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August 12, 2005
Two Thousand Tragedies
Stalin famously said that single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths is a statistic. To my mind, there is no more clear and unambiguous measure of how well we are fighting the war than that every story of every death, and every life story of that person, and even the internal family tragedies and political leanings of a few of the dead soldiers' families are known to us. Within a year after Pearl Harbor, US forces were losing so many men that discussion was only possible about statistics, unless it was your relative who died - that had been true for many years, by that point, in Europe and Asia and the western part of the Pacific Rim. We lost more men in three days on Iwo Jima than we have in the last three years fighting this war.
It's a manifestation of two factors that are different now from WWII: the first is that we are so overwhelmingly dominant against any conceivable enemy that our major limitations in combat are not enemy actions, but our own rules designed to keep enemy civilians (and sometimes even enemy soldiers) from getting killed; and the second is that we have chosen not to defeat the enemy per se, but to co-opt the enemy's society away from them. We have chosen to fight a slow war, giving time for representative governance and rule of law to develop, rather than a fast war, leaving behind us only a smoking ruin.
In a way, I'm very glad that we are still able to see our combat dead in tragic terms, rather than as part of a panorama. I'm very glad that it's still possible for Nightline to read off the names of all of the US combat dead in years of fighting in Iraq, that it's still possible to care about Cindy Sheehan's political views, and that it's still possible to know the names of every brave soldier, sailor, airman and marine we have lost. The alternative, while seemingly less painful, is not better.
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