that’s probably just the basic background number of deaths that occur is exactly my point about perspective. Did you have any idea military deaths were that high in the 90’s? I didn’t. It wasn’t reported. No one used that number as a handy cudgel to beat Clinton, and rightly so – it wasn’t his fault. The number of military deaths has been a staple in the news for the past 3 years, and people point to the number as support for the idea that Bush is an evil incompetent leader, without any hint as to the number of deaths that are, as you say, ‘the basic background’. We see reports of American military deaths now, and reports of Iraqi civilian deaths now, that we did not see 10 years ago. But in the years those deaths were not reported to us, they did still happen.
But you want to compare combat deaths to combat deaths. OK. There have been 2497 American military deaths in Iraq. That’s 7.4% of the combat deaths in Korea; 0.8% of WWII. Every American military death is a tragedy, whether KIA in Iraq, or in a training accident at home, today or 10 years ago. But by historical standards of warfighting, American combat deaths in Iraq have been astonishngly low.
