Honzo October 28th, 2005

2,000 Dead in Context

Americans, like most democratic people, can endure
fatalities if they believe they come in the pursuit of victory, during
a war against an aggressor with a definite beginning and end. That’s
why most polls found that about three-quarters of the American people
approved of the invasion upon the fall of the Saddam Hussein statue in
Baghdad in April 2003.

The public’s anguish for the fewer than 150 lost during that
campaign was counterbalanced by the apparently easy victory and the
visible signs of enemy capitulation.

But between the first 200 fatalities and the 2,000th, a
third of those favoring the war changed their minds, now writing off
Iraq as a mistake.

Perhaps we could summarize this radical transformation as,

“I was for my easy removal of Saddam, but not for your bungled and costly postwar reconstruction.”

Part of the explanation is that, like all wars against amorphous insurgencies, the current
struggle requires almost constant explanation by the government to show
how and why troops are fighting in a necessary cause - and for the
nation’s long-term security interests. Unless official spokesmen can
continually connect the terrible sacrifices of our youth with the need
to establish a consensual government in Iraq that might help to end the
old pathology of the Middle East, in which autocracies spawn
parasitic anti-Western terrorists, then the TV screen’s images of
blown-up American troops become the dominant narrative.

The Bush administration, of course, did not help itself by having
put forth weapons of mass destruction as the primary reason for the
invasion - when the Senate, in bipartisan fashion, had previously
authorized the war on a score of other sensible writs.

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