I recently saw in the news that the Iraq War casualty count for US forces has now exceeded 4,000 killed. This is tragic, especially for the families of those 4,000. But the media has lost the perspective of history. In the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, when Allied forces were advancing across France, over 19,000 US soldiers were killed in the course of the battle, and the vast majority of those were within the first three days! That is from only one battle out of the entire war. While that is a huge amount of loss also, it is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the warfare of medieval or ancient times.
I think that today we have such little patience for casualties, setbacks, or changes of strategy, because most of us (including the media) know so little history and therefore have no frame of reference to compare actually how astonishingly well we are doing in Iraq.
One thought on “Lessons from history”
When you look at it that way, you almost wonder why the news reporters are critical. Even the Invasion of Normandy (France-WW2), almost 10,500-15,500 troops died. That wasn't that long ago. Unfortunately, some people today seem to think that you should be able to have a war without any death. Like some country is just going to "hand their land over" to another because a bunch of people in camouflage show up.