. You have to take on the ideology and the networks that sustain it and throttle them. Does [Toronto mayor] David Miller sound like a man who’s up to that challenge? A reader in Quebec, John Gross, emailed me to distill the mayor’s approach as: “Don’t get mad, get even . . . wimpier.”
Despite the delusions of many Canadians, being “nice” will not save Canada.
Remember all of the outcry because Rumsfeld wasn’t getting better armored Humvees to the troops? Well, it turns out that the new “up armored” Humvees in Iraq are apparently killing more soldiers in rollovers than they’re saving with the new armor:
…serious accidents involving the M1114 have increased as the war has progressed, and the accidents were much more likely to be rollovers than those of other Humvee models, the newspaper reported.
Duhhhhh!
Increasing the vehicle mass, and coincidentally raising the center of mass, is obviously going to decrease its stability in turns. Didn’t anyone consider this when they came up with the design? People forget that this vehicle was a replacement for the jeep, not the tank.
This is a classic engineering safety trade, but soldiers killed in auto accidents don’t get all the press that the ones killed with IEDs do. That doesn’t fit the template that we’re losing the war, because they were killed by media outcry, not terrorists.