Trivial American Loss of Life in Afghanistan. The cowardly — or subversive — U.S. media are talking about "an especially deadly 24 hours" and issuing other alarmist and exaggerated reports about casualties in the Afghan conflict. (Curiously, the reports I have seen about a rogue Afghan soldier killing allied soldiers do not say what happened to the attacker! Nor did the CBS report today about that "especially deadly 24 hours" (8 American deaths) say how many of the Taliban fiters were killed. None? 8? More? The news we are getting is ENORMOUSLY suspicious.)
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In World War II, we would have regarded ourselves as extremely lucky if only 8 U.S. soldiers were killed in any given day. So why are the media making a huge stink about a total U.S. death toll in the entire course, to date, of "our longest war" (less than 9 years), of 1,184. That's about 1/6 the death toll of the entire Revolutionary War (8 years). The two current wars together have killed 5,914 U.S. soldiers, as against at least 7,000 and possibly 25,000 for the Revolutionary War, over 405,000 for WWII, and 625,000 for the Civil War.
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Wikipedia has broken down the figures for the daily death toll of our various wars. So how does Afghanistan compare in simple numbers to our other significant wars? "Dead" last. The next lowest toll was the Revolutionary War, at 11 per day. But the population of the U.S. at that time was about 2.5 million, so the death toll as a percentage of the population in the Revolutionary War was 0.899%; that for the "war on terror" (which apparently includes both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions), a negligible 0.002%. What a bunch of pussies Americans have become, that they are appalled by the infinitesimal death toll suffered by our all-volunteer military.
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Postscript, July 17th: I should have mentioned three individual days in recent U.S. history in which the death toll was greater than that of the entire course thus far of the Afghan war: (1) 9/11 (c. 2,800, on U.S. territory), (2) Pearl Harbor (c. 2,400, also on U.S. soil), and (3) D-Day (2,500). Each of these one-day death tolls was more than TWICE the total death toll in Afghanistan over the course of nine years. So why on Earth are the media and certain groups in the larger society bitching and moaning about 1,184 U.S. deaths over nine years? That is truly disgusting and contemptible.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,730 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:21 PM