News or Editorial Headline?
What exactly is the point of this headline?
Yahoo News/AP 12/26/2006: U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed 9-11 count
Is this a real milestone or an attempt to establish an emotional milestone based upon a comparative cost of the war and the attack of 9/11? The article states:
Two more American soldiers were killed in Iraq, officials said Tuesday, pushing the U.S. military death toll to at least 2,974 — one more than the number killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The tragic milestone came with the deaths of the two soldiers Monday in a bomb explosion southwest of Baghdad, the military said.
The deaths — announced Tuesday — raised the number of troops killed to 2,974 since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes at least seven military civilians. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks claimed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Note that, including the headline, the writer has already informed us of this milestone four different ways before even getting into beyond the fourth sentence of the article.
No where, however, is there any indication of why this milestone has any meaning. Are these particular deaths more important than all those that came before? Does the fact that there have been more deaths in a war than were killed when our nation was attacked on 9/11 have any meaning? Does this mean we lose? How does this compare to the number of enemy casualties? Or is that irrelevant.
While every single life lost in this war is tragic, and while all of us would much prefer peace to war, this comparison is pointless. I can not imagine a comparison being made between the casualties of Pearl Harbor and World War II while we were in the midst of the fight; but if today’s “reporters” were writing the headlines back then, here are some of the numbers they would be looking at near the end of the war (from Wikipedia):
- The civilian toll was around 37 million, the military toll about 25 million.
- United States Deaths: 418,500
- Deaths at Pearl Harbor: 2,403
So.. the attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,403 Americans compared to 418,500 American deaths during WWII. Does that mean US involvement in WWII wasn’t worth it after the first 2,404 casualties?
And what about the 37 million civilian deaths as compared to “only” 25 million military deaths… that’s 37,000,000 civilian deaths vs. 25,000,000 million military deaths. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even imagine what it was like live in a time when 62,000,000 people died in a war, and yet somehow we managed to continue to support the war.
According to Wikipedia, the Allies lost 51 million people, the Axis lost 11 million people; can you imagine what today’s press would do with that? We would have been losing World War II every single day of the war right up until the day Japan surrendered to end the war.
The sooner this war is over, the better; but it will be a lot less difficult to win if we are not led to believe we can not win through intentional emotional manipulation by a media determined to prove that the war against Islamic Fascists is not worth the cost. How many attacks on US soil will it take before we join together as a nation and decide we need to just win this damn thing.
Update: I just heard the anchor on Eyewitness News 7 in NYC mention essentially the same thing, saying “To put this in perspective, this is two less than died on 9/11″ (must have been a repeat of an earlier broadcast since the number was lower). How does that put this in perspective? You can take any two numbers and compare them, then declare that you have proved some point. How about: “To put it in perspective, in 2003 2,215 people age 15-44 were killed when they were hit by a vehicle in the US; 11,459 in car accidents”. (source) Does this comparison mean anything at all… nope, but neither does the comparison between war deaths and 9/11 deaths, unless you are trying to affect opinion as opposed to just reporting news.
More folks weighing in on this “milestone”: Wake Up America, The Nose On Your Face
Stumble it!