Americans Persevere!

This is a paragraph by Joe Conason that appeared the other day in the New York Observer: “Although the ongoing carnage in Iraq no longer gets the headlines reserved for exhibitionist celebrities, even the flickering attention paid to death’s daily drumbeat is too much for certain war enthusiasts. A conservative columnist for The New York Times has suggested that the media simply cease coverage of suicide bombings. This was a strange proposal from someone working for one of the world’s most important news organizations, but one that aptly reflected current attitudes in the White House, the Defense Department and much of official Washington.”

I don’t know if the conservative columnist to which Conason referred made such a suggestion, but the suggestion might be a good one in the sense that depriving the insurgents of the publicity accruing to the suicide bombers might dampen their enthusiasm for sending naïve, young Muslims to their deaths and conning them into believing that some sort of exotic paradise awaits self-styled martyrs “on the other side.” Also, it is doubtful that Conason has any better idea than I about the “current attitudes in the White House, the Defense Department and much of official Washington.” It could be that officials have just the opposite attitude, since accounts of these animalistic practices in the name of religion could be considered as another worthy reason for wiping out once and for all the instigators of suicide/homicide. Conason’s “flickering attention” remark, bedsides being humongously off-the-wall, is a slam at all his liberal colleagues in the media, who make it a point to grind out Bush-hating material on the war every day. CBS Rather-standin Bob Schieffer, for instance, offers a bio of a fallen warrior on the daily CBS evening news program in every broadcast.

The proper comparison of today’s suicide idiots, though not even close to being in the same league with respect to carnage, would be with the youthful kamikaze pilots sent out by their Japanese warlords to aim themselves and their bomb-laden planes at U.S. Navy ships in the waning months of World War II. The Japanese masochist-generals/admirals managed to get 7,465 of their youngsters incinerated while they sank 120 American ships and killed 3,048 Americans and wounded another 6,025. By contrast, whereas the Japanese beasts managed to kill the enemy while killing their own, the suicide bombers of today kill their own fellow Muslims, indiscriminately butchering women, children, and policemen, but few, comparatively speaking, American personnel (the ostensible enemy), though just one American lost is one too many. Indeed, the loss and maiming of all the victims represents needless carnage and remarks the instigators for just what they are – bloodthirsty animals of which the world must be rid, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Indochina, or anywhere else. They represent the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction, as the number of their victims increases.

Although the loss of one GI is too much, it needs to be remembered when contemplating the casualty figures that the U.S. citizenry never flagged in its support of other wars, even though the numbers of dead and wounded were astronomical – actually unbelievable by most of today’s generation. Since the beginning of Afghanistan/Iraq hostilities, there has been an average of two-to-three American military deaths per day, whether by combat, accident, disease or other. During the Vietnam War era (roughly 1964-72 [when last U.S. troops left in August]), the average was 20 dead per day. During the Korean Conflict (1950-53), the average number of military deaths was 34 per day. During the roughly four-and-a-half actual years of combat in the combined World War I and II eras (1917-18, 1942-45), the average number of deaths per day was a shocking 320. In those two wars alone, a number larger than that of the deaths on 9/11 died every ten days through a period of 1,643 consecutive days. The bloody per-day average of military deaths during the Civil War of 1861-65 was an unbelievable 340.

This is not to say that any death is acceptable. It is to remind people like Conason that Americans, in a cause that is just, will accept the trauma that accompanies any war. The constant “drumbeat of death” by the anti-establishment media amounts to their preaching to the choir, but it doesn’t faze the average guy, who has sense enough to understand what’s at stake in this dangerous world.

Jim Clark