What is the headline on this newspaper?
Wouldn’t it be nice, for the New Year, if it were upbeat, to get
2007 off on the right foot. How about AIDS cured, or a bad guy
– Osama? – finally caught?
What is the headline on this newspaper?
Wouldn’t it be nice, for the New Year, if it were upbeat, to get 2007 off on the right foot. How about AIDS cured, or a bad guy – Osama? – finally caught?
But our least tractable issue, the one that vexes Americans most, is how to end the war in Iraq. That’s the positive headline we really want.
Yet, as Baghdad burns, we await with growing anticipation an end to President Bush’s fiddling, and the announcement of a new course.
Some say he will call for a “surge” in troop levels, by as many as 30,000, even as our own people say, with increasing unanimity, that it’s a bad idea: “I have come to the conclusion that this is no longer America’s war in Iraq,” Maj. William Voorhies, who is training Iraqi security forces, said in Thursday’s New York Times, “but the Iraqi
civil war where America is fighting.”
And, most military experts say, no surge would be temporary. In Iraq-speak, it’s code for escalation, the reviled term that defined the Vietnam war. “New Direction in Iraq Hailed” seems an unlikely headline any time soon.
With 2,987 American dead in Iraq at this writing, we are more likely to find another headline on our New Year’s newspapers: “3,000th American Death in Iraq.”
Roughly one for every American mile, coast to coast.
To some, such as New York Post columnist Adam Brodsky, 3,000 dead is just another round number – and insignificant to boot:
In an essay in the Post following the November election titled: “Iraq: A mess, but so what?”, Brodsky tried to understand the political sea-change that was being blamed on Iraq: “What exactly are people upset about?” he lamented. “Is the situation in Iraq really so grim?”
“Where’s the evidence that Americans are worse off, in any tangible way, because of Iraq? Yes, families suffer enormously when a relative is killed or injured there. That’s tragic. But the 3,000 U.S. military deaths over the past 3 ½ years amount to less than three ten-thousandths of a percent of the U.S. population per year. That many Americans die from drunk driving every 20 days.”
It takes pretty cavalier thinking – the kind that got us into this god-awful mess in the first place – to reduce suffering to fractions, and compare the acts of irresponsible individual motorists to a global calamity with far-reaching consequences. Brodsky resembles Joseph Stalin, who made slaughter mundane with his famous remark, “One death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic.”
Brodsky is part of a political class that sees the world in overarching terms and strips it of its blood, sweat and tears. In that world, 47 million people without health insurance is good news, because it means 253 million have it. A huge and growing discrepancy between rich and poor is good news because it means there are more rich people. It is a kind of twisted optimism that can admire a beautiful sunset over a slum – or a slaughterhouse.
Tens of thousands of dead Iraqis aren’t even a blip on his radar.
The truly good news is that the last election discredited Brodsky’s cohort. Even many reliable conservatives, such as National Review Editor Rich Lowry, now admit – as Lowry did in a recent column – that the media got it right about Iraq:
“Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right: that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war,” wrote Lowry Dec. 19.
But with talk of a surge, the discouraging likelihood is that a year from now, we will be passing another awful milestone in Iraq: 4,000 Americans dead, maybe more.
“Do you think 2007 will be better than 2006?” the media wonder. It seems difficult to come up with a scenario in which that would be true. As long as a grim Iraq casts its shadow, Americans will be indisputably worse off, in tangible ways.
But such is George Bush’s terrible gambler’s logic: He is willing to waste more lives and money rather than risk admitting that previous losses were for nothing. Meanwhile, the surge we would all rather be talking about this New Year’s is in things like income and health care coverage – things we’ve neglected for six years.
