Monday, March 24, 2008
4000 dead in Iraq
...this month. Or maybe the last two months. No one actually knows. Which concerns me, but not nearly as much as the fact that so few even care. Whether it's George Bush, David Petraeus, or White House spokesperson Dana Perino making statements or even being questioned by generally good reporters like Helen Thomas, all the talk today is about how much the war has cost "us," by which they mean the lives of members of the American military, when the bulk of the "cost" has been "paid" by those who never volunteered for the assignment (unlike those 4000 American soldiers, whether they were semi-coerced by the economic draft or not), people who never even had the second-hand "guilt" of having voted for a President or a Congressperson who was responsible for launching the war.
Dana Perino says that "President Bush thinks that every single loss is tragic." Every single loss of what? Every single loss of an American life is what she meant, as is completely clear from the context of the remark (not that I believe even that, of course). When is the last time a reporter asked Perino, or Bush, how many Iraqis have died, or even raised the subject on one of the newstalk shows? When is someone going to ask the "Madeleine Albright" question: "A million Iraqis have died because of this invasion. Was it worth it?" Or did Dick Cheney already give us their one-word answer?
